9/11 and MS Flight Simulator

[Hagbard Celine]

I read in the Popular Mechanics article debunking 9/11 conspiracies that it took NORAD 1 hour and 20 minutes to locate Payne Stewart's Learjet. 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 at least half the Learjet's 51,000 foot service ceiling; this occured 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 follwed 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 NOAD 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 travelling 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 it's stalling speed of 75 knots, it would have reached a point closer to Tulsa that Elgin or Tyndall.