At 8:52 a.m. on September 11, 2001, “Two F-15 fighter jets took off from Otis Air Force Base on Cape Cod [Massachusetts] in pursuit of the hijacked airplane [United Flight 175]. …They had missed stopping the first hijacked plane [American Flight 11] and now they were late for the second. No one had really thought about the possibility of being attacked from the air. On the day that four commercial airplanes fell from the sky like weapons of war, the United States had on standby, to defend an area of nearly four million square miles, exactly 14 fighter jets.”
– Der Spiegel, Inside 9-11, Page 68