I was reviewing the old threads on the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and comparing them with the official timeline on how the actual attack occurred.

At Pearl at the time of the attack on Pearl, there was a sizable Army Air Corps presence that could've been scrambled to meet the Japanese attack. It's been said that the last chance for this was when the Japanese planes were spotted on radar but unfortunately, this was shrugged off and ignored.

Now my question is this: What if the fighters at Pearl were scrambled on time? Was there still time to actually have the US pilots man their planes and take off to meet the Japanese attack?
If the Japanese attack had been interdicted by US planes, could the Japanese with their escorting Zero fighters fight their way through and carry on with their bombing and torpedo runs?

The key, I think, to this hypothetical aerial fight is the number of fighters the US could've scrambled in the limited time they had left before the Japanese planes made their actual attack. Was there actually enough time left to scramble the fighters? In 1940, How long does the US Army Air Corps take to scramble planes once a raid had been spotted?

At first glance, I personally thought that if the US fighters had bounced the Japanese raid over Pearl, the Japanese didn't have enough escorts to fight their way through. But when I thought about it some more, I realized that the inexperienced sailors, marines and soldiers manning anti-aircraft guns at Pearl would've likely shot down many US fighters as well given the confusion and shock of the attack.