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It was “ugly,” one US lawmaker briefed on the launch said. Defense officials “didn’t have a good feel for its capabilities” right away, this person added.
Initial telemetry readings — which can be inaccurate and are often discarded as more data becomes available — suggested that the missile could pose a threat as far away as the Aleutian Islands off Alaska or the California coast, two sources familiar with the matter told CNN.
Within minutes, US Northern Command and the Northern American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) dismissed those initial readings and assessed that the missile posed no direct threat to the mainland of the United States. The test weapon — which sources say was a less maneuverable version of a hypersonic glide vehicle designed to evade missile defenses — splashed down harmlessly in the sea between China and Japan, thousands of miles away from threatening America.
The grounding forced air traffic controllers to hold some aircraft on the ground, while briefly diverting others in the air, according to air traffic control recordings, but controllers were at a loss when asked to explain to pilots what had caused the grounding. Some controllers erroneously referred to it as a national ground stop, something which hasn’t been seen since 9/11.
The question, now, is what sparked that initial burst of urgency — and perhaps, why the FAA reacted the way that it did.
“What we’re seeing here is just the normal process of coordination and communication out of which early on some decisions were made that probably didn’t need to get made,” Defense Department spokesman John Kirby told reporters on Thursday afternoon.
NORAD insists that it was the…
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Source : cnn
