Does anyone remember the fear of full scale nuclear war back in the prosperous eighties when we were toe to toe with the Soviet Union? Remember when Reagan was being followed around by that creepy guy in sunglasses with the suitcase handcuffed to his nutsack? We all thought we could be cooked in seven seconds by the heat of a thousand suns. Most people remember the joke, “What would you do if they launched the ICBMs and you knew you only had 30 minutes to live?” Sometimes it would be followed by, “I’d fuck anything that moves. What would you do?” The punch line was something like, “I’d stand perfectly still!” The implication being that when the shit hit the fan people would be fucking in the street. A guy might get so confused you’d be anally raped half way through a crosswalk. Or perhaps this closet homosexual waited all his life and finally got his courage up in the middle of an apocalypse.
That 30 minute thing was supposed to be the time it took the Soviet ICBMs to strike the US. But the real response time NORAD had to snap in gear was seven seconds. That’s because those evil socialists would probably have their submarines parked outside the Whitehouse and the orders from the Joint Chiefs were to automatically kick ass. Seven seconds was the time they had to make a decision to retaliate. Seven seconds to put the smack down on Gorbachev’s commune before the Great United States became a sea of radioactive debris.
It was such a simpler time where at least you knew what you were in for. Clean cut service men in shiny black shoes had it all figured out. Radar scanning the skies for any anomaly, high tech satellites reading heads or tails from a coin on the sidewalk, underground bases filled with computers and real time monitors tracking misplaced wing nuts 22,000 miles in geostatic orbit. Sure we knew within the blink of an eye we were burnt charburger but somehow we all fell asleep under a blanket of peace knowing if someone wanted to start the shit we’d take them down with us hand in hand. 10,000 cans of flying whoop ass. That was Mutual Assured Destruction. Eye for an eye on a mass scale. Oh the good old days.
What’s the point? I just wanted to remind everyone of the technological miracle we designed to fight and win the cold war before I ask one question. What the fuck happened on September 11, 2001? You mean to tell me with all the backwards engineered alien know-how we had stuffed inside Cheyenne mountain we couldn’t stop four lumbering commercial airliners? At 8:14 American Airlines flight 11 turns off its transponder. (I’m not sure why they would have a switch to turn off the transponder in a commercial plane if it means so much to NORAD. And don't forget the pilot can punch in a four digit code to notify of a hijacking but somehow all four planes were unable to do this). Ok no big deal it happens at least one hundred times a year. Standard Operating Procedure says to scramble the jets right? No let’s wait a bit and scratch our ass. Six minutes creeps by and the plane goes radically off course. At 8:21 a flight attendant actually calls and reported by telephone that their plane had defiantly been taken over by hijackers.
[Unedited audio transcript from Boston FAA control room]
“Hey that’s weird. Bob you want to take a look at this? I just got back from the break room... Someone bought a dozen Krispy Kreme so I got you one… Here’s a couple napkins… Anyway I’m looking on the… Hold on it’s the phone… ‘Hello? Yeah… yeah… uh hum… uh hum… hmm… yeah… weird… yeah… ok… I’ll tell em… thanks… ok… yep… bye!’ Fuck… Holy shit! This coffee’s hot! I almost burned my dick off… Oh yeah… I forgot... Ok… That was Suzanne the flight attendant you hooked up with at the Christmas party last year… No not the crazy one… The other one with the weird mole… Yeah that one… Hot! I know dude! Anyhoo she mentioned something about a hijacking… I think that may be the same plane we lost on radar and the transponder went screwy… Remember when I went on the doughnut hunt? SOPs says to call out the? Where’s that number? Aren’t we supposed to call NORAD or something?”
At 8:28, seven minutes later the plane turns toward New York. Let’s see… Seven times 60 is 420 seconds. Wait… It’s been 14 minutes since the transponder turned off to signal NORAD so that’s 14 times 60. Let me get the calculator. 840 seconds! Maybe it’s time to send a 31.1 million dollar F-15 out to look around a bit. (Our F-15s can go to 29,000 feet in 2.5 minutes and can fly at 1,850 mph. That’s like warp 2.4 for you Star Trek fans). Should we see what’s going on up there? Scramble time? No let’s wait a while just to see what happens. What’s the hurry? We do this all the time whenever a commercial jet liner goes off course or the transponder gets wacky and it’s nothing but some hot dog wannabe pilot. Let’s just sit back and wait it out.
1920 seconds later at 8:46 somehow the call goes in after 32 minutes. Do we send a plane from McGuire Air Force Base since its closer? Fuck no! Let’s use that Otis National Guard Base in Cap Cod 180 miles away. We’ll have the guy go in the wrong direction for 150 miles over the Atlantic ocean then wiz back at sub-warp 500 mph which is the same speed of a commercial airliner. Hey, everyone knows when you call work and tell them the alarm clock didn’t go off we take our time. You’re late anyway what’s a few more minutes? Hell, you may even stop off at McDonald’s and get an Egg McMuffin. This daily grind of continual preparedness gets on your nerves after a while.
What the…
BOOM!!!
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