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Monday, 31 March 2008 |
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Air traffic controller who has dealt with a hijacking: 9/11 was an inside job
A must-read
'Within three hours of the attacks on the World Trade Center and
Pentagon, Robin Hordon knew it was an inside job. He had been an Air
Traffic Controller (ATC) for eleven years before Reagan fired him and
hundreds of his colleagues after they went on strike in the eighties.
Having handled in-flight emergencies and two actual hijackings in his
career, he is well qualified to comment on what NORAD should have been
able to achieve in its response to the near simultaneous hijacking of
four domestic passenger carriers on the morning of September 11th, 2001 ...
... According to Hordon, air emergencies requiring scrambles, or "flushes", from fighter jets occur 50 to 150 times a year.
“It’s routine. At Otis AFB we would have practice
exercises two or three times a year. We’d flush aircraft, get the
B-52’s up, get the tankers up, get the fighters up. Just out of Otis
there’d be twenty, thirty fighter jets. And on 9/11 there were plenty
of fighters as well. They were just diverted over the ocean, tied up in
drills, etc.”'
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