Adam, Popular Mechanics also said, "Why couldn't ATC find the hijacked flights? When the hijackers turned off the planes' transponders, which broadcast identifying signals, ATC had to search 4500 identical radar blips crisscrossing some of the country's busiest air corridors. And NORAD's sophisticated radar? It ringed the continent, looking outward for threats, not inward. "It was like a doughnut," Martin says [Major Douglas Martin, public affairs officer for NORAD]. "There was no coverage in the middle." Pre-9/11, flights originating in the States were not seen as threats and NORAD wasn't prepared to track them."

In 2004 The 9/11 Commission Report said on page 18, "NORAD would receive tracking information for the hijacked aircraft either from joint use radar or from the relevant FAA air traffic control facility. Every attempt would be made to have the hijacked aircraft squawk 7500 to help NORAD track it."

The 9/11 Commission Report confirms what the GAO said in 1994, "NORAD defines air sovereignty as providing surveillance and control of the territorial airspace, which includes:

1. intercepting and destroying uncontrollable air objects;

2. tracking hijacked aircraft;

3. assisting aircraft in distress;

4. escorting Communist civil aircraft; and

5. intercepting suspect aircraft, including counterdrug operations and peacetime military intercepts."

So the answer to your question is: Popular Mechanics is lying!

Dean Jackson/Editor-in-Chief DNotice.org
Washington, DC