re: So why were the two airliners after the first plane on 9/11

Go back to bed

Shot down by what?

There was mass confusion and not even the realization that it was an attack till the 2nd airliner hit.

There were no jets with weapons to shoot anything down anywhere near the area. And the only jets available to even fly was sent out to the Atlantic because there was no clue where the next may come from.

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What happened to the plane that was supposed to hit tower 7

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Que?
No plane hit tower 7 first time I hear that claim.

Several reasons:

1) The hijackers turned off their transponders. While it might seem this makes it easier to track (the only plane without a transponder), it was the opposite because of how a secondary radar works. A secondary radar is what gives you transponder info and its what FAA looks at almost all the time. Once a pilot turns off a transponder, that plane disappears completely from the secondary radar (it doesn't show up at all). A primary radar can track everything, but it gives you no identifying info for ANY of the planes on the scope. You have to correlate things manually which is difficult.

2) Back then NORAD didn't even have radar pointed inside the U.S. Their mindset was still stuck in the Cold War with Goose and Maverick out chasing Russian MIGs around. NORAD's radar systems were all pointed at the oceans and had no way to track these domestic planes (on their own) even if they wanted to. NORAD did have the ability to "pull up" FAA's radar on their own scopes, but it was still FAA radar, not NORAD.

3) When FAA got in contact with NORAD, the only way to do so was by a phone call and voice chat. You had zero way to share info in real time other than by talking and manually giving out coordinates. While NORAD, as I said, did have the ability to pull up FAA radar on their own monitors, they were faced with the same challenge of identifying anonymous blips.

4) As I mentioned in point 1, FAA was forced to switch to primary radar which shows all planes, but only as blips. (None of the thousands of planes have transponder info on primary radar). What's worse is the "preferred radar" for that area did not offer any primary radar returns at all. When they switched to a backup radar, there was some glitch and the returns were 8 minutes behind real time. Here is the actual quote from the 911 Commission Report:

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Radar reconstructions performed after 9/11 reveal that FAA radar equipment tracked the flight from the moment its transponder was turned off at 8:56. But for 8 minutes and 13 seconds, between 8:56 and 9:05, this primary radar information on American 77 was not displayed to controllers at Indianapolis Center. The reasons are technical, arising from the way the software processed radar information, as well as from poor primary radar coverage where American 77 was flying.

Primary radar contact for Flight 77 was lost because the ‘preferred’ radar in this geographic area had no primary radar system, the ‘supplemental’ radar had poor primary coverage, and the FAA ATC software did not allow the display of primary radar data from the ‘tertiary’ and ‘quadrary’ radars.

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So it's worse than I thought. The ATC software had supplemental radar returns behind by 8 minutes and did not allow the traffic controllers to receive other backup (tertiary and quaternary) radar returns at all. The 8 minutes behind thing was a bug, but there's no explanation why tertiary and quaternary radar returns could not be seen at all.

5) NORAD was running simulation exercises that morning, with one of the war games being hijacked planes. You could tell that the NORAD people didn't think it was real and was some sort of exercise. I think even after FAA told them "This is real world, not exercise" they still didn't believe it and thought it was some trick (at least not until they turned on the news and saw it). And then you had FAA having to work their way up the NORAD chain of command (over the phone). One of the FAA guys finally got pissed, went Karen, and basically said "let me speak to the manager." (He actually said "Get me someone who can scramble fighter jets.").

6) NORAD actually did scramble jets fairly quickly after FAA demanded it. The first jets received a scramble order at 8:46 (two minutes before the first plane hit the tower) and were in the air by 9:53 (exactly 5 minutes which is a fairly good time). The issue was that since the hijackers turned off transponders, the F-15's out of Otis did not know where to go, so just ended up going out over the ocean in a holding pattern.

Then there were two F-16's scrambled out of Langley put in task of chasing the Pentagon plane. The odd thing is the F-16 pilots were not told it was a plane hijacking and believed they were looking for enemy fighters or missiles. When one of the pilots got over the Pentagon and saw it burning, he thought it was a foreign military fighter (or missile) that had hit the Pentagon.

TL;DR - Pure chaos. No one knew what to do. No clear chain of command between FAA and NORAD. Way too much playing "phone tag" with each other. No terrorism command center existed. All the hijacking protocols were focused on rational actors who would hijack, land, demand ransom, etc.

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with 100% certainty that you're shooting down the right passenger jets out of hundreds

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Not only that, but you have what? Maybe a couple of minutes to make that call?

What planes? There were many, many planes flying around. Which two? They wouldn’t know.

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Do you understand how many planes fly on any given day? Do you know how many planes were in the air that day? Singling out the other two planes that quickly and scrambling jets to stop them that quickly over a heavily populated NYC is an impossible task.

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And the risk of shooting down the wrong plane with passengers on board.

I believe we scrambled two f-16s with 130 practice rounds and no other weapons. They planed to ram the cockpit and tail. Takes an hour to arm with missles.
The passengers took that one out 40 min before they got airborne. It all was so fast when no rules of engagement were set.