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I agree with you about it being totally reasonable to get a nearby civilian plane to confirm. I also agree that there would be no point in doing so if an F-16 had just done a shoot-down. A simple loop by the F-16 to eyeball the wreckage would have done the job.

My question is with the wording of the author of this article--"military in nature". It sounded like BS to me--maybe something to almost subliminally bolster his argument about military involvement. But I'm NOT knowledgeable about planes and didn't want to expose myself to an embarrassing correction (it's happened before) if I'd just called it BS and then got 100 responses that EVERYBODY knows about the white military xxxxxxxs...

Bottom line, I think that if 93 was shot down, it was proper but terribly tragic procedure--notice the complaints that the others were NOT shot down, thus playing both sides of the street. OTOH I don't necessarily think it was shot down, and your point about the white plane recon being unnecessary is a good one. I agree with Fred that we'll probably never really know the answer to this one, but the passengers of 93 are heroes EITHER WAY.

Could, perhaps, "military in nature" be a description of a jet as opposed to what a less than knowledgable witness would expect a civilian craft to be such as a Cessna 172? Or maybe, a Learjet at high speed and low altitude could also give an on-looker a false impression? I live in the approach and departure path of Raleigh/Durham International (RDU) and on many occasions small private business jets have beat hasty departures to which visiting friends have questioned if they were military jets.

I can appreciate the questions asked in the article but descriptions such as "military in nature" without a reliable source for such a description is borderline Michael Rivero-esque. In such cases, not always though, chances are that the simplest explanation is probably the most accurate. IMHO

I agree with you about it being totally reasonable to get a nearby civilian plane to confirm. I also agree that there would be no point in doing so if an F-16 had just done a shoot-down. A simple loop by the F-16 to eyeball the wreckage would have done the job.

Am I missing something here?

I don't see civil aviation authorities asking "F-15 pilot that just shot down that commercial airliner, please confinm kill. We have lost FLT93 on radar."