Sarah,
The USAF fact-sheet for E4B says (Inventory: Active force, 4)

And I always thought that "When the president travels on Air Force One, an E-4B usually follows behind the presidential entourage."Wouldn't one be in Florida?

I also read this, "The plane also doubles as a mobile office for the Secretary of Defense. According to various reports, his predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, often used the plane, and much preferred it."

From Joe Dejka, "Inside STRATCOM on September 11: Offutt exercise took real-life twist," "three of the E-4Bs were participating in a live command-level exercise known as Global Guardian."

Anyways, can someone explain how even in fake-scenario crap they let this plane fly around with no fighter or AA? And how does this thing hover over the Pentagon all day AFTER they know it's real and still a known hijacked plane can fly into Pentagon? We have to assume for the exercises, this E4B was fully staffed? Wouldn't they have radar and modern doo-dad that work like communication devices? Is there USAF that incompetent they couldn't get any air support over D.C. with the emergency-flying-Pentagon-mobile-command thingy?

STRATCOM abruptly terminated the 2001 exercise at 9:03 AM, when Flight 175 crashed into the South Tower.[US DoD, News Transcript, "Secretary Rumsfeld Interview with the Washington Post," January 9, 2002]

Between 9:03 a.m. and 9:37 a.m.: Defense Official at Pentagon Says, ‘We’re Next’ [Gilbert et al., 2002, pp. 43]

Brigadier General Montague Winfield, commander of the National Military Command Center (NMCC), the Pentagon’s emergency response center, later says, “When the second aircraft flew into the second tower, it was at that point that we realized that the seemingly unrelated hijackings that the FAA was dealing with were in fact a part of a coordinated terrorist attack on the United States.” [ABC News, 9/14/2002] For unknown reasons, Winfield had stepped down from his usual position at 8:30 a.m., and allowed Captain Charles Leidig to temporarily take his place as deputy director for operations in the NMCC. [9/11 Commission, 6/17/2004]

-------------
What was that mobile command center plane with super-duper radar doing for 34 minutes over Pentagon?

Or did it take off afterwards? Or is this Verton guy a liar?

Global Guardian was reportedly canceled after 9:03, when the second WTC tower was hit. [Omaha World-Herald, 9/8/2002] But according to journalist and author Dan Verton, the E-4B located outside Washington has “only just taken off” at the time the Pentagon is hit (which is at 9:37 a.m.). Verton says the aircraft is then “immediately ordered to cease the military exercise it was conducting and prepare to become the actual national airborne operations center.” [Verton, 2003, pp. 144]

From LIH (Accidently) towards LIHOP.

Me, I think they MIHOP, but I'm biased.

No Hell below us
Above us, only sky

Quotes are good, but quotes with links are the best, for two reasons:

1. Like footnotes, the link allows the reader to assess the writer's evidence and reasoning independently (this is why links are profoundly non-authoritarian).

2. Over time, the fair use quotes with links in the blogosphere are becoming a collective archive, as material that used to be available disappears behind the pay wall, or gets moved.

So, think of yourself as contributing to the historical record....

We. Are. Going. To. Die. We must restore hope in the world. We must bring forth a new way of living that can sustain the world. Or else it is not just us who will die but everyone. What have we got to lose? Go forth and Fight!—Xan

You write:

But if there was any surprise what so ever involved with 9-11-01’s attacks, by means of hijacked jumbo jetliners against highly symbolic US buildings, what was an E-4B doing over DC Metro airspace?

I'm baffled. Is it that the E-4B is supposed to be in proximity to the person of the President at all times?

We. Are. Going. To. Die. We must restore hope in the world. We must bring forth a new way of living that can sustain the world. Or else it is not just us who will die but everyone. What have we got to lose? Go forth and Fight!—Xan

I had to read Intranets' quotes several times before working this out but it confirms what I originally thought: there are several of these planes, in fact:

The USAF fact-sheet for E4B says (Inventory: Active force, 4)

four of them.

Figure one for POTUS, one for VPOTUS, one that was for a long time known as Looking Glass (the old SAC command plane that was always in the air, for the duration of the Cold War. Obviously there were several of those as well working in rotation. In-air refueling can only go so far.) If the SecDef has one for his/her own use that would be the fourth.

As to details of the operation that day I will leave that to the better-informed. But does anybody else remember the story about the staff at one airport--in New York someplace, a ways upstate, close enough that their radar displays covered most of the airspace over which the hijacked planes flew?

The boss of air traffic control had everybody working that morning, before he even let them go home after the ground-stop interruption, sit down individually and record everything they saw on their screens during the whole event, on little tape recorders. He notified the FAA (I think) of what they had put together, thinking more of it as a unique addition to the historical record.

Couple of days later somebody who has never been clearly identified other than being "from Washington" showed up, and gathered the group together. Told everybody that this deal with the tape recorders did not follow proper investigative procedures, data was not properly gathered, whole bunch o' BS anyway, and collected all the tapes, and destroyed them then and there.

This story made the rounds enough that I even heard about it and I was not tied into the blogosphere yet. Then the runup to Iraq started and the whole thing just went *poof.* Does anybody else recall something like this?

Goddess knows I do not want to feed into the rampant conspiracy theorizing that seems to have blown up over the last few days, but this particular story always puzzled me.

I remember that one too, Xan, so I went looking for it. From the Times (and not behind the pay wall):

F.A.A. Official Scrapped Tape of 9/11 Controllers' Statements
At least six air traffic controllers who dealt with two of the hijacked airliners on Sept. 11, 2001, made a tape recording that same day describing the events, but the tape was destroyed by a supervisor without anyone making a transcript or even listening to it [Uh huh], the Transportation Department said in a report today.

The taping began before noon on Sept. 11 at the New York Air Route Traffic Control Center, in Ronkonkoma, on Long Island, where about 16 people met in a basement conference room known as "the Bat Cave" and passed around a microphone, each recalling his or her version of the events a few hours earlier.

But officials at the center never told higher-ups of the tape's existence, and it was later destroyed by an F.A.A. official described in the report as a quality-assurance manager there. That manager crushed the cassette in his hand, shredded the tape and dropped the pieces into different trash cans around the building, according to a report made public today by the inspector general of the Transportation Department.

Odd.

The tape had been made under an agreement with the union that it would be destroyed after it was superseded by written statements from the controllers, according to the inspector general's report. But the quality-assurance manager asserted that making the tape had itself been a violation of accident procedures at the Federal Aviation Administration, the report said.

On the tape, the controllers, some of whom had spoken by radio to people on the planes and some who had tracked the aircraft on radar, gave statements of 5 to 10 minutes each, according to the report.

The tape's value was not clear, Mr. Mead said, because no one was sure what was on it, although the written statements given later by five of the controllers were broadly consistent with "sketchy" notes taken at the time by people in the Bat Cave. (The sixth controller who spoke on the tape did not give a written statement, apparently because that controller had not spoken to either of the planes or observed it on radar.)

One of the central questions about the events of that morning is how the F.A.A. responded to emerging clues that four planes had been hijacked. A tape made within hours of the events, as well as written statements given later, could help establish that.

A spokesman for the 9/11 commission, Al Felzenberg, said that Mr. Mead's report was "meticulous" and "came through the efforts of a very conscientious senator." He said the commission would not comment now on the content of the report but that it "does speak to some of the issues we're interested in."

The tape was made because the manager of the center believed that the standard post-crash procedure would be too slow for an event of the magnitude of 9/11. After an accident or other significant incident, according to officials of the union and the F.A.A., the controllers involved are relieved of duty and often go home; eventually they review the radar tapes and voice transmissions and give a written statement of what they had seen, heard and done.

People in the Ronkonkoma center at midday on Sept. 11 concluded that that procedure would take many hours, and that the controllers' shift was ending and after a traumatic morning, they wanted to go home.

The center manager's idea was to have the tape available overnight, in case the F.B.I. wanted something before the controllers returned to work the next day, according to people involved.

The quality-assurance manager told investigators that he had destroyed the tape because he thought making it was contrary to F.A.A. policy, which calls for written statements, and because he felt that the controllers "were not in the correct frame of mind to have properly consented to the taping" because of the stress of the day, Mr. Mead reported.

Nonetheless, Mr. Martin said that "we have taken appropriate disciplinary action" against the quality-assurance manager. For privacy reasons, he said, he could not say what those actions were or identify any of the employees involved.

Odd, again, because privacy doesn't seem to mean a whole lot in other cases (c.f. Valerie Plame).

We. Are. Going. To. Die. We must restore hope in the world. We must bring forth a new way of living that can sustain the world. Or else it is not just us who will die but everyone. What have we got to lose? Go forth and Fight!—Xan

Is anyone else reminded of young Vito Corleone taking apart the pistol and dropping it down four different chimneys?

But I still believe
And I will rise up with fists!!

I've been out a long time. There were 2 NACC aircraft in active operation (1 in the air, 1 on the ground as a "hot swap" spare) in my days as a ramp rat in SAC at Barksdale. I was aware of a couple of spares, at the time -- I think one "lived" at Offutt, because CINCSAC was PDS at Offutt. Back before St. Ronnie of the Ray Gun took his "check ride" in 1981, the NACC didn't trail around behind AF1; but we didn't call the NACC birds "Looking Glass" -- that name referred to another 737 variant, the AWACS birds with the rotating dome.

So your information may be newer/better/fuller than mine.
But I still want to know why that aircraft was in that airspace at that time.

Where did that E4B launch from? What time did it launch?
Where did it recover following its airborne mission?
Who was on board that aircraft at that time?

I'm pretty sure I read from some of the timelines about one staying near Offutt, but I found this interesting:

As well as the three E-4Bs in the air the morning of September 11 due to the Global Guardian exercise, what appears to have been the fourth of these planes--presumably the one kept on alert--was apparently activated and launched simply in response to the attacks. Reportedly, minutes after the attack on the Pentagon, it took off from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, near Dayton, Ohio, bound for an undisclosed location. The plane returned to the base at some unspecified time later on in the day. [8] Like the E-4B launched near Washington, little attention has been paid to this aircraft and what its purpose was on 9/11.

[8] Timothy R. Gaffney, "Wright-Pat Air Force Base Goes to Highest Alert." Dayton Daily News, September 12, 2001.

Wouldn't this just be SOP? In an emergency setting where they might be useful isn't it better to put them in the air instead of leaving them sitting ducks on the tarmac?

that plane's presence in that place at that time flatly contradicts SOPs, regulations, etc.

We. Are. Going. To. Die. We must restore hope in the world. We must bring forth a new way of living that can sustain the world. Or else it is not just us who will die but everyone. What have we got to lose? Go forth and Fight!-- Xan

Should have been clearer I was referring to the E-4B cited in intranet’s source just above, as having been scrambled from Wright-Patterson just after the attack on the Pentagon. That’s what I meant by SOP, get that bird off the ground.

With regard to the E-4B in your photo at the start of the thread, is this not one of the three that were airborne in whatever exercise was underway? It was where it was because somebody told the pilot to be there either as part of the exercise or in response to the second plane hitting the WTCenter, not neccessarily anything sinister.

Sorry, I’m no fun with the megaconspiracy stuff, really hard to pull off and harder to keep secret for long, more so now than earlier times what with the internet and all. Much easier for me to believe in mass incompetence leading to stuff going "waytoowrong", that’s scary enough, good thing the Russkies never did show up.

blast range.

When your country, and very specifically your capital, is clearly under attack, I believe SOP is to assume that The Worst could happen at any moment. Those planes (at least the one I refered to as "Looking Glass, the old Strategic Air Command mobile command plane intended to keep open the military chain of command in the event of a nuclear strike taking out the entire civilian government) is as hardened as any aircraft can be, to the point of being immune to electomagnetic pulse and having the pilot wear a patch over one eye in case the first is blinded by nuclear flash.

But you can't protect a plane in the air against blast wave, meaning the thing should have been circling no closer than say West Virginia, not over the goddamn Mall.

Bringiton, I don't consider this "megaconspiracy stuff" as i hold no opinion on whether this plane ever existed. *I* didn't see it with my own eyes, I don't know anybody personally who claims to have done so, and photographs are entirely worthless these days to establish anything. So I consider all these discussions as if they were plot devices in a sigh-fi or Tom Clancy book. :)

is one of the reasons I can't fathom having that plane in that place that morning.

If I'm into conspiracy theory at all here, it's to wonder how the USAF managed to fumble so completely.

We. Are. Going. To. Die. We must restore hope in the world. We must bring forth a new way of living that can sustain the world. Or else it is not just us who will die but everyone. What have we got to lose? Go forth and Fight!-- Xan

It's not like accidentally straping nukes to the underside of a bomber is a goof up or anything.

In the defense of the lost and lonely E4B flying over Pentagon, it had all sorts of civilians and war-gamers on board and wasn't tasked for anything critical, so other than being expensive plane, the critical plane for NAOC or NACC or whatever was out of Wright-Patterson and that one was calling the shots ??

Anyways, why is the foremost eyewitness on this subject lying about it. If the wargames was canceled, this thing doesn't take off unless it is working in tandem with NMCC. If it was already in the air when war games was canceled, then I could see it staying up there flying over DC. But the question is, this E4B 100% must have seen Flight 77 headed right towards the Pentagon/ WH. Why wasn't anti aircraft or missiles used? I mean the radar on that plane would have shown the flight path, speed and altitude of the incoming speeding bullet of doom.

Doesn't our Pentagon have any defenses?

eom

We. Are. Going. To. Die. We must restore hope in the world. We must bring forth a new way of living that can sustain the world. Or else it is not just us who will die but everyone. What have we got to lose? Go forth and Fight!-- Xan

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn...

Having watched the disturbing hollywood movie United Flight 93 tonight, I cant help but wonder why there was no plane wreckage or bodies recovered if the plane really crashed that way.It's not hard to be on the side of people who question the official story considering how quick the gov was to getting rid of evidence, stonewalling creating a comission then barely funding it or handing over info when requested.The plain simple fact that the president said he saw the first plane hit the building then decided to go to the school anyways saying he must have been a bad pilot,is one thing.But then when he was informed of the second plane and we are under attack comment, why would he just sit there when the U.S. needed him to act,for his own saftey also and that of the children.There could be no order to shoot down planes without his decision to do so,and he just sat around.Also the gov has video footage it has been asked to release by FOIA, showing what hit the pentagon from the hotels angle but it still hasn't, citing they need it for evidence.These questions need answers as well as answers to the motlen steel found in all 3 of the trade center buildings that fell that day and was there for weeks afterwards.The fact that Larry Silverstein said "pull it", "and then we watched the buidling fall".Put him on the stand under oath to see what he really meant. Bring forth all the firefighters who were there and get sworn testimony. Bring forth public testimony of all family relatives of the alleged hijacked planes and put them in front of a new independant inquiry.Get to the bottom of the insider trading of stock options and the anthrax attacks.Get to the bottom of the question why the pentagon lost 4 trillion dollars due to computer problems that they still hadn't fixed 4 years after it was reported on sept 10th 2001 by Rumsfield himself.This is just my take on things I have been paying close attention to the details since this tragic day has left a scar on all of us who witnessed it.We need to elect people who will vow to reinvestigate these grand anomalies..