CJCSI 3610.01A (
HTML via Google) is a staff instruction from the Chairman of the Joint Cheifs rescinding the Clinton administration's 1997 CJCSI 3610.01 which heightened the priority of intercepting off-course and hijacked airplanes. Under the 1997 rules, in the event of a suspicious aircraft, the FCC would notify the NMCC, the National Military Command Center, the guys who launch the nuclear missiles. The NMCC would use largely the same procedures as they would with a Russian bomber coming down over Canada: dispatch planes to investigate the target, and deal with it as necessary.
For example, in 1999 when
Payne Stewart's Learjet first went off-course, the FAA notified the NMCC, who notified NORAD, who notified the commander of the Air National Guard at Tyndall Air Force Base, who dispatched two F-16s which were up in the air escorting Stewart's plane within 20 minutes of the FCC losing the transponder. The plane was traded off between F-16s and A-10s and was tracked by an AWACS for all of the remaining hours before it crashed. The NMCC had also prepared armed jets in the event that President Clinton ordered the plane shot down.
Once CJCSI 3610.01A went into effect June 1st of 2001, this was changed. Now, in the event of a hijacking, "Determine whether or not the assistance needed is reasonably available from police or commercial sources. If not, the DDO, NMCC, will notify the appropriate unified command or NORAD to determine if suitable assets are available and will forward the request to the Secretary of Defense for approval."
In short, if Payne Stewart's plane had gone out of contact after June of 2001, those planes would not have been there without Donald Rumsfeld's expressed permission.
Now that the cheerful exposition is out of the way, I have a question. I've seen this article quite a few times in the past few years, and if you'll notice, the first paragraph counts the number of intercepts between 9/11 and June 1st, 2002, compared with the number of aircraft intercepts between 9/11/00 and 5/1/01. These are not the AP's numbers, they took them from an FAA press release. June 1st, 2001. What I want to know is, can anybody find a military jet intercepting a suspicious aircraft between 5/1/01 and September 11th?
Or, more importantly, can Rumsfeld?