I assumed that NEADS did not receive appropriate notices, but this it what I do not understand how could it happen, and if it happened, why did not heads fall for this, immediately after the events.

While I was watching the TV, before the following attacks, I was thinking that they must track now where all the other airplanes already in flight are, to determine if everything is OK with those, and if not, to find them.

If I was thinking about this, as an amateur, I cannot believe that there were not many in the US military thinking the same during those moments.

There was a half hour until the second hit. I would have expected that in ten minutes maximum it would have been known if all the other flights are in their normal trajectories, or some are missing.

When 3 more planes were found missing, I would have expected a full scale operation to find them on the radars.

Perhaps another 10 minutes for finding the planes and another 10 minutes to shoot down the one that was going towards the Twin Towers, was short, so perhaps the second hit could have been forgivable, but until the one that hit the Pentagon there has been an enormous amount of time, much more than sufficient to locate and destroy the plane.

In Europe where I live, until the recent Russian wars there was a much lower likelihood of wars or terrorist attacks than in USA, but nonetheless, for as long as I remember, around important targets, like big cities or military objectives, there have always been dense anti-aircraft defenses and radar stations, ready day and night to intervene in the unlikely event of some kind of aircraft attack, and the air space has always been scanned continuously for suspicious or unidentified aircraft.

I expect that the biggest military spender would have more of those than here and better radars, so if properly used they should have been able to find immediately the missing airplanes.

If that did not happen I can only assume that some people with high positions in the military command have made serious mistakes and under pressure they have failed to take the necessary measures.

This is not very surprising, but then I would have expected the guilty people to be exposed and some "lessons learned" to be applied, to prevent for such a situation to ever happen again.

However, after 9/11 I did not hear any word about the obvious mistakes of the US administration and military, but only about the bad terrorists, and instead of hearing about measures to prevent the repetition of such mistakes I heard about things like the "Patriot" Act, which gave inappropriate powers to the US government, which was the great beneficiary of the 9/11 attacks, not the terrorists.

Thanks for the link to the complete report.

EDIT:

Thanks again, I have read the report and it was much worse than I could have imagined. The confusion and lack of coordination of FAA and NORAD were unbelievable.

On the other end of the Earth, people who watched TV were better informed in real time about what was happening, than the people who worked in FAA and NORAD and had to solve the situation.

So much was wrong that indeed it would have impossible to identify directly responsible persons. The main problem was, as you have said, that the protocols to be followed in such a situation were completely inadequate, and even those had not been followed (i.e. for any hijacked airplane a military escort should have been immediately deployed, but due to very bad coordination the hijacked airplanes were not located in time).

In my opinion, it's not worth while giving them the benefit of the doubt and studying their “report” (narrative). They play dumb, and “OMG, we f*cked up so badly, it's simply unbelievable!” Well, it is, verbatim. And nobody should believe it, or them.

Here's an observation from my very brief 48h visit to NYC in mid-September 2000. Walking around lower Manhattan, on my way to Battery Park, I came past the WTC and saw, across an empty plaza, a queue of a few dozen people, probably to enter the building or the tourist elevator. The very fact that the queue “stood out” in the general void felt strange. So few people, on a busy and perfect picture postcard blue sky ~25°C late summer early afternoon. And all the streets down to Battery Park were empty. Zero street life. No cafés, no restaurants, no nothing. No one going for a coffee with a colleague or business partner. A total commercial and tourist wasteland.

And yet we're told there were 40 or 50,000 people working in the towers. To that I say bollocks. Rather, the number of people working in the towers must have been commensurate with the level of street life, which was zero. And from that everything can be explained easily.

Not to forget the money flow. The largest insurance case (and fraud) in human history. Made enough money to make thousands of millionaires.