Quote Originally Posted by DV8 View Post
FAA reports situations (in-flight aircraft is seized in order to go to an unscheduled destination, an aircraft is stolen, or an aircraft is used without permission of the owner or the FAA) to NORAD. FAA requests for escort/intercept are channeled through the Joint Chiefs and, if authorized, are coordinated between the affected NORAD region/sector and other military and/or civilian agencies.

Hammer, is this not still correct?
Well The details are Classified or Sensitive, so I can not tell you how they are handled. Stolen aircraft are not listed as stolen until the owner reports it as stolen. Some times it can be days before an aircraft is reported stolen.

In flight aircraft being seized are not always readily aparent either. But aircraft off flight plan is readily aparent. The FAA does immediately make attempts to get the aircraft back on course and secondly vector other aircraft in the area out of the way to prevent mid air collision. This happens quite frequently mostly because of radio problems (wrong freq, static charge buildup, out of range of transmitter, too low for transmitter,etc) If the FAA had every aircraft intercepted by the military that went without radio contact the military would be intercepting over 300 aircraft per day over the USA. Even the prohibited airspace over the Whitehouse and the Pentagon are violated several times a day every day. 99.5% of the time these are all pilot or controller mistakes. 00.5% of the time it is for real.