> 1000s of planes in the air corridor over the east. Literally
> impossible to tell if one not near an airport is doing something
> a little funny. No time to figure it out, and react [shoot down]
> in the time frame in question. Plus plane goes straight into the
> gnd, forms a deep 30' x 30' crater, not blown into bits 30,000
> feet in the air.
> =============

There are only about 3000 airliners in the country, and a lot of them are on
the ground loading and unloading at any one time.  They always fly "IFR",
which means that they are in constant contact with air traffic controllers.
If they don't hear from an airliner for 5 minutes, a controller will already
be wondering if something's wrong.  Airliners (and the vast majority of
other planes) have transponders, that send back a code when they are
"pinged" by radar.  This code helps the FAA's 50-year-old computers draw a
"shrimp boat" with the flight number next to the dot on the screen.  The
first thing a pilot does at the first hint of a hijacking is to switch the
code on the transponder to a special one that says "I've been hijacked".
This sets off bells and whistles and stuff on the controller's console.
Supposedly the first thing the hijackers did was turn off the transponder,
but that would only make it more suspicious.

No, air traffic controllers knew within a couple of minutes that the planes
were hijacked, and they had them on radar, so they knew where they were and
which way they were headed.

Usually hijackers make some sort of demands and want to be taken somewhere,
so standard procedures work on that assumption.  Humor the nut, and you can
probably talk him down somewhere and nobody gets hurt.

These guys had a new strategy.  We haven't had hijackers grabbing the
controls and diving the plane into some target before, so the standard
procedures didn't work.

The new tactic apparently worked for, at most, an hour.

Someody had wised up.  Maybe it was the Air Force and they shot the plane
down.  It's starting to sound like it was the passengers and crew who
figured out that, unlike the usual kind of nut, with these lunatics, the
best strategy was to fight back, even if it meant everyone on the plane
died.

I think we may have had a planeload of ordinary folks who behaved like
heroes and taught us all a new paradigm for dealing with hijackers.
Heightened airport security or not, I don't think a tactic like the one
these guys used will ever work as well as it did this time.

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