Debunked: VP Dick Cheney ordered a standdown of jet fighters on 9/11

Marc Powell

Active Member
Conspiracy theorists claim that Vice President Dick Cheney ordered jet fighters to standdown on 9/11 so as to allow American Airlines Flight 77 to crash into the Pentagon unchallenged. As evidence, they cite testimony by then Secretary of Transportation, Norman Mineta, before the 9/11 Commission. Below is how Mineta’s testimony is presented at the 1:24:15 mark in the David Hooper film, The Anatomy of a Great Deception (viewable in its entirety on YouTube at youtube.com/watch?v=l0Q5eZhCPuc ):

DAVID HOOPER (voiceover): Over time it got easier to find puzzle pieces like the following testimony by Norman Mineta, Secretary of Transportation in 2001, who was with Vice President Dick Cheney on the morning of 9/11 and like so much other important information, this interview would also be left out of the 9/11 Commission Report.

NORMAN MINETA: During the time that the airplane (was) coming into the Pentagon, there was a young man who would come in and say to the vice president, "The plane is 50 miles out. The plane is 30 miles out," and when he 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 order still stands. Have you heard anything to the contrary?" Well, at the time I didn't know what all that meant. And...

9/11 COMMISSIONER LEE HAMILTON: The flight you're referring to is the one...

NORMAN MINETA: The flight that came into the Pentagon.

From the testimony presented by Hooper, it does indeed seem like “the order that still stands” had been issued by Vice President Cheney and that it was to allow Flight 77 to fly into the Pentagon unchallenged by jet interceptors. However, that is simply not true. The filmmakers had deliberately omitted the question that Mineta was responding to and presented only a cherrypicked part of his response. This bit of chicanery changed the syntax of Mineta’s sentences so as to reverse the meaning of his words. The following is a transcript of Norman Mineta’s actual testimony as taken from the original video (viewable at www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDfdOwt2v3Y ):

9/11 COMMISSIONER LEE HAMILTON: I wanted to focus just a moment on the Presidential Emergency Operating Center. You were there for a good part of the day. I think you were there with the vice president and we had that order given, I think it was by the president, that authorized the shooting down of commercial aircraft that were suspected to be controlled by terrorists. Were you there when that order was given?

NORMAN MINETA: No, I was not. I was made aware of it during the time that the airplane (was) coming in to the Pentagon. There was a young man who would come in and say to the vice president, "The plane is 50 miles out. The plane is 30 miles out," and when he 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 order still stands. Have you heard anything to the contrary?" Well, at the time I didn't know what all that meant. And...

9/11 COMMISSIONER LEE HAMILTON: The flight you're referring to is the one...

NORMAN MINETA: The flight that came into the Pentagon. And so, I was not aware that that discussion had already taken place and that in listening to the conversation between the young man and the vice president then at the time I didn't really recognize the significance of that. And then, later on, I heard of the fact that the airplanes had been scrambled from Langley to come up to DC, but those planes were still about 10 minutes away.

So then, by, (1) cutting off Lee Hamilton’s question asking Mineta if he was aware of the presidential shoot-down order, (2) truncating the words “No, I was not. I was made aware of it” from the beginning of Mineta’s response and (3), truncating the end of Mineta’s response where he spoke of jet fighters “scrambled from Langley,” the filmmakers made it seem like Mineta had overheard Cheney talking about a standdown order that he (Cheney) had issued in support of the terrorists’ mission. In reality, the order that Mineta heard Cheney speaking about had been issued by President Bush and it was to shoot down hijacked airliners. Mineta’s testimony on this issue was most likely left out of the 9/11 Commission Report because it was trivial. One would think that, if their points were valid, David Hooper and his Technical Director, Richard Gage, would not need to stoop to this level of deceit to trick their audience into believing their claims.
 
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A far better reason to leave out Mineta's testimony is that he was, and possibly remains to this day, entirely mistaken about his own timeline, and consequently the correct interpretation of what he observed.

Let's start at the end: Mineta's belief that this "The plane is 50 / 30 / 10 miles out" was reporting on "The flight that came into the Pentagon" as Mineta was in the "Presidential Emergency Operating Center" (PEOC). Mineta for himself has worked out his timeline backwards from there. He thinks that, since he was in the PEOC as AA77 was still 30, 50 miles out, he must have arrived in the PEOC well before AA77's crash time, which was 9:37. So, his story goes, he was there at 9:20. Which would imply that Cheney and entourage, too, were there at, even before 9:20.

None of that comes even close to being correct.

Here is Mineta's true timeline, from memory, as best as can be reconstructed from evidence:

9:03: He is at the Department of Transportation, several blocks away from the White House, with his colleague from Belgium, as UA175 crashes into the South Tower on live TV, which is switched on and being noticed since news of the first crash and fire in the WTC were broadcast around 8:50.
9:04: Realizing that something major is amiss, he interrupts the meeting with the Belgian secretary of transport, goes to his office, confers with staff, learns that commercial planes are involved, calls a couple of airline CEOs (I am asking myself as I write this if he knew already which two airlines lost planes at the WTC, which would put a limit on when, at the earliest, he made those calls), etc, then talks with the White House and gets advised to go there ASAP. So he goes downstairs several floor to get into his car with chauffeur.
We can take guesses as to how long all this took, and how long one drives from the Department to the White House, but it is clear already that "9:20" or anything not long after that is quite impossible.
Mineta arrives at the White House perimeter as it is obviously it's being evacuated - many people are walking moving swiftly away from it, he notices. This information allows us to place him at the WH perimeter at or around 9:45. Note that this is already minutes AFTER AA77 crashed into the Pentagon, news of which took several minute to emerge on the news. As none of Mineta's accounts mention him receiving that news as he was on his way to the White House or the PEOC, we may safely infer he didn't hear of it at all until he finally was in the PEOC.
Mineta then first goes to see Richard Clarke, the White House anti-terrorism "czar", who was retained from the Clinton administration. Clarke was in the West Wing, Situation Room or next to it, in a secure video conference. "Secure" means that you could not simply walk in and out, there was a procedure to informationally "sanitize" those who participated on video, so add minutes for Mineta to get physically to Clarke, minutes more where the two talked, minutes more to physically get out. And only THEN did he, with the help of Secret Service agents, eventually move to the PEOC - which is deep below the East Wing, so again a bit of a distance to walk, a couple of minutes at least.
Add all this together, and we are easily past 10 a.m.

Now there exists further documentation of when the others, particularly Cheney, went to the PEOC. This much can be pinned down:
Cheney was in his office until less than a minute before AA77 crashed, and was then grabbed by his Secret Service detail and rushed towards the PEOC.
Plenty of documentation from participants and Secret Service logs exists that agrees Cheney and entourage did not immediately enter the PEOC proper (a conference room with adjacent room for staffers working secure information sources), but were held up in the tunnel leading to it, where there was already a secure phone which Cheney used to talk to the President. This took a few minutes, during which time several people arrived, such as Condolezza Rice or Cheney's wife Lynne. It was there they first learned of the crash of AA77. Only then - the 9/11 Commission estimates around 9:58 - did they move on to the PEOC proper.

There exists a batch of publicly released photos by the Vice Presidents personal photographer, David Bohrer, showing Cheney in his office, then in the PEOC all day. These photos have been analysed in fine detail (I have done a lot of analysis myself), as some can be timestamped to the precise minute, even second, either because there is a readable watch or clock in it, or because a live TV screen shows a scene that can be synchronized with existing archives of the day's news channel broadcasts. From this we know that Cheney, Rice, Mrs Cheney and staffers were first in a "virgin" PEOC (cookie trays, notepads and pens on the tables untouched, no personal notes, folders or other items laying around) at 10:03 - coincidentally the time when the last plane crashed.
Mineta is not seen yet!
Mineta is actually photographed coming in several photos after 10:03, and some photos before one that can be timestamped to 10:18 as per Scooter Libby's watch (the photos themselves are numbered by a system that obviously has a number for the physical analogue film (36 frames) plus a number from 1-36 for the frame on the film - or sometimes 1A-36A - these alternative numbers with a capital "A" indicate that, as happens, the film is shifted such that it would not be clear if an exposure is in the 2 or 3 position, it's halfway between the two, and so on the other side of the film role, there is the 0A to 36A numbering that's shifted by half a frame; this is how we know the metadata on the published digital photos reflects a physical position on film, and thus a temporal order of the exposures).

Mineta never mentions having been held up in the tunnel before proceding to the PEOC proper, he tells how he got the PEOC and the Cheneys and Rice were already there.

So this is how we know he arrived in the PEOC after all planes had crashed - most likely around 10:10 +/- 5 minutes.

So what was this "50/30/10 miles out" scare that he was overhearing in the PEOC?

-> A confusion.
It was a flight plan for UA93, the plane that crashed near Shanksville, extrapolated by a system called "Traffic Situation Display" (TSD), if memory serves (it's one of those terms that I have memorized wrong before, which makes it impossible for me to ever be sure I now remember correctly; at any rate, for the purpose of this post, I'll stick with "TSD"). Here is what happened:
When air traffic controllers (ATC) working UA93 noticed it was unresponsive and had turned, they correctly surmised it was hijacked and the hijackers were heading towards the Washington, DC area. Now, commercial flights submit a flight plan to the FAA's air traffic control system, to allow controllers to extrapolate where planes may show up in the near future. And so, to assist the ATC in the DC sector, some ATC in the Pittsburgh area entered a new flight plan for UA93, which would start at its current location, neat Pittsburgh somewhere, and go to Reagan National Airport, the one that's just a mile and a bit from the Pentagon.
Flights are displayed on the TSD system because that system works with flight plans and simply computes where planes are. And the staffer in the PEOC, perhaps being unaware of what TSD is, what it shows and what it doesn't show, was monitoring this projected flight path of UA93 on TSD and calling out distances to the Pentagon. If I remember correctly, it would have landed at Reagan Natl at 10:28 as per TSD, and so, if Mineta was at the PEOC at 10:10, 18 minutes or 0.3 hours earlier, he indeed might first have heard a distance of "50 miles".
Of course, unbeknownst to the people in the PEOC and also to the TSD, UA93 had, in reality, crashed at 10:03. It was only a computed extrapolation that had it continuing on to the Pentagon.
When it "landed" at Reagan Natl at 10:28 (or whatever the correct time), it "disappeaerd" from TSD. As the destination is right next to the Pentagon, it is perhaps understandable that Mineta might have believed that they were watching the flight the crashed into the Pentagon.

And this is how come Mineta believed, at the 9/11 Commission hearings, and still years later when interviewed, that he was in the PEOC when the Pentagon was impacted. He must have worked out his personal timeline from there - and it was wrong by about 50 minutes.

Mineta was informed at the PEOC that underlings at the FAA had instituted a national ground stop and started to bring down ASAP all flights currently airborne at their nearest feasible air strips. he mistook this for underlings suggesting it, and him making that decision.
Mineta, in short, was unavailable as the disaster unfolded, and could not be reached for the most urgent information and decisions. Like other high ranking officials, he was, essentially, a failure on 9/11.
 
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Ugh, the emotional manipulation after that segment is hard to watch.​
It's telling, ironic, that Hooper admits that he started his personal journey towards Trutherism from this - confused, wrong - Mineta account. Mineta is, in my opinion, the most confused, the wrongest on 9/11 of all government officials.

[1:25:22] [Caption: "Finally Awake"] The Mineta testimony launched my investigation into the Pentagon, Shanksville, the hijackers, and many other aspects of 9/11
[1:25:31] And if I thought I was along way down the Rabbit Hole already, was I way wrong! My belief system would ultimately be shattered, but rebuilt to accommodate my developing world view.
[1:25:42] Back then, however, I was only a few months into my investigation, and I was going through a full scope of emotions and, frankly, having a difficult time handling all of them.
Yes, Mr. Hooper, you were having a difficult time, and ended up ever deeper down the Rabbit Hole, because you chose the most confused, maximally wrong account of the Pentagon and Shanksville events as your starting point.

Whenever Truthers are given a choice between two narratives, two claims, two hypotheses about aspects of 9/11, they will invariably pick the wrongest option, for if they were able to select the most correct, they would not be Truthers in the first place.

Time to rehash my DEFINITION of the term "9/11 Truther":

A 9/11 Truther is a person who persists in being essentially wrong about 9/11​

David Hooper fits that definition perfectly: He persists in taking Mineta's account as the basis of his entire belief system - a person could not be more wrong in essence.
 
Yes, Mr. Hooper, you were having a difficult time, and ended up ever deeper down the Rabbit Hole, because you chose the most confused, maximally wrong account of the Pentagon and Shanksville events as your starting point.
At this point, considering the other debunks of this film that Marc Powell has posted so far, why would you assume he's telling the truth about that?

Like in the rest of his film, he's directing the attention of the viewer toward the items that will cause them the most confusion, reinforces that confusion, and then turns it into a conversion by substituting his own (false) sense-making narrative.

It's manipulation, brain-washing of the susceptible among the audience.
It's meant to work, not to be truthful.
 
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At this point, considering the other debunks of this film that Marc Powell has posted so far, why would you assume he's telling the truth about that?

Like in the rest of his film, he's directing the attention of the viewer toward the items that will cause them the most confusion, reinforces that confusion, and then turns it into a conversion by substituting his own (false) sense-making narrative.

It's manipulation, brain-washing of the susceptible among the audience.
It's meant to work, not to be truthful.
That's a high-level claim that, I think, is contentious and may be beyond the realm of evidence, i.e. difficult to impossible to prove: That 9/11 Truth leaders are aware of their deceptions, that their intentions are wholly separate from their publicly stated intentions.

We can't read minds.
Are we privy to any insider information - meeting minutes, whistleblower accounts etc - that Hooper, or Gage, Steven Jones, Wood, McKee, Fetzer, Alex Jones, know 9/11 Truth is bullshit and they do it all to manipulate and brain-wash?

I think 9/11 Truthers are truly confused: They must have an inkling that their story doesn't quite pan out, but the mind has many methods of rationalizing conflicting information. People who have personally met Richard Gage tell me quite different personal impressions: One says Gage is sincere and passionate, even if wrong, the other says he is lying through his teeth.
There have been many former members of Gage's inside circle who later had some sort or other of falling out - I am not aware that any of them ever reported that Gage is there to be untruthful, to manipulate, to brain-wash. Our own @Jeffrey Orling was an AE911Truth board member for some months, years ago. I am not sure he ever described Gage, and the people around him, as entirely fake, a conscious fraud.

Have you heard of, and listened into the recordings of the former "9/11 Truth Teleconference", to which Craig McKee served as secretary, writing the minutes, taking roll? I listened to many hours of it, and it never occurred to me that any of the participants wasn't entirely sincere.

So, if you want to claim that, specifically, David Hooper, "means" to not be truthful, "means" for manipulation and (specifically) "brain-washing" "to work", I'd like to see some evidence beyond the fact that the video editing is designed to convince the viewer of claims that we understand to be untrue.
 
that Hooper, or Gage, Steven Jones, Wood, McKee, Fetzer, Alex Jones, know 9/11 Truth is bullshit and they do it all to manipulate and brain-wash?
I'm not saying that.
On the contrary, the greatest atrocities in human history have been committed in the spirit of sincere righteousness. It's likely because they believe their cause to be righteous that they're willing to recruit converts by any means.

You can't quote that bit from Mineta and be unaware that he refers to interceptors being scrambled from Langley. You have to want to deceive to place that bit in that context, same as with the Marriot lobby, and all the other stuff. (Gage must be among the best-informed people in the world on 9/11, he doesn't leave information out because he doesn't have it.) You have to want to make converts by any means to do that.

And the psychological methods are overt, I've pointed them out.
This is not education, it's propaganda, and it's apparent from the movie itself.
 
I think 9/11 Truthers are truly confused:
Some likely are, some likely are not... I would not expect homogeneity among them. And while we can't read minds, I'd be more likely to suspect bad faith among those who demonstrate bad faith by editing their evidence so as to reverse its meaning.
 
A far better reason to leave out Mineta's testimony is that he was, and possibly remains to this day, entirely mistaken about his own timeline, and consequently the correct interpretation of what he observed.
As usual, your are correct. Mineta was confused about his whereabouts at various times on the morning of 9/11 and the 50/30/10-miles-out reporting by the "young man" was not in reference to Flight 77. However, Hooper didn't make any claims about those issues so, I didn't mention them in my thread.
 
Thanks to Metabunk I find out after all these years that jets were scrambled for intercepting the hijacked planes. I had not really given it much thought nor research at the time and in the spanning years. I thought any intercepting planes were indeed ordered to "stand down". I found Metabunk due to my UFO interests (as in, UFOs, not aliens) and very thorough and intelligent, very educated folks researching, inspecting, and questioning possible misunderstanding of human nature (ahem, and propaganda, maybe).
 
Time to rehash my DEFINITION of the term "9/11 Truther":

A 9/11 Truther is a person who persists in being essentially wrong about 9/11
David Hooper fits that definition perfectly: He persists in taking Mineta's account as the basis of his entire belief system - a person could not be more wrong in essence.
If David Hooper was merely honestly mistaken and had formed a “new world view” based on shoddy evidence and a healthy dose of confirmation bias, I would respect him for having the courage to stand up for what he mistakenly believed to be true. However, that is not the case and I have no respect for him. In his AOAGD film, Hooper deliberately misrepresents evidence, fraudulently alters evidence and conceals contradictory evidence so as to fool the audience into believing his false 9/11 narrative. Nothing that he or others that appear in his film (including Technical Director, Richard Gage) have to say about 9/11 is suspicious or cannot be logically explained. And the few examples I have provided thus far in this forum are only the tip of the iceberg. I find it outrageous that the filmmakers would present such dishonest rubbish while offering sanctimonious Bible quotes and comparing the GW Bush administration with Nazi Germany. If anyone is foisting a “great deception” on the public it is the filmmakers.
 
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Thanks to Metabunk I find out after all these years that jets were scrambled for intercepting the hijacked planes. I had not really given it much thought nor research at the time and in the spanning years. I thought any intercepting planes were indeed ordered to "stand down".
This really highlights how important it is to choose your news sources wisely. (And I don't mean that personally, but rather as a general observation affecting everyone - this has been studied!) The news that reaches you first is likely the one you're going to remember, and if it's from an unreliable source, you're going to have it wrong a lot of the time.

I do like to dig down into news stories that interest me, because journalists aren't experts, and getting to the original sources and seeing more than one view point leaves me with a more complete picture of what went on, even if that sometimes means there's now more uncertainty than there was when I had just one account. In the case of 9/11, simply working through the wikipedia article on it leaves me with more information (including which fighters were scrambled and when) than spending the same time on some youtube "documentary".

But most news items don't get that sort of in-depth treatment from me, simply because they don't pique my interest that much, so the news had better be accurate -- and when it is simplified, it should be a reasonable simplification of the truth. Happily, for commercial news sources, there are overviews and databases you can check to assess their general quality, see https://www.metabunk.org/threads/media-bias.11554/

If you're getting your news from social media, you're more likely to believe a conspiracy theory or two, a study found:
https://www.brookings.edu/techstream/how-media-consumption-patterns-fuel-conspiratorial-thinking/

They surveyed 1,947 US adults - probably about the minimum number you'd want for decent confidence - and found these results:

1627494377448.png

Basically, the biggest indicator was being a "news-finds-me" type of person, followed by social media use, lack of trust in the government, and racial resentment.
The "news-finds-me" effect stems from individuals' perceptions that a) they are well informed about current events despite not purposely following the news, because b) the important information “finds them” anyway, through their general media use, peers, and social connections.

https://academic.oup.com/jcmc/article/22/3/105/4161793
Content from External Source
So if these are your news-gathering habits, you may find yourself holding on to false information (sometimes for years) more often than others. And it pays to do a little digging on news that reaches us through social media -- often a simple web search will turn up a well-written article on it -- or maybe even a debunk!
 
In the case of 9/11, simply working through the wikipedia article on it leaves me with more information (including which fighters were scrambled and when
This is the only thing that's bothered me for 20 years now.

I was living outside Pittsburgh at the time and had every TV in the house on a different station (even moved TVs into the same room, if they were small enough to move alone), so that I couldn't miss anything. One of the Pittsburgh stations, I believe it have been KDKA, filmed armed F-16s landing at Pittsburgh International around mid-day. They didn't appear to have fired any missiles. That is, both aircraft were configured identically, with two fuel tanks, two underwing missiles, and two wingtip missiles, which is a common air defense configuration. I'm not trying to claim that they did or should have. It wasn't a fleeting glimpse either. There were no F-16s based at Pittsburgh at the time, making it somewhat unusual to see them there (it wasn't impossible, though, because sometimes they did pass through). I remember the commentators talking about them, one of them being the fellow that they usually had at the airport to report on airport news.

I've never seen these two aircraft accounted for, but also don't possess whatever skills or abilities would be required to find that footage.
 
@Alexandria Nick it honors you that you know you ought to find recordings of the actual programs you remember seeing on 9/11 - for your recollection must be considered hopelessly unreliable 20 years later.
 
One of the Pittsburgh stations, I believe it have been KDKA, filmed armed F-16s landing at Pittsburgh International around mid-day.
I wouldn't be surprised if these turn out to have been looking for the crash site of flight 93 in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, and needed to refuel.

Now's a good time to contact the station and ask them for it, they may have dug into their archives for the upcoming 20-year anniversary anyway.

9/11 Commission report, p.38:
At 9:49, the commander of NORAD directed all air sovereignty aircraft to battle stations, fully armed.
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The fighters who were scrambled before that are reported to have been equipped with training ammunition for some exercise; whether this encompassed dummy missiles, I do not know.
 
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There were two National Guard interceptors tasked with finding flight 93 and ramming it, to bring it down; as they had no live weapons on board, other than bullets. The two pilots names were then-Lt. Heather Penney, and her commanding officer, Col. Marc Sasseville. This and exerpt from the Pitsburg Gazette, along with Penney's words: https://www.post-gazette.com/news/n...unts-her-9-11-experience/stories/202108070046
They scrambled to the pre-flight area, zipping up their flight suits. There was no time to arm their F-16 fighter jets to track down United Airlines Flight 93. She realized what could be her fate:

“Sass looks at me and says, ‘I’ll ram the cockpit.’ I knew that I would take the tail,” she said.
I couldn't find out for sure where they landed, but Pittsburg seems like a likely place to land, re-fuel and regroup.
 
@Alexandria Nick it honors you that you know you ought to find recordings of the actual programs you remember seeing on 9/11 - for your recollection must be considered hopelessly unreliable 20 years later.
While I'm aware of the vagaries of human memory, it is one of the clearest memories I have. It might be one of the handful of memories I have no doubt about the accuracy of. What's vexed me in all these years is the avenue to the proof for my memory.

There's definitely other gaps in the popular reporting of what fighters were where and what they were up to. The popular discourse only really mentions the three groups of fighters out of Otis, Andrews, and Langley, because they were the only flights in position to (albeit too late) to do anything about the hijackings. But, there was actually quite a herd of aircraft moving around. I've known about the Toledo, Michigan, and DC F-16s that got in the air, yet never come up as potential interceptors for United 93 despite having been launched to clean up anything that was still in the air at the time that United 93 was still airborne. While doing some poking around, this publication https://www.hsdl.org/?view&did=722055 makes a curious remark I've never seen before.

Nasypany quickly obtained an offer from the 127th Wing, a Michigan Air National Guard unit at Selfridge Air National Guard Base, of two
F–16s that were in the air on a training mission, on which they had already expended their ordnance.267 Cleveland Center personnel then asked about which fighters were being sent to intercept Delta Airlines Flight 1989 and how long it would take. With fighters at Duluth unavailable, Nasypany called his counterpart at the Western Air Defense Sector, who agreed to bring two armed fighters up at Fargo.268

By 10:00 a.m., as a result of concerns over the status of Delta Airlines Flight 1989, two Selfridge fighters were already airborne, and Toledo and Fargo promised two more each. Also available to Nasypany would soon be two F–16s, with guns, from Springfield, Ohio, that were returning from deployment at the Alpena Combat Readiness Training Center, as well as fighters from the Atlantic City Air National Guard.269 Before ten minutes had passed, Nasypany’s direct contact with the Western Air Defense Sector resulted in an offer of two additional fighters at Sioux City, Iowa.270

The two Selfridge fighters were empty. The two Toledo fighters were semi-guns only (they were loaded with inert bullets). These guys were joined by the Springfield guns-only fighters. Fargo were "armed," ambiguously so, and the status of Atlantic City and Sioux City is unknown. There were also four out of Syracuse, guns-only. All of these aircraft were being poured into a trapezoid of Chicago-Detroit-Cleveland-Pittsburgh, where Delta 1989 and United 93 were. By mid-day, any of these aircraft would be low on fuel, especially if they'd made longer runs from the Midwest. Could any of them have landed at Pittsburgh for fuel? Maybe. It doesn't seem that out there, from a conjectural point. I've just always wanted to prove what I saw.

(Coincidentally, the Air Force unit at Pittsburgh is the 911th Air Refueling Wing.)
 
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