Originally posted by karajorma
There is actually one aspect I find somewhat puzzling.
Didn't the US scramble any fighters after the two remaining hijacked planes after the twin tower attack? How come they never reached the planes in time to stop the attack on the pentagon? Considering the distance a modern fighter can cover I find this somewhat stange. Maybe there's a explaination that I'm missing.
The official story is that there was no communication between the national-defense-place-under-the-mountain-whose-name-i-forget - there's actually a tape of the ATC dithering whether to contact them after the first plane hit the towers.
The other thing is that there wasn't actually that much by way of air defense - the systems had mostly been switched off after the end of the Cold War, because no-one anticipated an aerial threat. That said, procedure was to send up fighters as soon as an airliner stopped responding, and this wasn't followed.
Also, I'm not sure if the Pentagon plane was visible to radar for some of the time - there's eyewitness acounts that it approached at very low level (literally skimming the ground), which IIRC would be below the level of radar. Unclear how longit would have spent at this altitude, though, so it probably wasn't a long term move to avoid radar.