Last week’s report by a commission investigating the events of September 11 has been followed by accounts of two recent incidents in which planes approaching Washington and New York exposed flaws in US air defences.
A communications breakdown between air traffic controllers and military security was blamed yesterday for the evacuation of the US Capitol in Washington on the day President Ronald Reagan was lying in state.
Military jets scrambled to intercept a plane that turned out to be carrying the governor of Kentucky to Reagan’s funeral.
Earlier, an unidentified civilian aircraft flew low over Manhattan while civilian officials wrangled over who had the authority to call for a military intercept.
Thomas Kean, chairman of the 9/11 commission, said this incident had given him the “jitters” because it indicated that some of the problems identified by his investigation had not yet been solved.
Advertisement
The new security failures follow a chilling account of Vice-President Dick Cheney’s decision, soon after the attacks on the World Trade Center, to order US Air Force fighters to shoot down any other hijacked aircraft.
It remains unclear whether Cheney had the authority to give the order, which was never passed to fighter pilots and came too late for action to be taken. President George W Bush was in Florida when the attacks began and the commission found no proof that Cheney had talked to him before issuing the order.
Since September 11 the Federal Aviation Administration and the North American Aerospace Defence Command (Norad) have integrated their radar systems, improved their communications and revised the rules of engagement for dealing with aircraft deemed to be hostile.
Officials have insisted that failsafe measures are in place to prevent the accidental shooting down of a civilian passenger aircraft.
Yet details of the Reagan funeral incident exposed what one senior congressman called “miscommunication and technical shortcomings”.
Advertisement
The episode had raised “serious concerns about the government’s ability to guard not only the US Capitol but the entire region in the event of another airborne attack”, said Jim Turner, the leading Democrat on the House homeland security committee.
Military officials ordered two F-15 fighters and a Black Hawk helicopter to intercept the Kentucky governor’s aircraft, which had failed to transmit proper identification. But the pilot had already informed civilian air traffic controllers that his transmitter was broken.
In New York, a civilian controller saw a plane flying too low but was not sure he had the authority to call for an intercept. By the time he had spoken to Norad, the plane had passed over the city.