Wikipedia. Nice research. Can't even be bothered to go to the actual source and pretend like you did real research. Do you even know how many people were asked in that wonderful graph? No.
None of that even has to do with the idea that planes weren't actually used in the attacks by the way. I know using your brain is hard when you're so dumb.
Well until the 9/11 attacks the possibility of needing armed jets for internal issues was too low of a threat to spend the funds and energy on this. For the time pre 9/11 times, it seems pretty reasonable. In today's world, obviously you'll have armed jets up in a quick fashion. The general consensus is that although we have a good air defense system, it wasn't built to defend against hijacked passenger planes originating from inside the country. It was built to protect the United States from Russian/Chinese planes flying from their airspace and trying to violate ours. We're talking about being out in the ocean on ships. So radar defense and jets that would be equipped and prepared to get in the air with munitions quickly to prevent an attack. Internally, our airspace was managed by the FAA and information was passed to their military counterparts. From there, they had to be passed to the actual air wing and then to the pilots themselves. By the time the military was even notified, there wasn't enough time to get armed jets prepped and into the sky. Until then, having armed jets flying over American soil was a huge risk with little reward. It was a much bigger threat to have a jet accidentally drop a bomb or missile on a school/neighborhood than actually need it to shoot down hostile aircraft. There's a lot of reasons why planes weren't just sitting by with weapons loaded and pilots waiting a room to jump into them to save the day, but that's a general idea of it. It wasn't unusual considering the history and circumstances they were dealing with prior to the attacks.
