[akira2501]

What? The attackers had an easier time because hijackings didn't usually involve flying into a building / killing everyone on board.

Prior to 9/11 most hijackings were about taking hostages, flying to a friendly country, then awaiting your ransom. As a passenger, your job was just to sit tight, don't do anything stupid, and wait for the resolution. The hijackers didn't have to socially engineer anything, they just relied on the assumptions of the time.

After 9/11, passengers got more aggressive. The shoe bomber and the underwear bomber were shut down and restrained by alert passengers.

[mortenjorck]

Let's not forget that the hijackers' greatest asset was a unique, tragic coincidence, covered five years ago by the very same magazine: http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2006/08/norad200...

Were it not for a scheduled drill that happened to bear just enough similarity to what was actually going on to confuse first-responders, the terrible events of that day might have been limited to the air. The chances of such a coincidence happening again are so incredibly low as to be nil.

That's what gets me—we were basically just outrageously unlucky that day. The universe rolled all ones. And we've structured our security procedures with the idea that straight ones are rolled every day.

[halter73]

The Vanity Fair article (which is great by the way) makes it very clear that, given policies in place on 9/11, there was very little chance of the military being able stop the hijackers even if the drill hadn't been scheduled for that day.

One major issue was the terrible communication between the FAA and the military. Not only did the FAA feed the military a lot of incorrect information (One example being the report that AA Flight 11 was heading towards DC after it had already hit the north tower), but they were extremely late in reporting the actual hijackings to the military.

It was only because an ID tech at NEADS (The Northeast Air Defense Sector which was in control of all the scrambled jets on the eastern seaboard) called the FAA's Washington Center trying to ascertain the whereabouts of the already crashed Flight 11 that the military even got wind of the AA 77 hijacking. NEADS also didn't receive any reports about the United 93 hijacking until 35 minutes after the FAA first suspected the hijacking was taking place and 4 minutes after the plane had already crashed into a Pennsylvanian field. Reports of the hijackings shot quickly up the FAA's chain of command, but they were not reported to the military in a timely manner.

Even when the military did get word of the hijackings in time to theoretically do something about it, they were unable to track the planes on their woefully antiquated radar. With so many planes in the air and the transponders on each of the hijacked planes disabled, NEADS old radar systems didn't stand a chance. The commanders at NEADS were unable to give their fighter pilots instructions any more specific than to head to Manhattan or to the White House. And even then, in the case of the White House, NEADS was unable to supply their fighter pilots accurate coordinates (which is amazing to me).

Lastly, even if the fighter pilots had been able to intercept any of the hijacked planes, they wouldn't have been allowed to shoot them down in the first place. It wasn't until 10:18, 15 minutes after the last hijacked plane crashed into a field, that President Bush gave the military authorization to fire on hijacked planes.

While having a drill scheduled for the same day certainly didn't help, I don't think there was any chance that "the terrible events of that day might have been limited to the air."

[grecy]

I'd not seen that article before. Thank you very much.

Highly recommend.

[maaku]

What's more, on the one 9/11 plane that was taken down by it passengers (United 93), the passengers fought back only after hearing about the fates of the planes in New York and D.C., making it clear that an extended vacation in Cuba was not what was about to happen.