DUE WED 1/24 Debunking Assignment - Military Intercepts

Summarize the Claim:
So what happened is that the military should have been able to intercept the hijacked planes because that is what military pilots regularly do in this type of situation. They are saying that it is a standard operation to shoot down off-course planes that don't respond to air traffic controllers.
Summarize the Facts:

A decade before 9/11 NORAD fighter planes intercepted Payne Stewart's Learjet. They say that at 39,000 feet the plane lost its cabin pressure and crashed. The National Transportation Safety Board said that the plane was lost at 9:33 eastern daylight time and was intercepted at 9:52 central daylight time, making the total time 1 hour and 19 minutes for the fighter to reach the plane. What actually happened was that the plane that intercepted Payne's plane was already in the air and did not have to be scrambled so the actual total time for the jet to chase down the Learjet was approximately 50 minutes. Another point is that the transponders on hijacked planes were usually turned off. The transponder on Payne's Learjet was active. Making it easy for the jets to find it. However the planes on 9/11 were not that easy to track because the transponders were turned off.
On August 12, 2002, an Associated Press story had proof that NORAD had mounted more frequent interceptions of domestic flights. The article says that from September 11 to June 2002, NORAD scrambled jets or had diverted combat air patrols 462 times. That is seven times more that the usual 67 scrambles from September 2000 to June 2001.

Now because of all that had happened on 9/11 the FAA an NORAD increased cooperation setting up hotlines between air traffic control centers and NORAD command centers and establishing an ADIZ zone over Washington D.C.