quick question

[paulthompson]

I'm going through the latest 9/11 commission report, and came across this sentence:

"At 9:49, the commander of NORAD directed all air sovereignty aircraft to battle stations fully armed."

Can anyone clarify this for me? What is "air sovereignty aircraft" exactly? And does this means those fully armed are to go to battle stations, or all fighters should get fully armed and go to battle stations?

[necso]

1. I think that it is a way of saying "air defense aircraft".

But "defense" is a bad word considering how little they did of it.

Sort of like how the Forest Service now calls "controlled burns", "prescribed burns" --- they had (have) too little damn control.

I think that this decodes to ".. the commander of Norad directed all air defense aircraft to actually arm and to go to battle stations." In short: "Hey, maybe we ought to get ready to actually defend something."

But the whole point of encoding a statement like that is that it can be decoded in various ways, and in general, decoded in ways that sound better than the simple truth.

Not their best moment.

[paulthompson]

2. perhaps

On a related note, can any military minded person tell me the exact meaning of "battle stations" and "scramble" and the exact difference? I assume the first means get ready and the second means get in the air, but there may be more precise definitions for all I know. For instance, if a fighter is already at battle stations, how long would it then typically take to scramble?

[medienanalyse]

3. it is easy to determine that some of the words

are purposefully unclear.

Let us take "battle station". This term would be used in several wings of the military, it is not specifoc for the airforce. So all in all the wording is part of the red herring too.

Now about the procedure of "scrambling". It is all NATO standard, so this is not specific American knowledge. The take off is to be fulfilled in the shortest measure of time. this is trained since half a century. Procedures are all the same. For sure you can scramble jet fighters in minutes armed or unarmed, but this is not the point.

The whole point is that this order tries to protect the NORAD from questions about the standards - that is the air policing. The word "air policing" itself is standard. It includes the word QRA -quick reaction alert. This is 14 jet fighters, interceptors ready on battlestation, here fully armed, warmed up engines, ready pilots in G-suits nearby, wards to take of the wheel blockss and the warming gear, to open the doors and so on.

This QRA last between 5 and 15 minutes. U.S. Pilots are proud to reach only five minutes to scrambling time.


To talk about OTHER FIKGHTR JETS which are not in QRA status is like talking about lorries and vans and pickups, when the one and only issue must be the cars of the fire brigade (why did they not come). It is completely irrelevant to talk about other cars which COULD have been used and equipped witgh pumps and be equipped with whatever.

We must only talk about the fire brigade. Everything else is MISLEADINBG.

About NORAD and sovereignity: I interpret the term as excluding Canadian aircraft which are under command of NORAD too as the name NORAD (Northamerican) and the facts show.