Payne Stewart

Payne Stewart was a pro-golfer who in 1999 was killed when his private plane, a Bombardier Learjet, crashed. The aircraft was on a flight from Orlando, Florida to Dallas, Texas when it suffered a depressurization while flying at high altitude. The air authorities immidiately became aware and reacted quickly to the incident; when Air Traffic Control lost contact with the aircraft they called NORAD, the North American Air Defence service, which immediately ordered the deployment of fighter aircraft from Tyndall Air force Base in Northern Florida. With the help of NORAD’s powerful radar network they soon found the plane, within 22 minutes, according to ABC News. They flew up close and could see no movement inside. There was nothing that could be done except to follow the plane until it ran out of fuel and make sure it didn’t crash in a built-up area. The plane eventually ran out of fuel over North Dakota and crashed to the ground. This incident has raised an important question: If NORAD could find Payne Stewart’s small private jet in just 22 minutes, why did it take them up to two hours to find four huge airliners on September the 11th 2001?

(If you have an atlas, it will help you understand the rest of this article if you open it onto a page showing the eastern USA.) I read in the famous Popular Mechanics article debunking 9/11 conspiracy theories and it said that there is no mystery. In fact it took NORAD 1 hour and 22 minutes to locate Payne Stewart's Learjet and that the 22 minute figure cames from a simple confusion over the aircraft moving between the US Eastern and Central Standard time zones. That sounded like a reasonable explanation, but something still niggled me. I decided to test this with my Microsoft Flight Simulator 2005. I recreated Payne Stewart's last flight using the same aircraft at the same time of day and year over the same route. I took off from Orlando and headed for Dallas using proper skylanes. To cause the crew to become debilitated so quickly, the decompression must have taken place at least half the Learjet's 51,000 foot service ceiling (I asked a doctor at work about that); this occurred 23 minutes after taking off from Orlando when the plane was over northern Florida. Then I just left the autopilot on and followed my nose at cruising speed, which is what happened during the real incident. According to the ABC News report of the incident, fighters were scrambled from Elgin and Tyndall AFB in Florida to intercept the Learjet after air traffic control had alerted NORAD. These were then relieved on station by the Air National Guard out of Tulsa, Oklahoma. They followed the aircraft until it ran out of fuel and crashed in North Dakota.

What's wrong with this report? Well, lots. I found in my experiment that 1 hour 22 minutes after the earliest time for the decompression, my aircraft was flying over Arkensas, not far from Tulsa itself, where the USAF fighters were relieved on station. This is the problem: the language of the report suggests that the fighters from Florida had already been in contact with the Learjet for some considerable time when the Tulsa aircraft took over. If we add this to the PM debunkers, it suggests that by the time the Tulsa aircraft were deployed the Florida fighters had only just found the Learjet. And I'm not taking into account the time it took air traffic control to realize what had happened, react and contact NORAD, and then for NORAD to tell the USAF to scramble. By the article's own words not all NORAD alerts progress to a scramble. The plane would have probably been traveling at standard climbing speed: 220 knots, because no adjustments to the autopilot could have been made once the crew were unconscious or dead. But even if it had been traveling at its stalling speed of 75 knots, it would have reached a point closer to Tulsa that Elgin or Tyndall. It seems likely that someone in the media is twisting the facts to make it seem reasonable that NORAD would not be able to find those four airliners on 9/11 before they had time to strike. Too much about the events of that day do not tally

What’s more, according to the official story, the planes flew quite to quite a long “stand-off range” from their targets before beginning their attack run, up to 40 minutes! They struck over a long time period too. If these mythical 19 hijackers had done their homework about NORAD then why didn’t they coordinate their attacks better, catching planes that all took off simultaneously very close to their targets? Some researchers have discovered that a big exercise was in progress on that very day. The exercise scenario was one in which airliners were hijacked by Islamic terrorists to be used in Kamikaze-style attacks on prominent American places. So much for the theory that NORAD didn’t see the 9/11 planes because it was designed to look outwards to spot incoming missiles and bombers rather than inland threats! But what this research shows is the presence of a familiar repeating pattern: Exercises or drills on the very same time involving the very same scenario as the real event. We see this in London on 7/7 (What a great brand name! It rolls off the tongue so sweetly!) at the time of the bombings. A security company called Visor Consultants was carrying out a drill in which bombs explode at Tube stations, the very same Tube stations, at the very same times as the real bombs! What are the odds of that happening by chance? The effect of this is to confuse the security services. For instance someone in NORAD might have heard the reports of hijacked airliners and seen how similar this was to the exercise and gone “Is this real or part of the exercise?”

Where are these anomalies reported? In newspapers or on TV? No, in small circulation conspiracy theory media like HPANWO! This is why it’s so important to look behind the headlines when an event like this occurs. I’m glad to see that more and more people are doing that.