Although military jets were scrambled out of Boston about 8:46 a.m., it was already too late to prevent the attacks on the World Trade Center. About the same time, American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the trade center's north tower.
Military officials acknowledged other problems in the nation's air defenses but said they had since been corrected.
McKinley testified that both ground communications with pilots and the radar system of the North American Aerospace Defense Command were designed to protect the country from external attack and thus worked only outside the country's borders.
As a result, military commanders were forced to rely on radar information from the FAA during the terror attacks. Moreover, they could not communicate directly with their pilots and had to go through the FAA.
In some of the more unusual testimony at the hearing, McKinley said pilots of two unarmed jets scrambled out of Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland and intended to crash their planes into Flight 93, the Shanksville plane, if they could not get it to deviate from its flight path.
The planes were sent aloft at the request of the Secret Service, which feared that the hijacked plane was headed for the White House.
"It is my understanding that the planes were to crash into Flight 93," McKinley said.
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