Mineta Follow up

Of course, the corollary is that every member of the 9-11 commission is also too lazy or too stupid to spot the conspiracy as well...or it just may be that they also had the PEOC logs, which would show when Secretary Mineta arrived at the PEOC, and if it was actually at the later time...well, then the reaction of everyone to this non-event makes sense....:)
 
Augustine said:
Of course, the corollary is that every member of the 9-11 commission is also too lazy or too stupid to spot the conspiracy as well...or it just may be that they also had the PEOC logs, which would show when Secretary Mineta arrived at the PEOC, and if it was actually at the later time...well, then the reaction of everyone to this non-event makes sense....:)
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Exactly. Why highlight the honest mistake of a dedicated public servant like Norman Mineta?
 
scooby said:
Plenty of press all about transponders being turned off, and then the old 1-2 switcheroo as that is subtly manipulated into radar blips disappearing off screens - if only someone had told the US air force that was the trick, they wouldn't have had to go to all that bother inventing Stealth Planes.
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Er... I didn't say the blips weren't on the screen. I said AA77 was "missing" ON radar. The reason for this is the FAA air traffic controllers primarily use secondary radar, which only shows aircraft transponder information.

Only the PRIMARY radar would show AA77. Firstly, that means switching radar scopes to keep tracking it. Secondly, the primary also picks up all the aircraft flying around that don't have transponders such as light aircraft. Thirdly, when AA77 went missing it went through an area of the country in which there was no primary radar coverage at all.

And for what it's worth, the primary reason for developing stealth technology is to prevent the enemy from successfully getting a weapon lock on the aircraft.



scooby said:
It's other incarnation, which I heard again somewhere the other day, goes something like this ... "they switched off the transponder, and the poor radar operator was left with nothing but an anonymous blip in a sea of other blips, ahh if only, if only!" ... conveniently forgetting to point out, that this would be the only blip in that sea with its transponder switched off - duh - making it stand out like a sore thumb.
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Um, no. It disappears from secondary radar. The guy managing secondary radar that is allocated to AA77 thinks that's odd, and tries to get in contact with them. He concludes the plane crashed.

Meanwhile, some other guy allocated the lighter air traffic on primary may or may not notice AA77, flying in his scope, suddenly become an unlabelled "blip". If he doesn't notice, AA77 trundles along, unnoticed, while the first controller calls the FAA and tells them an airliner has just crashed.

At some point, they realise the plane didn't crash, but was hijacked (maybe they got a transmission from it, or visual from another airliner, or whatever).

The problem is, by now that little blip has gone off course. It's on primary, with a whole bunch of other primary non-transponder contacts. They're checking all of the blips in the direction AA77 was headed, but known to them, AA77 has turned around. It's actually one of the little blips on the opposite side of their radar scope.

And then it leaves the scope, going out of their radar range. And there's no primary coverage in the next sector, so they can't track AA77 (even if anyone knew it had turned around).

So the original controllers are looking, and they notify the controllers in the next sector along the flightpath AA77 was originally taking. But they don't think to warn the sectors in the opposite direction.

So the first anyone finds AA77, it's a sector way over in Washington who notice an unknown primary contact headed low and fast towards the White House. Well, Washington has already had some hijacking alerts. Maybe this is the first one - AA11 - which has been missing since it disappeared from radar a little before 0845.

That's how AA77 gets lost on radar and makes it to Washington DC undetected.

-Gumboot
 
Great post Gumboot, as always.

But you are doing Scooby's homework for him. I wanted to hear his explanation.

Not as if I was holding my breath. ;)
 
In fact when the Primary Radar tracking recording was played back, it was possible to follow 77 all the way to the crashsite.

I was made aware of it during the time that the airplane coming into the Pentagon. There was a young man who had come in and said to the vice president, "The plane is 50 miles out. The plane is 30 miles out." And when it got down to, "The plane is 10 miles out," the young man also said to the vice president, "Do the orders still stand?" And the vice president turned and whipped his neck around and said, "Of course the orders still stand. Have you heard anything to the contrary?"

Since according to the timeline of when the Whitehouse was evactuated, this happened after the Pentagon crash, could be possible that he overheard them talking about the military planes coming to cover DC, or one of the later "hijacked" planes (iirc NEADS was up to about 9 by 10-11am), ie the orders being to protect DC rather than heading somewhere else.
 
PhantomWolf said:
Since according to the timeline of when the Whitehouse was evactuated, this happened after the Pentagon crash, could be possible that he overheard them talking about the military planes coming to cover DC, or one of the later "hijacked" planes (iirc NEADS was up to about 9 by 10-11am), ie the orders being to protect DC rather than heading somewhere else.
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There's a number of different options.

I'd tend to argue against the other mistaken hijacks as they appeared quite abruptly, very close to Washington DC. So they weren't tracking them.

The most likely explanation is UA93.

Tigerwall - the system used by the USSS to track aircraft, is capable of projecting the flight path of an aircraft based on its last known position, heading, speed, etc...

When UA93 went down, Tigerwall would continue to "track" UA93 until such time as someone removed UA93 from the system. The USSS would only do that once they had been told that UA93 had crashed.

NEADS, who, unlike the USSS, were in direct contact with the ATC Centres, were not told that UA93 had crashed until 1015, and even then they were only told because they specifically asked about it. (In other words no one contacted them to let them know).

The 1015-1020 time period is important. It's at about this time that people started finding out UA93 had crashed. It's also about this time that a shoot-down order was issued. It was also not long before this that the White House was officially evacuated (there were earlier isolated semi-evacuations earlier, but not a full-blown clearance of the site). Lastly, it was about this time period that UA93 would have reached Washington DC, had it continued at it's projected speed.

Thus, to my way of thinking, it's patently obvious that the conversation Mineta overheard was regarding UA93, and occured some time shortly after 1000.

The important thing to remember is the flight numbers. We're all very familiar with AA77, AA11, UA93 and UA175. We know where each flight was going, when it crashed, etc...

On the day, there was not necessarily a direct correlation. They would know a given flight was hijacked, and they would detect a potential hijack. Because we know everything, it's easy for us to identify which potential hijack was which flight. Not so for ATC and NORAD on the day. Each potential hijack alert had to be treated as a NEW hijack.

So when this conversation is occuring about the plane coming in, there's no reference to flight number. They don't know what flight it is. It's just an unknown radar contact.

Mineta allocated a flight number (AA77) to this conversation based on his understanding of what was going on. But he couldn't see Tigerwall. He didn't know what they were tracking.

So when the call came in that UA93 had crashed - probably some time well after 1015 - that probably WAS the first time Mineta had heard about a flight UA93 being hijacked. What he (and the USSS) may not have realised is that some of those early communications about unknown hijacked aircraft were ALSO UA93 so they HAD heard about UA93 already - indeed they had tracked it - they just didn't realise it.

-Gumboot
 
The Demon's Head said:
gumboot, you have made another exceptional post on this subject. I applaud your efforts.
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To give an example of the level of confusion we're dealing with:

Here's the hijack notifications to NEADS, and their times.

1. - 0837 - AA11 Hijacked - headed to NYC
2. - 0846 - civil aircraft hits WTC1 - NYC
3. - 0903 - a second hijacking is reported
4. - 0903 - another aircraft hits WTC2 - NYC
5. - 0921 - third hijacking - headed to Washington DC
6. - 0921 - update on AA11 - suspected headed to Washington DC
7. - 0934 - AA77 hijacked - location unknown
8. - 0935 - fifth hijacking - six miles from White House
9. - 0940 - Delta 1989 Hijacking - diverted to Cleveland
10. - 1000 - seventh hijacking - aircraft crossing border from Canada into Washington (time approx)
11. - 1007 - Unknown aircraft over White House
12. - 1007 - UA93 Hijacked - location unknown
13. - 1015 - Ninth hijacking - reported from SEADS

-Gumboot
 
Reading the transcripts from NEADS is amazing, somehow in the confusion, the incorrect intell they were getting and at one sdtage literally telling their planes to go look for themselves, they somehow did an amazing job. It's a shame that the know nothing petty CT's who haven't even bothered trying to locate the information out there slander them left right and centre.
 
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