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Air Traffic Controllers Do
Track Planes Even with Transponders Off
George
Washington's Blog
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
Before 9/11, no transponder had ever become inactive,
and so the military and FAA didn't have any experience on how
to track planes with their transponders off. Right?
Well, a Miami-Herald
article from September 14, 2001, states:
The transponder [on Flight 77] went off about
9 a.m., the company said.
At that moment, the flight would have been under
the control of the Indianapolis Air Route Traffic Control Center,
one of 20 regional centers that track flights between airports.
The trouble should
have been instantly noticeable, traffic controllers say.
Flight 77, like other planes, at first showed
up on radar screens as a short solid line, with a readout that
identifies the plane and gives its altitude and speed. When
the transponder shuts down, the short line vanishes. The speed
number goes away, too.
"It's just something
that catches your eye,'' one controller says.
And
it's not that unusual. Transponders fail from time to time;
commercial aircraft are required to carry a spare. Although
it isn't clear what happened in the case of Flight 77, a controller's
first move typically would be to contact the pilot, and tell
them the transponder wasn't working.
It is important for people to understand that
scrambling jet fighters to intercept aircraft showing the signs
of experiencing “IN-FLIGHT EMERGENCIES” such as going off course
without authorization, losing
a transponder signal and/or losing radio contact
is a common
and routine task executed
jointly between the FAA and NORAD controllers. The entire “national
defense-first responder” intercept system has many highly-trained
civilian and military personnel who are committed and well-trained
to this task. FAA and NORAD continuously monitor our skies and
fighter planes and pilots are on the ready 24/7 to handle these
situations. Jet fighters typically intercept any suspect plane
over the United States within 10 - 15 minutes of notification
of a problem.
This type of "immediate, high speed, high priority
and emergency" scramble had been happening regularly approximately
75 - 150 times per year for ten years. In the same ten years,
there were ZERO "low speed, delayed reaction, and low priority"
hijacking scrambles reported, which means that the only time
interceptors were ever scrambled for ten years before 9/11,
they were using the high speed immediate scrambles.
On 9/11, Flight 77 was in fact tracked on radar,
and could have been intercepted with fighter jets. However, the
plane was allowed to go on a joy-ride all over the country with
its transponder off for three-quarters of an hour. As the above-quoted
Miami-Herald
article states:
Forty-five minutes. That's how long American Airlines
Flight 77 meandered through the air headed for the White House,
its flight plan abandoned, its radar beacon silent.
* * *
Who was watching in those 45 minutes?
"That's a question that more and more people are going to ask,''
said one controller in Miami. "What the hell went on here? Was
anyone doing anything about it? Just as a national defense thing,
how are they able to fly around and no one go after them?''
Even with the transponder silent,
the plane should have been visible on radar, both to controllers
who handle cross-continent air traffic and to a Federal Aviation
Administration command center outside of Washington, according
to air traffic controllers.
The FAA, which handles air traffic control, would not discuss
the track of Flight 77 or what happened in air-control centers
while it was in flight. Neither would American Airlines.
***
But even if the plane remained
silent, controllers could still find it -- by switching their
screen display to the old-fashioned radar that bounces a signal
off the plane's metal skin.
***
Military jets are routinely scrambled in the case
of hijackings and "runners,'' planes that do not answer or do
not heed air traffic controllers. But FAA officials would not
say when controllers detected the errant Flight 77 or whether
any fighter jets were able to get into the air to confront it.
Fighter jets are based nearby, in Virginia, and
could have reached the White House within minutes, aviation
sources say.
Dick Cheney also monitored
flight 77 for many miles as it approached the Pentagon (confirmed
here).
Similarly, an ABC
News article states:
"Controllers at the Boston Center knew American Airlines
Flight 11, which departed at 7:59 a.m. ET from Boston for its
flight to Los Angeles, was hijacked 30 minutes before it crashed.
They tracked it to New York
on their radar scopes. 'I watched the target of American 11
the whole way down,' said Boston controller Mark Hodgkins.
"
And air traffic controllers and others tracked Flight
175.
Indeed, radar data declassified in 2006 shows that the
planes were tracked on radar virtually their entire flight, and
that altitude was known for the planes during most of their flight
(only flight 77 was purportedly off-radar for part of its flight).
And, as recounted by a high-level Secret Service agent:
"Through
monitoring radar and activating an open line with the FAA, the
Secret Service was able to receive real time information about
. . . two hijacked aircraft as they approached Washington, D.C.
"
Norad Admits Planes Show Up on Radar Even with Transponders
Turned Off
Even Neads, the Northeastern sector of Norad, admits that the
hijacked planes would have appeared on radar as dashes even after
the transponders had been turned off:
A similar report states:
"But the area was so congested and it was incredibly
difficult to find. We were looking for little dash marks in
a pile of clutter and a pile of aircraft on a two-dimensional
scope.” Each fluorescent green pulsating dot on their radar
scopes represents an airplane, and there are thousands currently
airborne, especially over the busy northeast US.
Moreover, it makes no sense that air traffic controllers
could not focus their radar scopes solely on airplanes without
transponder signals. In other words, let's say a Cuban jet flew
onto the East Coast of the United States without any transponder
signal. Would Norad say "Sorry, we lost the bad guy's nuclear-armed
fighter jet amidst all the commuter flights"?
That makes no sense.
Remember that Norad had run drills for several years
of planes
being used as weapons against the World Trade Center and other
U.S. high-profile buildings, and "numerous types of civilian
and military aircraft were used as mock hijacked aircraft". In
other words, drills using REAL AIRCRAFT simulating terrorist attacks
crashing jets into buildings, including the twin towers, were
run. See also this
short excerpt of a Peter Jennings newscast on 9/11. Moreover,
the military had previously run war games involving multiple,
simultaneous hijackings , so this aspect of 9/11 was not as
overwhelming as we have been led to believe..
Air traffic control radar, or at least military
radar, must -- with the push of a button -- be able to use computer
programming to hide all data for planes which have been accounted
for as normal, civilian airplanes. In other words, those with
working transponder signals. Even if air traffic controllers have
to switch from secondary to primary radar, there must be a function
for the computer to remove from primary radar signals which include
transponder data.
If that were not the case, America's trillion-dollar
defense system would be rendered useless.
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INFOWARS:
BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND
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