The New York Times reports on the FAA’s investigation into the October 21st incident (see blog post here, including commmentary from one of the spokesmen involved):
Air traffic control supervisors delayed nearly an hour in notifying Norad, the military air defense command, that a Northwest Airlines jetliner was not responding to radio calls, the head of the Federal Aviation Administration said on Friday. The delay was a violation of detailed procedures put in place after the quadruple hijackings of Sept. 11, 2001.
The lapse probably made no difference to Norad, said the administrator, J. Randolph Babbitt, because while the Air Force did ready fighter jets in the incident, it never decided to order them into the air.
Decisions on how to handle planes that do not respond to air traffic control instructions are based on a variety of factors, Mr. Babbitt said. Among them are whether the plane is in a metropolitan area, whether it is flying erratically and whether it is sending signals that it has been hijacked. None of those was the case on Oct. 21, when Northwest Flight 188, from San Diego to Minneapolis, flew about 150 miles past the airport.
