Interview with one of the fighter pilots from 9/11

That's crazy. Is any evacuated and presumably empty government building worth the live of anyone?
 
Penney, now a major but still a petite blonde with a Colgate grin, is no longer a combat flier. She flew two tours in Iraq and she serves as a part-time National Guard pilot, mostly hauling VIPs around in a military Gulfstream. She takes the stick of her own vintage 1941 Taylorcraft tail-dragger whenever she can.
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I like her already...
 
SkyHog said:
That's crazy. Is any evacuated and presumably empty government building worth the live of anyone?
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No. But they didn't necessarily know the next target. It could've been, for example, my high school with 5000 students in it.
 
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Ted DuPuis said:
No. But they didn't necessarily know the next target. It could've been, for example, my high school with 5000 students in it.
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And it was a matter of principle; a message... a big fat "No!". Had they needed to carry out their plan, there could still have been casualties on the ground, but at that point, the most important thing was to deny the hijackers their objective. The resisters aboard Flight 93 also understood this.
 
That's an amazing story, and one brave woman.

What's even more amazing is how utterly unprepared the Air Force was for the attack. I'm surprised the plane had fuel in it.

It's hard to believe that we didn't have a single plane on hot stand-by around our nation's capital. In the 50s and 60s, we had entire squadrons on alert.
 
Jay Honeck said:
That's an amazing story, and one brave woman.

What's even more amazing is how utterly unprepared the Air Force was for the attack. I'm surprised the plane had fuel in it.

It's hard to believe that we didn't have a single plane on hot stand-by around our nation's capital. In the 50s and 60s, we had entire squadrons on alert.
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The Air Force wasn't tasked to have aircraft armed and ready to shoot down domestic airliners carrying American citizens inside US borders. In the fifties there weren't ICBMs able to hit any spot on earth in 30 minutes so fighters were on alert to intercept bombers from mother Russia.
 
Short of crashing into the aircraft and losing both aircraft, what else could you do to disable the aircraft? Crash the wing or the tail? Fly over it and sit on top of it? Seems to me a head-on isn't the right answer. You would want to sneak up. And what are practice bullets? Do they fire at all?
 
silver-eagle said:
And what are practice bullets? Do they fire at all?
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They fire, but the projectile is just a relatively low density solid metal slug -- no armor piercing, no high explosive, no incendiary. That means they have a very low probability of kill on a big airliner. About all they're good for is being scored on the strafing range or the towed banner. I suppose you might get lucky, but it's not much of a chance of knocking it right down compared to an impact by an F-16, which has an immediate kill Pk pretty near 1.0.

As for trying to crash into the wing or tail, those have a lot smaller presented area than the fuselage, and thus make a much more difficult target to hit. And losing one F-16 and its pilot would be, in the eyes of the National Command Authorities, an acceptable price to pay to prevent another hit like those on the WTC and the Pentagon. Don't any of you forget that military personnel are considered expendable when necessary, and we all knew it.
 
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