According to the 9/11 Commission, on September 11, 2001: “Vice-President [Dick] Cheney issued the shoot-down order from the bunker underneath the White House shortly after 10:00 a.m. He told us that he discussed the order beforehand in a phone conversation with President Bush–who was aboard Air Force One–shortly after he entered the bunker at around 9:58 a.m. There was no documentary evidence of this call–either in the log entries from the day or from the notes of the people sitting next to the vice-president. There was evidence about whether the shoot-down order reached military pilots in the sky. Based on transcripts of conference calls, logs of phone calls, and interviews, our staff found that the shoot-down order did not reach the NORAD pilots until after all of the hijacked planes had crashed–well after the vice-president thought that it had reached the pilots–and that the order was for the pilots to identify the types and tail numbers of the planes, not to shoot them down.”
– Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, Without Precedent, Page 260