Report: Confusion delayed air defense

The report included tape recordings from the planes and control towers.
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Plagued by miscommunication and confusion, the Pentagon's air-defense command had little opportunity to intercept the four hijacked planes that crashed Sept. 11, 2001, and killed nearly 3,000 people, the federal panel reviewing the attacks said today.
At the commission's final public hearing, a report recounting the details of what happened with each of the planes was read aloud before an audience that included victims' relatives, some clutching photos of their loved ones.
The reading of the report was interspersed with tape recordings from the planes and control towers that had not been heard in public before. Accompanying graphics traced the flight paths of the four planes.
Hijacker heard speaking
A particularly haunting transmission came from the cockpit of American Airlines Flight 11, which took off from Boston and was the first plane to strike the World Trade Center. A person believed to be Mohamed Atta, the alleged ringleader of the 19 hijackers, who piloted the plane, is heard saying to passengers: "We have some planes. Just stay quiet and you'll be OK. We are returning to the airport."
Later, Atta tells the passengers, "If you try to make any moves, you'll endanger yourself and the airplane."
Later, another tape was played of a transmission from United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in a Pennsylvania field after passengers fought back against the hijackers. On the transmission, a hijacker is heard telling passengers "there is a bomb on board."
The report detailed a series of missteps by aviation and military officials that squandered precious minutes between the time air traffic controllers became aware of the first hijacking and the crash of Flight 93 more than an hour later.
And it recounted confusion at the Federal Aviation Administration and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) that led to delays in scrambling fighter jets to intercept the planes.
Shootdown order
Vice President Dick Cheney eventually issued an order to shoot down hijacked planes, but military pilots did not receive it until the last of the four planes -- United Airlines Flight 93 -- crashed in Pennsylvania after passengers fought back against the hijackers. Cheney said he received the authorization in an earlier phone call with President Bush.
The report largely blamed inadequate emergency procedures that contemplated more time to react to a traditional hijacking rather than a suicide hijacking.
"NORAD and the FAA were unprepared for the type of attacks launched against the United States on September 11, 2001," the report said. "They struggled, under difficult circumstances, to improvise a homeland defense against an unprecedented challenge they had never encountered and had never trained to meet."
In many cases, the panel praised the actions of government personnel forced to make split-second decisions. In the hours just after the attacks occurred, nearly 4,500 planes in the air had to be landed as quickly as possible. To do that, air traffic controllers first had to reroute about a quarter of them -- juggling 50 times the usual number of planes rerouted each hour.
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