I had been on a long search, using variations on search terms, trying to find a cache or copy of an earlier Simon & Schuster press release, which I remember reading but couldn't relocate. It contained an heroic anecdote of such absurdity I must have blacked it out the first time around. It would have to be a quote from the book, so suppressing a press release would mean reprinting the book, but, be that as it may, in the reported detail, an American fighter pilot is aloft and within effective striking range, but he is unarmed at the time--without any missiles or other offensive capabilities. Powerless, but knowing full well the hijacker's intent, the fighter pilot volunteers to crash his own jet into the errant American airliner to stay its course, thus prevent the successful completion of the terrorist attack. Conceptually, this would effectively co-opt the theme of using airplanes as missiles, while melding it to a valorous "throwing oneself on a grenade," in sacrifice for the country, but it is implausible beyond an adolescent's fantasy.Without claiming any cause-and-effect, within 90 days I had appended an edit to this ending, which satisfied me quite nicely:
Of course, I may have simply imagined all this--in which case the joke's on me--but at least I found cleartheskies.com out of it and I shall keep looking.
(The New York Times sides with me on September 13th, 2008.)This was an Op-Ed contribution signed by John Farmer, John Azzarello and Miles Kara, staff members of the 9/11 commission, and somebody---at the Times, or elsewhere---had titled for very odd reasons, "Real Heroes, Fake Stories." It begins with these six paragraphs:
IT is one of the most stirring accounts of heroism to emerge from 9/11: a fighter pilot from Andrews Air Force Base near Washington returns from a training mission, finds out that a plane, United Airlines Flight 93, has been hijacked and is heading for Washington, then takes off without refueling and low on ammunition in pursuit.However, Billy Hutchison's story has nothing to do with an embellishment---it is an out-and-out lie. A complete fraud and total fabrication that steals honor and valor from the real exploits of uniformed men and women who served this nation in some of its darkest hours---leaving aside for a moment the true causes of such darkness. It is just one piece of the over-arching reality of 9/11---that multi-trillion-word narrative with Photoshopped imagery founded on lies so deep and complex and undermining it lacks any analogy.
According to "Touching History," Lynn Spencer’s recent account of what "unfolded over the skies" on 9/11, the pilot, Maj. Billy Hutchison, took off and flew over the Pentagon, asking the civilian air traffic controllers to give him a vector from his current location along with a distance to the target.
"This method works, and Hutchison quickly spots the aircraft on his radar," writes Ms. Spencer. "He quickly comes up with a plan: he will try first to take the plane down with practice rounds fired into one of the engines, and then across the cockpit. ... If that does not sufficiently disable the aircraft, then he will use his own plane as a missile. He thinks again of his son and prays to God that his mission won't end that way."
It is hard to imagine a more thrilling, inspiring — and detailed — tale of fighter-jock heroism. There is only one problem with it: it isn't true. It is about as close to truth as the myth of the Trojan Horse or the dime-store novels about Billy the Kid.
As we pointed out in the 9/11 commission report, the radar records of the day indicate that Major Hutchison did not take off until more than a half-hour after United 93 had crashed near Shanksville, Pa., and a good 20 minutes after the wreckage had been located. He could not have seen United 93 on his scope, and could not have intercepted it. Like thousands of others that day, he did his duty. He was brave. But his tale isn't true.
The Billy Hutchison story is an example of a phenomenon that the 9/11 commission staff encountered frequently: heroic embellishment. If something good happened that morning, an amazing number of people took credit. Take, for instance, the decision to land all civilian aircraft. As the report notes: "This was an unprecedented order. The air traffic control system handled it with great skill, as about 4,500 ... aircraft soon landed without incident." But whose idea was it?
Interestingly, the Times web page carrying this piece reads "Published: September 13, 2008," while its printable version says "September 14, 2008." This differentiation would make sense if the earlier web page date had instead been listed as a "posting," but as it stands, some sort of tricky archive manipulation must be intended.
Not that the Newspaper of Record is anything like the New York Post, where an unconscious submersion of Robert Novak's Sept. 13, 2001 column "Beyond Pearl Harbor," could somehow occur for years. Nor will the Times ever know the thrilling experience when such suppressed knowledge makes its reappearance, such as Novak's did in late 2008. And in this we can only pity poor dopamine-deprived intellectuals like John Gardner. For here is a modern epic worthy of Homer, or the better neighborhoods of the Bible. How we have come to know---and how we are prevented from knowing.
As a for instance, like, perhaps journalism students could study the New York Times' coverage of the TWA Flight 800 disaster. It seems to me to be the test round for what came later---on all levels, from the FBI's co-opting of the established legal process for examination and accountability, to the obeisance of the old gray lady who sees what fits, not what's fit to print. We have jailed journalist James Sanders on our side, and they have jailed journalist Judith Miller on theirs. We know, or shall soon, what it is that they have wrought.
It is the shamelessness of people who have long ago begun to believe in their own publicity that led to the awkward display of doubling down on the bet at the 10th anniversary last year. A teetering old fraud, on dry-rot stilettos and osteoporotic knees, carrying forth with Bush's bullhorn, tapping their breasts with their fists, saying, "I know! I know! Watch me cry! See the image of my family member around my neck!"
The New York Times let Pandora out of the box, and she gets no credit for trying to latch the lid later. I can still picture the sequence of images on the front page of George Bush in Japan, stymied by an undiplomatic door that won't open.
The Washington Post is even worse, that's why it has to resort to robots.txt so frequently. With mind-blowing arrogance, last September they trotted out Lt. Heather "Lucky" Penney (Wouldn't a Lt. Carol Camel-Toe be more, um, euphonious?) for the vaudeville reprise in "U.S. combat pilot reflects on her 9/11 suicide mission: Bring down Flight 93, She was ordered to down Flight 93 by ramming it before it got to D.C. Here we can see clearly facts that don't "emerge," but are "launched," like breath-mint ad campaigns, and it is a dry-heave regurgitation unworthy even of a Madonna Beamer or Esther Glick. Clearly, the scriptwriters for this song-and-dance left a long time ago for the left coast.
I've found two other suicidal ideations in the Fly Boy media record so far, both are late summer, 2002, teases, before the real pumping of America began by mean Masonic pimps who put us in British and Israeli slings, for the rushing climax of New World Order moral horror and the spasms of a dying economy. In the BBC's US considered 'suicide jet missions', and ABC News' Any Means Necessary: Fighter Jet Pilots Faced Possible Suicide Mission On Sept. 11, Colonel Robert Marr, who was Commander of the North East Defence Sector, offers up his pilots "Duff," and "Nasty," who "were only minutes away," we're told, while "Lucky" probably had her mouth full just then and couldn't be quoted.
"Real Heroes, Fake Stories," could just as well read "Real Villains, Fake Stories," to explain our existential fears of Iran, or "Real Victims, Fake Stories," for the pitiable overclass of Holocaust Insisting, but it is all the same. A program of power by some really nasty, evil folks. As Thoreau theorized:
September 9, 2002, Aviation Week and Space Technology, F-16 Pilots Considered Ramming Flight 93 by William B. Scott, 9:24 AM U.S. EDT, [saved by PJeffQ at Free Republic]
Editor's Note: This is Part 3 of an ongoing special report on how the military responded to terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. Earlier articles appeared in the June 3 and June 10 issues. For this segment, one D.C. Air National Guard F-16 pilot chose not to have her name used, so is identified only by her call-sign.
ANDREWS AFB, MD. -- With Pentagon in flames and hijacked aircraft threatening Washington, White House scrambled fighters with little or no armament.
Within minutes of American Airlines Flight 77 hitting the Pentagon on Sept. 11, Air National Guard F-16s took off from here in response to a plea from the White House to "Get in the air now!" Those fighters were flown by three pilots who had decided, on their own, to ram a hijacked airliner and force it to crash, if necessary. Such action almost certainly would have been fatal for them, but could have prevented another terrorism catastrophe in Washington.
One of those F-16s launched with no armament--no missiles and no usable ammunition in its 20-mm. gun. The other two "Vipers" only had a full load of 20-mm. "ball" or training rounds, not the high-explosive incendiary (HEI) bullets required for combat, and no air-to-air missiles.
The Andrews-based 121st Fighter Sqdn. was not standing alert on Sept. 11, because the District of Columbia Air National Guard (DCANG) unit was not assigned to the North American Aerospace Defense Command air defense force. Norad had already scrambled three F-16s from their alert base at Langley AFB, Va., but they were about 12 min. from Washington when the Pentagon was struck at 9:37 a.m. (AW&ST June 3, p. 48).
The 121st squadron's day had started normally. Three F-16s were flying an air-to-ground training mission on a range in North Carolina, 180 naut. mi. away. At Andrews, several officers were in a scheduling meeting when they received word that the World Trade Center had been hit by an aircraft. Minutes later, after United Airlines Flight 175 slammed into the second WTC tower, a squadron pilot called a friend in the Secret Service "to see what was going on. He was told some bad things were happening. At that time, we weren't thinking about defending anything. Our primary concern was what would happen to the air traffic system," said Lt. Col. Marc H. (Sass) Sasseville, the current 121st FS commander. On Sept. 11, he was the director of operations and air operations officer--the acting operations group commander under the 113th Wing.
Soon thereafter, the Secret Service called back, asking whether the squadron could get fighters airborne. The unit's maintenance section was notified to get several F-16s armed and ready to fly. Anticipating such an order, Col. Don C. Mozley, the 113th Logistics Group commander, had already ordered his weapons officer to "break out the AIM-9s and start building them up." The missiles had to be transported from a bunker on the other side of the base, which would take a while.
"After the Pentagon was hit, we were told there were more [airliners] coming. Not 'might be'; they were coming," Mozley recalled.
Sasseville grabbed three F-16 pilots and gave them a curt briefing: "I have no idea what's going on, but we're flying. Here's our frequency. We'll split up the area as we have to. Just defend as required. We'll talk about the rest in the air." All four grabbed their helmets, g-suits and parachute harnesses, and headed for the operations desk to get aircraft assignments.
Another call from the Secret Service commanded, "Get in the air now!" Almost simultaneously, a call from someone else in the White House declared the Washington area "a free-fire zone. That meant we were given authority to use force, if the situation required it, in defense of the nation's capital, its property and people," Sasseville said.
He and his wingman, Lucky, sprinted to the flight line and climbed into waiting F-16s armed only with "hot" guns and 511 rounds of "TP"--nonexplosive training rounds. "They had two airplanes ready to go, and were putting missiles on Nos. 3 and 4. Maintenance wanted us to take the ones with missiles, but we didn't have time to wait on those," Sasseville said. Maj. Dan (Raisin) Caine and Capt. Brandon (Igor) Rasmussen climbed into the jets being armed with AIM-9s, knowing they would take off about 10 min. behind Sasseville and Lucky.
"We had two air-to-air birds on the ramp . . . that already had ammo in them. We launched those first two with only hot guns," said CMSgt. Roy Dale (Crank) Belknap, the 113th Wing production superintendent. "By then, we had missiles rolling up, so we loaded those other two airplanes while the pilots were sitting in the cockpit."
Inside, at the operations desk, Lt. Cols. Phil (Dog) Thompson and Steve (Festus) Chase were fielding a flood of calls from the Secret Service and the FAA's two area air traffic control facilities--Washington Center and Washington Approach Control. Thompson is chief of safety for the 113th Wing, and Chase is now commander of the new Air Sovereignty Detachment here. By then, Brig. Gen. David F. Wherley, Jr., the 113th Wing commander, was on-site, trying to determine whether the unit had authorization to launch fighters.
"By this time, [commercial] airplanes were landing, but there were still several unidentified ones flying. One was in the northwest [area], basically coming down the [Potomac] River," Thompson said. Later, they would learn that the FAA and Norad's Northeast Air Defense Sector (NEADS) were tracking the hijacked United Flight 93, and feared it was coming toward Washington. Thanks to intervention by passengers, the aircraft ultimately crashed in Pennsylvania.
Maj. Billy Hutchison and his wingmen had just landed after being recalled from a training mission in North Carolina. When Hutchison checked in via radio, Thompson told him to take off immediately.
"Billy had about 2,400 lb. of gas; the other two [F-16s] were too light," Thompson said. "I told Billy to take off, but don't use afterburner to save gas. He took off with nothing--no weapons. I told him to 'do exactly what ATC asks you to do.' Primarily, he was to go ID [identify] that unknown [aircraft] that everybody was so excited about. He blasted off and flew a standard departure route, which took him over the Pentagon."
According to now-official accounts, an armed Norad-alert F-16 from Langley AFB, flown by Maj. Dean Eckmann of the 119th Fighter Wing Alert Detachment 1, was the first defender to overfly the Pentagon. At the time, Hutchison and his fellow "Capital Guardians"--as the 121st FS is known--were unaware that three other fighters were over the city.
MINUTES LATER, Sasseville and Lucky were in the air, roughly 6 min. after they had reached their F-16s. "I was still turning things on after I got airborne. By that time, the [Norad alert] F-16s from Langley were overhead--but I didn't know they were there," Sasseville recalled. "We all realized we were looking for an airliner--a big airplane. That was [United] Flight 93; the track looked like it was headed toward D.C. at that time."
The DCANG was not in the Norad or NEADS communication and command loops, so its pilots weren't on the same frequencies as Norad air defense fighters. The Andrews-based F-16s were launched by the Secret Service and someone in the White House command center, not Norad. At the time, there was no standing agreement between the Secret Service and the 113th Wing for the latter to provide fighters in response to an attack on Washington.
Hutchison made two loops up the Potomac, reversing course near Georgetown and the Pentagon, flying at 500-1,000 ft. AGL. Sasseville and Lucky were at 5,000-6,000 ft., "because I didn't want to get too low for a good radar angle, and not too high, so we could get somewhere fast," Sasseville said. He later conceded he was "making things up on the fly." Obviously, there was no precedent to draw upon. All the pilots were relying on their training and ability to think under pressure.
Hutchison was probably airborne shortly after the alert F-16s from Langley arrived over Washington, although 121st FS pilots admit their timeline-recall "is fuzzy." But it's clear that Hutchison, Sasseville and Lucky knew their options were limited for bringing down a hijacked airliner headed for an undetermined target in the capital city. Although reluctant to talk about it, all three acknowledge they were prepared to ram a terrorist-flown aircraft, if necessary. Indeed, Hutchison--who might have been the first to encounter Flight 93 if it had, indeed, been flying low and fast down the Potomac--had no other choice.
Sasseville and Lucky each had 511 rounds of ammo, but that only provided roughly a 5-sec. burst of the 20-mm. gun. And where should they shoot to ensure a hijacked aircraft would be stopped? Sasseville planned to fire from behind and "try to saw off one wing. I needed to disable it as soon as possible--immediately interrupt its aerodynamics and bring it down."
He admits there was no assurance that a 5-sec. burst of lead slugs could slice an air transport's wing off, though. His alternative was "to hit it--cut the wing off with my wing. If I played it right, I'd be able to bail out. One hand on the stick and one hand on the ejection handle, trying to ram my airplane into the aft side of the [airliner's] wing," he said. "And do it skillfully enough to save the pink body . . . but understanding that it might not go as planned. It was a tough nut; we had no other ordnance."
Still unaware that the 119th FW alert F-16s were overhead, patrolling at a higher altitude, Sasseville initially split the airspace into four sectors. He swept the northwest area of Washington--where the hijacked United Flight 93 was expected to be--and had Lucky guard the northeast area.
Approximately 10 min. after Sasseville and Lucky took off, Caine and Rasmussen launched, the first Andrews-based F-16s to carry both hot guns and live AIM-9 missiles. They worked the city's southern sectors. Soon, F-16s from Richmond, Va., and Atlantic City, N.J., as well as F-15s from Langley AFB, were arriving. The air picture was confused, at best, and radio frequencies were alive with chatter.
"The FAA controllers were doing their best to get us information [about unidentified aircraft], but we were used to working with AWACS and their weapons directors and controllers," Rasmussen said. Eventually, Washington Reagan National Airport was designated "Bullseye," and fighters were given range and bearing to targets from there.
Possibly the highest ranking pilot in the area, Sasseville "essentially declared myself the CAP [combat air patrol] commander and set up deconfliction altitudes so we didn't run into each other. There really wasn't time for niceties." For the rest of the day, a dozen or so fighters rotated in and out of the region, running intercepts on myriad helicopters and light aircraft.
"THEY WERE SNAPPING to targets everywhere," Thompson said. "A lot of light aircraft fly under the [controlled] airspace here, and they had no idea what was going on. What really scared us was Washington Approach broadcasting, 'Anyone flying within 25 mi. of the Washington Tacan is authorized to be shot down.' We kind of winced at that, because there are plenty of hard reasons to not shoot somebody down. We were really in an ID posture--and trying to really be careful."
A miracle of the post-attack hours on Sept. 11 was that no aircraft was shot down accidentally, a credit to the training and discipline of U.S. fighter crews. That fact is even more impressive when one considers many of those pilots had little or no experience with air defense techniques and protocols.
"We really didn't know the intricacies of Norad's mission--how it works," Thompson explained. "We've never been an air defense unit. We practice scrambles, we know how to do intercepts and other things, but there's a lot of protocol in the air defense business. We obviously didn't have that expertise, but it worked out fine. For the first three days, everybody seemed to be reasonably happy with our orchestrating the D.C. CAP. By day-four, we'd pretty much turned into a national asset" as Norad assumed control of CAPs nationwide.
On that first day, many of the pilots flying CAP over Washington, New York and other U.S. cities were faced with the very real possibility of having to shoot down or ram their fighter into an air transport filled with innocent passengers.
"I was asking myself, 'Is this when I have to make the million-dollar decision on my own?' But with smoke billowing out of the Pentagon . . . ," Rasmussen said.
"That's what we get paid to do, though. When young guys sign up, they may not see that the 'guts and glory' of fighter-flying may cost you your life. That day brought everything into focus."
In the afternoon, Sasseville and Lucky were flying their second mission of the day--armed with AIM-9 missiles now--when they were told to contact an AWACS aircraft in the area and "expect special tasking." They were directed to fly a 280-deg. heading for 140 naut. mi.--almost due west of Washington. Unable to communicate by secure or encrypted means, the AWACS controller lowered his voice and told Sasseville via radio they were going to "escort Air Force One," President Bush's aircraft.
Two Langley F-15s offered to go along, and Sasseville concurred. Soon, an AWACS controller reported a fast-moving, unidentified aircraft southwest of Air Force One, approximately 60 naut. mi. away, but on a "cutoff vector" to the President's Boeing 747. It was above 40,000 ft. and the 747 was "in the 20,000-ft. range," but Sasseville sent the F-15s to intercept the unknown aircraft. It was a Learjet that hadn't yet landed after aircraft nationwide had been ordered out of the air.
Sasseville and the two F-15s later joined on Air Force One, while Lucky positioned her F-16 about 10 naut. mi. in front of the 747. With the SADL data link system, she was able to monitor her location relative to Sasseville's SADL-equipped F-16 positioned on Air Force One's left wing. Another flight of F-16s from Ellington AFB, Tex., were about 5 mi. in trail. They had escorted the President from Offutt AFB, Neb., according to 121st FS officers.
Why the Washington-based F-16s were sent to shadow the President's aircraft back to Andrews AFB has not been disclosed. Apparently, someone in the Norad or Secret Service command loop had received information about a potential threat to the 747, prompting a request for additional armed escorts.
Surrounded by fighters, Air Force One descended rapidly toward its home base. Lucky made a clearing pass over the airfield, pulled up, circled back and joined on Sasseville's wing. All of the fighters remained with the 747 until the latter landed, then climbed and established a CAP over Andrews.
Despite being short of aircrews the next few days, the 121st flew continuously for about 63 hr., maintaining protective CAPs over Washington. They were aided by fighters from other ANG, Reserve and active-duty units, as well.
"We were generating airplanes faster than they could put 'em up," remarked Belknap. "And we still are."
September 14, 2008, New York Times, Op-Ed Contributors, Real Heroes, Fake Stories By John Farmer, John Azzarello and Miles Kara
IT is one of the most stirring accounts of heroism to emerge from 9/11: a fighter pilot from Andrews Air Force Base near Washington returns from a training mission, finds out that a plane, United Airlines Flight 93, has been hijacked and is heading for Washington, then takes off without refueling and low on ammunition in pursuit.
According to "Touching History," Lynn Spencer's recent account of what "unfolded over the skies" on 9/11, the pilot, Maj. Billy Hutchison, took off and flew over the Pentagon, asking the civilian air traffic controllers to give him a vector from his current location along with a distance to the target.
"This method works, and Hutchison quickly spots the aircraft on his radar," writes Ms. Spencer. "He quickly comes up with a plan: he will try first to take the plane down with practice rounds fired into one of the engines, and then across the cockpit. ... If that does not sufficiently disable the aircraft, then he will use his own plane as a missile. He thinks again of his son and prays to God that his mission won't end that way."
It is hard to imagine a more thrilling, inspiring — and detailed — tale of fighter-jock heroism. There is only one problem with it: it isn't true. It is about as close to truth as the myth of the Trojan Horse or the dime-store novels about Billy the Kid.
As we pointed out in the 9/11 commission report, the radar records of the day indicate that Major Hutchison did not take off until more than a half-hour after United 93 had crashed near Shanksville, Pa., and a good 20 minutes after the wreckage had been located. He could not have seen United 93 on his scope, and could not have intercepted it. Like thousands of others that day, he did his duty. He was brave. But his tale isn't true.
The Billy Hutchison story is an example of a phenomenon that the 9/11 commission staff encountered frequently: heroic embellishment. If something good happened that morning, an amazing number of people took credit. Take, for instance, the decision to land all civilian aircraft. As the report notes: "This was an unprecedented order. The air traffic control system handled it with great skill, as about 4,500 ... aircraft soon landed without incident." But whose idea was it?
In the aftermath of 9/11, Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta claimed that he ordered all civilian aircraft to land: "I said ... 'get the damn planes down,'" he told ABC News. Richard Clarke, the National Security Council’s antiterrorism director, has written it was he who prompted the order, by saying to Jane Garvey, the Federal Aviation Administration’s director, "O.K., Jane, how long will it take to get all aircraft now aloft onto the ground somewhere?"
In fact, the commission established that the order was issued by Ben Sliney, the aviation administration’s national operations manager, on his own initiative, after hearing that the Pentagon had been hit.
Most of the exaggerated claims from 9/11 are harmless, springing as they do from some combination of the unreliability of witness recollection, the psychological need for consolation after a defeat, and the human love of a good story. They are, more than anything else, a commentary on human nature.
Others, however, are not harmless, not innocent, and cannot go unchallenged. In fact, they fuel distrust of the government, give rise to conspiracy theories and threaten to set back America's efforts to avoid future 9/11's.
Take, for instance, the tale of Major Hutchison, which is part of a larger and totally discredited story. After 9/11, military and government officials undertook an aggressive public relations effort. In testimony before Congress and the 9/11 commission, in numerous interviews, and in an official Air Force history, these officials told the country that by the time United 93 turned toward Washington, President Bush had issued the shoot-down authorization, Vice President Dick Cheney had passed it on, fighters were standing by over Washington and, as the military's commander at the Northeast Air Defense Sector headquarters in Rome, N.Y., told ABC News of the authorization to shoot down the planes: "We of course passed it on to the pilots. United Airlines Flight 93 will not be allowed to reach Washington."
Yet the commission established that none of this happened. Once we subpoenaed the relevant tapes and other records, the story fell apart. Contrary to the testimony of retired Gen. Larry Arnold, who on 9/11 was the commander of continental defense for the North American Aerospace Defense Command, fighters were not scrambled that morning to meet the threat posed by United 93. In fact, the fighters were sent up in response to an unrelated and mistaken report that General Arnold and others had not disclosed to the commission. Flight 93 hadn't even been hijacked when the planes were ordered scrambled, and General Arnold's command found out the plane was hijacked only after it had crashed. The authorization to shoot it down came after it had crashed, and was never passed on to the pilots.
No one is telling that tale anymore, but the damage was done. Because the story couldn't withstand scrutiny, the public was left free to believe anything, and to doubt everything. Many still believe that a cruise missile hit the Pentagon; that 9/11 was an "inside job" by American and Israeli intelligence; that the military actually did shoot down United 93.
Worse still, by overstating the effectiveness of national command and control by the time United 93 was heading for Washington, the government obscured the central reality of that morning: that the Washington establishment talked mainly to itself, disconnected from the reality on the ground and in the air. Because bureaucrats obscured that disconnect, they didn’t fix it, in terms of national security or any other complicated federal emergency response. Thus the whole world got to see a very similar reaction in 2005, when Hurricane Katrina hit, and residents of New Orleans struggled to survive on their rooftops while officials in Washington issued reassuring statements.
The afterword to "Touching History" was written by General Arnold, despite his having been forced to retract his testimony to the 9/11 commission. ("I was wrong," he told the panel at its final hearing. "I was wrong.") He praises the book's "corrections to the record" because they recognize the heroism of people like Major Hutchison and expose the "political agenda" of the commission.
Yes, the commission staff looking into these events did have an agenda. Our team included a retired military officer who was badly burned in the Pentagon attack, and a former federal prosecutor whose wife lost both her brothers in the World Trade Center. We believed that telling misleading stories about what happened undermines the public's confidence in government, spawns conspiracy theories and compromises efforts to prepare for future events. Truth, not wishful thinking, is the most enduring memorial we can leave.
There were heroes on 9/11, people whose split-second decision-making saved lives. All too frequently, as in the case of many civilians and first responders in New York and the passengers and crew aboard United 93, those heroic deeds cost them their lives.
America lost that day. At critical moments, our nation was undefended — something the passengers on United 93 realized when they decided to work together to bring the plane down. We should not allow such real heroism of that day to be diminished, or the grim reality of that day to be obscured, by the self-serving agendas of would-be heroes.
John Farmer, John Azzarello and Miles Kara were staff members of the 9/11 commission.
September 11, 2011, The Washington Post, U.S. combat pilot reflects on her 9/11 suicide mission: Bring down Flight 93, She was ordered to down Flight 93 by ramming it before it got to D.C., By Steve Hendrix,
Sunday, [Courtesy of The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette]
Late in the morning of the Tuesday that changed everything, Lt. Heather "Lucky" Penney was on a runway at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland and ready to fly. She had her hand on the throttle of an F-16 and she had her orders: Bring down United Airlines Flight 93. The day's fourth hijacked airliner seemed to be hurtling toward Washington. Lt. Penney, one of the first two combat pilots in the air that morning, was told to stop it.
The one thing she didn't have as she roared into the crystalline sky was live ammunition. Or missiles. Or anything at all to throw at a hostile aircraft.
Except her own plane. So that was the plan.
Because the surprise attacks were unfolding, in that innocent age, faster than they could arm war planes, Lt. Penney and her commanding officer went up to fly their jets straight into a Boeing 757.
"We wouldn't be shooting it down. We'd be ramming the aircraft," Lt. Penney, who is now a major, recalls of her charge that day. "I would essentially be a kamikaze pilot."
For years, Maj. Penney, one of the first generation of female combat pilots in the country, gave no interviews about her experiences on Sept. 11 (which included, eventually, escorting Air Force One back into Washington's suddenly highly restricted airspace).
But 10 years later, she is reflecting on one of the lesser-told tales of that endlessly examined morning: how the first counterpunch the U.S. military prepared to throw at the attackers was effectively a suicide mission.
"We had to protect the airspace any way we could," she said last week in her office at Lockheed Martin, where she is a director in the F-35 program.
Maj. Penney has risen in the ranks but is no longer a combat flier. She flew two tours in Iraq and 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.
But none of her thousands of hours in the air quite compare with the urgent rush of launching on what was supposed to be a one-way flight to a midair collision.
She was a rookie in the autumn of 2001, the first female F-16 pilot they'd ever had at the 121st Fighter Squadron of the D.C. Air National Guard. She had grown up smelling jet fuel. Her father flew jets in Vietnam and still races them. Maj. Penney got her pilot's license when she was a literature major at Purdue. She planned to be a teacher. But during a graduate program in American studies, Congress opened up combat aviation to women and Maj. Penney was nearly first in line.
"I signed up immediately," she says. "I wanted to be a fighter pilot like my dad."
On that Tuesday, they had just finished two weeks of air combat training in Nevada. They were sitting around a briefing table when someone looked in to say a plane had hit the World Trade Center in New York. When it happened once, they assumed it was some yahoo in a Cessna. When it happened again, they knew it was war.
But the surprise was complete. In the monumental confusion of those first hours, it was impossible to get clear orders. Nothing was ready. The jets were still equipped with dummy bullets from the training mission.
As remarkable as it seems now, there were no armed aircraft standing by and no system in place to scramble them over Washington.
Before that morning, all eyes were looking outward, still scanning the old Cold War threat paths for planes and missiles coming over the polar ice cap.
"There was no perceived threat at the time, especially one coming from the homeland like that," says Col. George Degnon, vice commander of the 113th Wing at Andrews. "It was a little bit of a helpless feeling, but we did everything humanly possible to get the aircraft armed and in the air. It was amazing to see people react."
Things are different today, Col. Degnon says. At least two "hot-cocked" planes are ready at all times, their pilots never more than yards from the cockpit.
A third plane hit the Pentagon, and almost at once came word that a fourth plane could be on the way, maybe more. The jets would be armed within an hour, but somebody had to fly now, weapons or no weapons.
"Lucky, you're coming with me," barked Col. Marc Sasseville.
They were gearing up in the pre-flight life-support area when Col. Sasseville, struggling into his flight suit, met her eye.
"I'm going to go for the cockpit," Col. Sasseville said.
She replied without hesitating.
"I'll take the tail."
It was a plan. And a pact.
'Let's go!'
Maj. Penney had never scrambled a jet before. Normally the pre-flight is a half-hour or so of methodical checks. She automatically started going down the list.
"Lucky, what are you doing? Get your butt up there and let's go!" Col. Sasseville shouted.
She climbed in, rushed to power up the engines, screamed for her ground crew to pull the chocks. The crew chief still had his headphones plugged into the fuselage as she nudged the throttle forward. He ran along pulling safety pins from the jet as it moved.
She muttered a fighter pilot's prayer -- "God, don't let me [expletive] up" -- and followed Col. Sasseville into the sky.
They screamed over the smoldering Pentagon, heading northwest at more than 400 mph, flying low and scanning the clear horizon. Her commander had time to think about the best place to hit the enemy.
As a for instance, like, perhaps journalism students could study the New York Times' coverage of the TWA Flight 800 disaster. It seems to me to be the test round for what came later---on all levels, from the FBI's co-opting of the established legal process for examination and accountability, to the obeisance of the old gray lady who sees what fits, not what's fit to print. We have jailed journalist James Sanders on our side, and they have jailed journalist Judith Miller on theirs. We know, or shall soon, what it is that they have wrought.
It is the shamelessness of people who have long ago begun to believe in their own publicity that led to the awkward display of doubling down on the bet at the 10th anniversary last year. A teetering old fraud, on dry-rot stilettos and osteoporotic knees, carrying forth with Bush's bullhorn, tapping their breasts with their fists, saying, "I know! I know! Watch me cry! See the image of my family member around my neck!"
The New York Times let Pandora out of the box, and she gets no credit for trying to latch the lid later. I can still picture the sequence of images on the front page of George Bush in Japan, stymied by an undiplomatic door that won't open.
The Washington Post is even worse, that's why it has to resort to robots.txt so frequently. With mind-blowing arrogance, last September they trotted out Lt. Heather "Lucky" Penney (Wouldn't a Lt. Carol Camel-Toe be more, um, euphonious?) for the vaudeville reprise in "U.S. combat pilot reflects on her 9/11 suicide mission: Bring down Flight 93, She was ordered to down Flight 93 by ramming it before it got to D.C. Here we can see clearly facts that don't "emerge," but are "launched," like breath-mint ad campaigns, and it is a dry-heave regurgitation unworthy even of a Madonna Beamer or Esther Glick. Clearly, the scriptwriters for this song-and-dance left a long time ago for the left coast.
I've found two other suicidal ideations in the Fly Boy media record so far, both are late summer, 2002, teases, before the real pumping of America began by mean Masonic pimps who put us in British and Israeli slings, for the rushing climax of New World Order moral horror and the spasms of a dying economy. In the BBC's US considered 'suicide jet missions', and ABC News' Any Means Necessary: Fighter Jet Pilots Faced Possible Suicide Mission On Sept. 11, Colonel Robert Marr, who was Commander of the North East Defence Sector, offers up his pilots "Duff," and "Nasty," who "were only minutes away," we're told, while "Lucky" probably had her mouth full just then and couldn't be quoted.
"Real Heroes, Fake Stories," could just as well read "Real Villains, Fake Stories," to explain our existential fears of Iran, or "Real Victims, Fake Stories," for the pitiable overclass of Holocaust Insisting, but it is all the same. A program of power by some really nasty, evil folks. As Thoreau theorized:
But the question must be asked, does the separation of the diabolical from the divine send the diabolical or the divine forth to rule the world?God Bless the Free Republic! Without their practice of maintaining full copies of texts (and unlike moi, they are being sued by the L.A. Times and others for copyright infringement for the practice,) I would once again be stymied by the dreaded red Page cannot be crawled or displayed due to robots.txt. notice, Instead, Aviation Week and Space Technology adds to our suicidal knowledge base. But, as Farmer et.al said above, "If something good happened that morning, an amazing number of people took credit." Does the same apply to doing yourself in?
September 9, 2002, Aviation Week and Space Technology, F-16 Pilots Considered Ramming Flight 93 by William B. Scott, 9:24 AM U.S. EDT, [saved by PJeffQ at Free Republic]
Editor's Note: This is Part 3 of an ongoing special report on how the military responded to terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. Earlier articles appeared in the June 3 and June 10 issues. For this segment, one D.C. Air National Guard F-16 pilot chose not to have her name used, so is identified only by her call-sign.
ANDREWS AFB, MD. -- With Pentagon in flames and hijacked aircraft threatening Washington, White House scrambled fighters with little or no armament.
Within minutes of American Airlines Flight 77 hitting the Pentagon on Sept. 11, Air National Guard F-16s took off from here in response to a plea from the White House to "Get in the air now!" Those fighters were flown by three pilots who had decided, on their own, to ram a hijacked airliner and force it to crash, if necessary. Such action almost certainly would have been fatal for them, but could have prevented another terrorism catastrophe in Washington.
One of those F-16s launched with no armament--no missiles and no usable ammunition in its 20-mm. gun. The other two "Vipers" only had a full load of 20-mm. "ball" or training rounds, not the high-explosive incendiary (HEI) bullets required for combat, and no air-to-air missiles.
The Andrews-based 121st Fighter Sqdn. was not standing alert on Sept. 11, because the District of Columbia Air National Guard (DCANG) unit was not assigned to the North American Aerospace Defense Command air defense force. Norad had already scrambled three F-16s from their alert base at Langley AFB, Va., but they were about 12 min. from Washington when the Pentagon was struck at 9:37 a.m. (AW&ST June 3, p. 48).
The 121st squadron's day had started normally. Three F-16s were flying an air-to-ground training mission on a range in North Carolina, 180 naut. mi. away. At Andrews, several officers were in a scheduling meeting when they received word that the World Trade Center had been hit by an aircraft. Minutes later, after United Airlines Flight 175 slammed into the second WTC tower, a squadron pilot called a friend in the Secret Service "to see what was going on. He was told some bad things were happening. At that time, we weren't thinking about defending anything. Our primary concern was what would happen to the air traffic system," said Lt. Col. Marc H. (Sass) Sasseville, the current 121st FS commander. On Sept. 11, he was the director of operations and air operations officer--the acting operations group commander under the 113th Wing.
Soon thereafter, the Secret Service called back, asking whether the squadron could get fighters airborne. The unit's maintenance section was notified to get several F-16s armed and ready to fly. Anticipating such an order, Col. Don C. Mozley, the 113th Logistics Group commander, had already ordered his weapons officer to "break out the AIM-9s and start building them up." The missiles had to be transported from a bunker on the other side of the base, which would take a while.
"After the Pentagon was hit, we were told there were more [airliners] coming. Not 'might be'; they were coming," Mozley recalled.
Sasseville grabbed three F-16 pilots and gave them a curt briefing: "I have no idea what's going on, but we're flying. Here's our frequency. We'll split up the area as we have to. Just defend as required. We'll talk about the rest in the air." All four grabbed their helmets, g-suits and parachute harnesses, and headed for the operations desk to get aircraft assignments.
Another call from the Secret Service commanded, "Get in the air now!" Almost simultaneously, a call from someone else in the White House declared the Washington area "a free-fire zone. That meant we were given authority to use force, if the situation required it, in defense of the nation's capital, its property and people," Sasseville said.
He and his wingman, Lucky, sprinted to the flight line and climbed into waiting F-16s armed only with "hot" guns and 511 rounds of "TP"--nonexplosive training rounds. "They had two airplanes ready to go, and were putting missiles on Nos. 3 and 4. Maintenance wanted us to take the ones with missiles, but we didn't have time to wait on those," Sasseville said. Maj. Dan (Raisin) Caine and Capt. Brandon (Igor) Rasmussen climbed into the jets being armed with AIM-9s, knowing they would take off about 10 min. behind Sasseville and Lucky.
"We had two air-to-air birds on the ramp . . . that already had ammo in them. We launched those first two with only hot guns," said CMSgt. Roy Dale (Crank) Belknap, the 113th Wing production superintendent. "By then, we had missiles rolling up, so we loaded those other two airplanes while the pilots were sitting in the cockpit."
Inside, at the operations desk, Lt. Cols. Phil (Dog) Thompson and Steve (Festus) Chase were fielding a flood of calls from the Secret Service and the FAA's two area air traffic control facilities--Washington Center and Washington Approach Control. Thompson is chief of safety for the 113th Wing, and Chase is now commander of the new Air Sovereignty Detachment here. By then, Brig. Gen. David F. Wherley, Jr., the 113th Wing commander, was on-site, trying to determine whether the unit had authorization to launch fighters.
"By this time, [commercial] airplanes were landing, but there were still several unidentified ones flying. One was in the northwest [area], basically coming down the [Potomac] River," Thompson said. Later, they would learn that the FAA and Norad's Northeast Air Defense Sector (NEADS) were tracking the hijacked United Flight 93, and feared it was coming toward Washington. Thanks to intervention by passengers, the aircraft ultimately crashed in Pennsylvania.
Maj. Billy Hutchison and his wingmen had just landed after being recalled from a training mission in North Carolina. When Hutchison checked in via radio, Thompson told him to take off immediately.
"Billy had about 2,400 lb. of gas; the other two [F-16s] were too light," Thompson said. "I told Billy to take off, but don't use afterburner to save gas. He took off with nothing--no weapons. I told him to 'do exactly what ATC asks you to do.' Primarily, he was to go ID [identify] that unknown [aircraft] that everybody was so excited about. He blasted off and flew a standard departure route, which took him over the Pentagon."
According to now-official accounts, an armed Norad-alert F-16 from Langley AFB, flown by Maj. Dean Eckmann of the 119th Fighter Wing Alert Detachment 1, was the first defender to overfly the Pentagon. At the time, Hutchison and his fellow "Capital Guardians"--as the 121st FS is known--were unaware that three other fighters were over the city.
MINUTES LATER, Sasseville and Lucky were in the air, roughly 6 min. after they had reached their F-16s. "I was still turning things on after I got airborne. By that time, the [Norad alert] F-16s from Langley were overhead--but I didn't know they were there," Sasseville recalled. "We all realized we were looking for an airliner--a big airplane. That was [United] Flight 93; the track looked like it was headed toward D.C. at that time."
The DCANG was not in the Norad or NEADS communication and command loops, so its pilots weren't on the same frequencies as Norad air defense fighters. The Andrews-based F-16s were launched by the Secret Service and someone in the White House command center, not Norad. At the time, there was no standing agreement between the Secret Service and the 113th Wing for the latter to provide fighters in response to an attack on Washington.
Hutchison made two loops up the Potomac, reversing course near Georgetown and the Pentagon, flying at 500-1,000 ft. AGL. Sasseville and Lucky were at 5,000-6,000 ft., "because I didn't want to get too low for a good radar angle, and not too high, so we could get somewhere fast," Sasseville said. He later conceded he was "making things up on the fly." Obviously, there was no precedent to draw upon. All the pilots were relying on their training and ability to think under pressure.
Hutchison was probably airborne shortly after the alert F-16s from Langley arrived over Washington, although 121st FS pilots admit their timeline-recall "is fuzzy." But it's clear that Hutchison, Sasseville and Lucky knew their options were limited for bringing down a hijacked airliner headed for an undetermined target in the capital city. Although reluctant to talk about it, all three acknowledge they were prepared to ram a terrorist-flown aircraft, if necessary. Indeed, Hutchison--who might have been the first to encounter Flight 93 if it had, indeed, been flying low and fast down the Potomac--had no other choice.
Sasseville and Lucky each had 511 rounds of ammo, but that only provided roughly a 5-sec. burst of the 20-mm. gun. And where should they shoot to ensure a hijacked aircraft would be stopped? Sasseville planned to fire from behind and "try to saw off one wing. I needed to disable it as soon as possible--immediately interrupt its aerodynamics and bring it down."
He admits there was no assurance that a 5-sec. burst of lead slugs could slice an air transport's wing off, though. His alternative was "to hit it--cut the wing off with my wing. If I played it right, I'd be able to bail out. One hand on the stick and one hand on the ejection handle, trying to ram my airplane into the aft side of the [airliner's] wing," he said. "And do it skillfully enough to save the pink body . . . but understanding that it might not go as planned. It was a tough nut; we had no other ordnance."
Still unaware that the 119th FW alert F-16s were overhead, patrolling at a higher altitude, Sasseville initially split the airspace into four sectors. He swept the northwest area of Washington--where the hijacked United Flight 93 was expected to be--and had Lucky guard the northeast area.
Approximately 10 min. after Sasseville and Lucky took off, Caine and Rasmussen launched, the first Andrews-based F-16s to carry both hot guns and live AIM-9 missiles. They worked the city's southern sectors. Soon, F-16s from Richmond, Va., and Atlantic City, N.J., as well as F-15s from Langley AFB, were arriving. The air picture was confused, at best, and radio frequencies were alive with chatter.
"The FAA controllers were doing their best to get us information [about unidentified aircraft], but we were used to working with AWACS and their weapons directors and controllers," Rasmussen said. Eventually, Washington Reagan National Airport was designated "Bullseye," and fighters were given range and bearing to targets from there.
Possibly the highest ranking pilot in the area, Sasseville "essentially declared myself the CAP [combat air patrol] commander and set up deconfliction altitudes so we didn't run into each other. There really wasn't time for niceties." For the rest of the day, a dozen or so fighters rotated in and out of the region, running intercepts on myriad helicopters and light aircraft.
"THEY WERE SNAPPING to targets everywhere," Thompson said. "A lot of light aircraft fly under the [controlled] airspace here, and they had no idea what was going on. What really scared us was Washington Approach broadcasting, 'Anyone flying within 25 mi. of the Washington Tacan is authorized to be shot down.' We kind of winced at that, because there are plenty of hard reasons to not shoot somebody down. We were really in an ID posture--and trying to really be careful."
A miracle of the post-attack hours on Sept. 11 was that no aircraft was shot down accidentally, a credit to the training and discipline of U.S. fighter crews. That fact is even more impressive when one considers many of those pilots had little or no experience with air defense techniques and protocols.
"We really didn't know the intricacies of Norad's mission--how it works," Thompson explained. "We've never been an air defense unit. We practice scrambles, we know how to do intercepts and other things, but there's a lot of protocol in the air defense business. We obviously didn't have that expertise, but it worked out fine. For the first three days, everybody seemed to be reasonably happy with our orchestrating the D.C. CAP. By day-four, we'd pretty much turned into a national asset" as Norad assumed control of CAPs nationwide.
On that first day, many of the pilots flying CAP over Washington, New York and other U.S. cities were faced with the very real possibility of having to shoot down or ram their fighter into an air transport filled with innocent passengers.
"I was asking myself, 'Is this when I have to make the million-dollar decision on my own?' But with smoke billowing out of the Pentagon . . . ," Rasmussen said.
"That's what we get paid to do, though. When young guys sign up, they may not see that the 'guts and glory' of fighter-flying may cost you your life. That day brought everything into focus."
In the afternoon, Sasseville and Lucky were flying their second mission of the day--armed with AIM-9 missiles now--when they were told to contact an AWACS aircraft in the area and "expect special tasking." They were directed to fly a 280-deg. heading for 140 naut. mi.--almost due west of Washington. Unable to communicate by secure or encrypted means, the AWACS controller lowered his voice and told Sasseville via radio they were going to "escort Air Force One," President Bush's aircraft.
Two Langley F-15s offered to go along, and Sasseville concurred. Soon, an AWACS controller reported a fast-moving, unidentified aircraft southwest of Air Force One, approximately 60 naut. mi. away, but on a "cutoff vector" to the President's Boeing 747. It was above 40,000 ft. and the 747 was "in the 20,000-ft. range," but Sasseville sent the F-15s to intercept the unknown aircraft. It was a Learjet that hadn't yet landed after aircraft nationwide had been ordered out of the air.
Sasseville and the two F-15s later joined on Air Force One, while Lucky positioned her F-16 about 10 naut. mi. in front of the 747. With the SADL data link system, she was able to monitor her location relative to Sasseville's SADL-equipped F-16 positioned on Air Force One's left wing. Another flight of F-16s from Ellington AFB, Tex., were about 5 mi. in trail. They had escorted the President from Offutt AFB, Neb., according to 121st FS officers.
Why the Washington-based F-16s were sent to shadow the President's aircraft back to Andrews AFB has not been disclosed. Apparently, someone in the Norad or Secret Service command loop had received information about a potential threat to the 747, prompting a request for additional armed escorts.
Surrounded by fighters, Air Force One descended rapidly toward its home base. Lucky made a clearing pass over the airfield, pulled up, circled back and joined on Sasseville's wing. All of the fighters remained with the 747 until the latter landed, then climbed and established a CAP over Andrews.
Despite being short of aircrews the next few days, the 121st flew continuously for about 63 hr., maintaining protective CAPs over Washington. They were aided by fighters from other ANG, Reserve and active-duty units, as well.
"We were generating airplanes faster than they could put 'em up," remarked Belknap. "And we still are."
September 14, 2008, New York Times, Op-Ed Contributors, Real Heroes, Fake Stories By John Farmer, John Azzarello and Miles Kara
IT is one of the most stirring accounts of heroism to emerge from 9/11: a fighter pilot from Andrews Air Force Base near Washington returns from a training mission, finds out that a plane, United Airlines Flight 93, has been hijacked and is heading for Washington, then takes off without refueling and low on ammunition in pursuit.
According to "Touching History," Lynn Spencer's recent account of what "unfolded over the skies" on 9/11, the pilot, Maj. Billy Hutchison, took off and flew over the Pentagon, asking the civilian air traffic controllers to give him a vector from his current location along with a distance to the target.
"This method works, and Hutchison quickly spots the aircraft on his radar," writes Ms. Spencer. "He quickly comes up with a plan: he will try first to take the plane down with practice rounds fired into one of the engines, and then across the cockpit. ... If that does not sufficiently disable the aircraft, then he will use his own plane as a missile. He thinks again of his son and prays to God that his mission won't end that way."
It is hard to imagine a more thrilling, inspiring — and detailed — tale of fighter-jock heroism. There is only one problem with it: it isn't true. It is about as close to truth as the myth of the Trojan Horse or the dime-store novels about Billy the Kid.
As we pointed out in the 9/11 commission report, the radar records of the day indicate that Major Hutchison did not take off until more than a half-hour after United 93 had crashed near Shanksville, Pa., and a good 20 minutes after the wreckage had been located. He could not have seen United 93 on his scope, and could not have intercepted it. Like thousands of others that day, he did his duty. He was brave. But his tale isn't true.
The Billy Hutchison story is an example of a phenomenon that the 9/11 commission staff encountered frequently: heroic embellishment. If something good happened that morning, an amazing number of people took credit. Take, for instance, the decision to land all civilian aircraft. As the report notes: "This was an unprecedented order. The air traffic control system handled it with great skill, as about 4,500 ... aircraft soon landed without incident." But whose idea was it?
In the aftermath of 9/11, Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta claimed that he ordered all civilian aircraft to land: "I said ... 'get the damn planes down,'" he told ABC News. Richard Clarke, the National Security Council’s antiterrorism director, has written it was he who prompted the order, by saying to Jane Garvey, the Federal Aviation Administration’s director, "O.K., Jane, how long will it take to get all aircraft now aloft onto the ground somewhere?"
In fact, the commission established that the order was issued by Ben Sliney, the aviation administration’s national operations manager, on his own initiative, after hearing that the Pentagon had been hit.
Most of the exaggerated claims from 9/11 are harmless, springing as they do from some combination of the unreliability of witness recollection, the psychological need for consolation after a defeat, and the human love of a good story. They are, more than anything else, a commentary on human nature.
Others, however, are not harmless, not innocent, and cannot go unchallenged. In fact, they fuel distrust of the government, give rise to conspiracy theories and threaten to set back America's efforts to avoid future 9/11's.
Take, for instance, the tale of Major Hutchison, which is part of a larger and totally discredited story. After 9/11, military and government officials undertook an aggressive public relations effort. In testimony before Congress and the 9/11 commission, in numerous interviews, and in an official Air Force history, these officials told the country that by the time United 93 turned toward Washington, President Bush had issued the shoot-down authorization, Vice President Dick Cheney had passed it on, fighters were standing by over Washington and, as the military's commander at the Northeast Air Defense Sector headquarters in Rome, N.Y., told ABC News of the authorization to shoot down the planes: "We of course passed it on to the pilots. United Airlines Flight 93 will not be allowed to reach Washington."
Yet the commission established that none of this happened. Once we subpoenaed the relevant tapes and other records, the story fell apart. Contrary to the testimony of retired Gen. Larry Arnold, who on 9/11 was the commander of continental defense for the North American Aerospace Defense Command, fighters were not scrambled that morning to meet the threat posed by United 93. In fact, the fighters were sent up in response to an unrelated and mistaken report that General Arnold and others had not disclosed to the commission. Flight 93 hadn't even been hijacked when the planes were ordered scrambled, and General Arnold's command found out the plane was hijacked only after it had crashed. The authorization to shoot it down came after it had crashed, and was never passed on to the pilots.
No one is telling that tale anymore, but the damage was done. Because the story couldn't withstand scrutiny, the public was left free to believe anything, and to doubt everything. Many still believe that a cruise missile hit the Pentagon; that 9/11 was an "inside job" by American and Israeli intelligence; that the military actually did shoot down United 93.
Worse still, by overstating the effectiveness of national command and control by the time United 93 was heading for Washington, the government obscured the central reality of that morning: that the Washington establishment talked mainly to itself, disconnected from the reality on the ground and in the air. Because bureaucrats obscured that disconnect, they didn’t fix it, in terms of national security or any other complicated federal emergency response. Thus the whole world got to see a very similar reaction in 2005, when Hurricane Katrina hit, and residents of New Orleans struggled to survive on their rooftops while officials in Washington issued reassuring statements.
The afterword to "Touching History" was written by General Arnold, despite his having been forced to retract his testimony to the 9/11 commission. ("I was wrong," he told the panel at its final hearing. "I was wrong.") He praises the book's "corrections to the record" because they recognize the heroism of people like Major Hutchison and expose the "political agenda" of the commission.
Yes, the commission staff looking into these events did have an agenda. Our team included a retired military officer who was badly burned in the Pentagon attack, and a former federal prosecutor whose wife lost both her brothers in the World Trade Center. We believed that telling misleading stories about what happened undermines the public's confidence in government, spawns conspiracy theories and compromises efforts to prepare for future events. Truth, not wishful thinking, is the most enduring memorial we can leave.
There were heroes on 9/11, people whose split-second decision-making saved lives. All too frequently, as in the case of many civilians and first responders in New York and the passengers and crew aboard United 93, those heroic deeds cost them their lives.
America lost that day. At critical moments, our nation was undefended — something the passengers on United 93 realized when they decided to work together to bring the plane down. We should not allow such real heroism of that day to be diminished, or the grim reality of that day to be obscured, by the self-serving agendas of would-be heroes.
John Farmer, John Azzarello and Miles Kara were staff members of the 9/11 commission.
September 11, 2011, The Washington Post, U.S. combat pilot reflects on her 9/11 suicide mission: Bring down Flight 93, She was ordered to down Flight 93 by ramming it before it got to D.C., By Steve Hendrix,
Sunday, [Courtesy of The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette]
Late in the morning of the Tuesday that changed everything, Lt. Heather "Lucky" Penney was on a runway at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland and ready to fly. She had her hand on the throttle of an F-16 and she had her orders: Bring down United Airlines Flight 93. The day's fourth hijacked airliner seemed to be hurtling toward Washington. Lt. Penney, one of the first two combat pilots in the air that morning, was told to stop it.
The one thing she didn't have as she roared into the crystalline sky was live ammunition. Or missiles. Or anything at all to throw at a hostile aircraft.
Except her own plane. So that was the plan.
Because the surprise attacks were unfolding, in that innocent age, faster than they could arm war planes, Lt. Penney and her commanding officer went up to fly their jets straight into a Boeing 757.
"We wouldn't be shooting it down. We'd be ramming the aircraft," Lt. Penney, who is now a major, recalls of her charge that day. "I would essentially be a kamikaze pilot."
For years, Maj. Penney, one of the first generation of female combat pilots in the country, gave no interviews about her experiences on Sept. 11 (which included, eventually, escorting Air Force One back into Washington's suddenly highly restricted airspace).
But 10 years later, she is reflecting on one of the lesser-told tales of that endlessly examined morning: how the first counterpunch the U.S. military prepared to throw at the attackers was effectively a suicide mission.
"We had to protect the airspace any way we could," she said last week in her office at Lockheed Martin, where she is a director in the F-35 program.
Maj. Penney has risen in the ranks but is no longer a combat flier. She flew two tours in Iraq and 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.
But none of her thousands of hours in the air quite compare with the urgent rush of launching on what was supposed to be a one-way flight to a midair collision.
She was a rookie in the autumn of 2001, the first female F-16 pilot they'd ever had at the 121st Fighter Squadron of the D.C. Air National Guard. She had grown up smelling jet fuel. Her father flew jets in Vietnam and still races them. Maj. Penney got her pilot's license when she was a literature major at Purdue. She planned to be a teacher. But during a graduate program in American studies, Congress opened up combat aviation to women and Maj. Penney was nearly first in line.
"I signed up immediately," she says. "I wanted to be a fighter pilot like my dad."
On that Tuesday, they had just finished two weeks of air combat training in Nevada. They were sitting around a briefing table when someone looked in to say a plane had hit the World Trade Center in New York. When it happened once, they assumed it was some yahoo in a Cessna. When it happened again, they knew it was war.
But the surprise was complete. In the monumental confusion of those first hours, it was impossible to get clear orders. Nothing was ready. The jets were still equipped with dummy bullets from the training mission.
As remarkable as it seems now, there were no armed aircraft standing by and no system in place to scramble them over Washington.
Before that morning, all eyes were looking outward, still scanning the old Cold War threat paths for planes and missiles coming over the polar ice cap.
"There was no perceived threat at the time, especially one coming from the homeland like that," says Col. George Degnon, vice commander of the 113th Wing at Andrews. "It was a little bit of a helpless feeling, but we did everything humanly possible to get the aircraft armed and in the air. It was amazing to see people react."
Things are different today, Col. Degnon says. At least two "hot-cocked" planes are ready at all times, their pilots never more than yards from the cockpit.
A third plane hit the Pentagon, and almost at once came word that a fourth plane could be on the way, maybe more. The jets would be armed within an hour, but somebody had to fly now, weapons or no weapons.
"Lucky, you're coming with me," barked Col. Marc Sasseville.
They were gearing up in the pre-flight life-support area when Col. Sasseville, struggling into his flight suit, met her eye.
"I'm going to go for the cockpit," Col. Sasseville said.
She replied without hesitating.
"I'll take the tail."
It was a plan. And a pact.
'Let's go!'
Maj. Penney had never scrambled a jet before. Normally the pre-flight is a half-hour or so of methodical checks. She automatically started going down the list.
"Lucky, what are you doing? Get your butt up there and let's go!" Col. Sasseville shouted.
She climbed in, rushed to power up the engines, screamed for her ground crew to pull the chocks. The crew chief still had his headphones plugged into the fuselage as she nudged the throttle forward. He ran along pulling safety pins from the jet as it moved.
She muttered a fighter pilot's prayer -- "God, don't let me [expletive] up" -- and followed Col. Sasseville into the sky.
They screamed over the smoldering Pentagon, heading northwest at more than 400 mph, flying low and scanning the clear horizon. Her commander had time to think about the best place to hit the enemy.
"We don't train to bring down airliners," said Col. Sasseville, now stationed at the Pentagon. "If you just hit the engine, it could still glide and you could guide it to a target. My thought was the cockpit or the wing."
He also thought about his ejection seat. Would there be an instant just before impact?
"I was hoping to do both at the same time," he says. "It probably wasn't going to work, but that's what I was hoping."
Maj. Penney worried about missing the target if she tried to bail out.
"If you eject and your jet soars through without impact ..." she trails off, the thought of failing more dreadful than the thought of dying.
But she didn't have to die. She didn't have to knock down an airliner full of kids and salesmen and girlfriends. They did that themselves.
It would be hours before Maj. Penney and Col. Sasseville learned that United 93 had already gone down in Pennsylvania, an insurrection by hostages willing to do just what the two Guard pilots had been willing to do: Anything. And everything.
"The real heroes are the passengers on Flight 93 who were willing to sacrifice themselves," Maj. Penney says. "I was just an accidental witness to history."
She and Col. Sasseville flew the rest of the day, clearing the airspace, escorting the president, looking down onto a city that would soon be sending them to war.
She's a single mom of two girls now. She still loves to fly. And she still thinks often of that extraordinary ride down the runway a decade ago.
"I genuinely believed that was going to be the last time I took off," she says. "If we did it right, this would be it."
First published on September 11, 2011 at 12:00 am
August 30, 2002, ABC Evening News, Any Means Necessary: Fighter Jet Pilots Faced Possible Suicide Mission On Sept. 11, by Martha Raddatz,
Aug. 30 — The Bush administration said shortly after Sept. 11 that the president had approved orders to shoot down United Airlines Flight 93, but ABCNEWS has learned that even more drastic measures would had to have been taken to intercept the flight, possibly including a suicide mission.
ABCNEWS obtained the information for its special report, "9/11: Moments of Crisis."
With the World Trade Center twin towers and the Pentagon ablaze, the military zeroed in on Flight 93 — realizing the plane was still in the air and heading straight for Washington DC.
The closest fighter jets were two F-16's that happened to be on a training mission near Detroit. They were sent to intercept the United flight.
"We started receiving reports from the fighters that were heading to intercept," said U.S Army Brig. Gen. W. Montague Winfield, deputy directory of operations at the National Military Command Center. "The FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] kept us informed with their time estimates as the aircraft got closer and closer."
But there was a major problem according to U.S. Air Force Col. Robert Marr, commander of the Northeast Air Defense Sector, in Rome, N.Y.:
"The real scary part is that those guys are up there on a training mission; they don't have any weapons on board they can use," he said. "The first question that came from my mission crew commander, the individual that is in charge of the operations force: 'Well, sir, what are they going to do?' I said we're going to put them as close to that airplane as we could, in view of the cockpit and convince that guy in that airplane that he needs to land."
And if the plane wouldn't land, commanders were well aware that without weapons on board, the fighter pilots might have no choice but to slam their own jets into the hijacked plane.
"As a military man, there are times that you have to make sacrifices that you have to make," said Marr.
The F-16 pilots never had to make that suicidal decision, since Flight 93 crashed before the fighter jets were able to close in on it. However, Marr said he expected the military pilots to bring down Flight 93 by whatever means necessary.
Officials believe passengers made the ultimate sacrifice, uniting to storm the hijackers and forcing the aircraft to crash into a field in western Pennsylvania, instead of Washington. All 44 passengers and crew died.
August, 29, 2002, BBC News, US considered 'suicide jet missions',
21:09 GMT,
Some fighter pilots had no weapons on 11 September
US Air Force commanders considered crashing fighter jets into hijacked planes on 11 September because of a lack of armed planes, a BBC investigation reveals.
In the immediate aftermath of the terror attacks US fighter planes took to the skies to defend America from any further attacks.
"It was very possible that they [US pilots] would have been asked to give their lives themselves."
Colonel Robert Marr
Their mission was to protect President George W Bush and to intercept any hijacked aircraft heading to other targets in the US.
But, as a new BBC programme Clear The Skies reveals, the threat of an attack from within America had been considered so small that the entire US mainland was being defended by only 14 planes.
As a result unarmed planes were diverted from training missions in a desperate bid to increase the number of fighter planes patrolling American airspace.
Colonel Robert Marr was Commander of the North East Defence Sector and remembers the words that came over the secure phone "we will take lives in the air to preserve lives on the ground".
US military unprepared
However, at the time of the attacks the US had just four fighter pilots on alert covering the north eastern United States.
Colonel Marr: Too few planes to defend the US
US pilots were forced to take to the skies without any weapons and might have had to deliberately crash into a hijacked plane to prevent casualties on the ground.
"I had determined, of course, that with only four aircraft we cannot defend the whole north eastern United States," he said.
"Some of them would have just gotten in the air possibly without any armament onboard.
"If you had to stop an aircraft sometimes the only way to stop an aircraft is with your own aircraft if you don't have any weapons.
"It was very possible that they [the pilots] would have been asked to give their lives themselves to try to prevent further attacks if need be."
Colonel Marr said: "That was the sense of frustration, of I don't have the forces available to do anything about this, we've got everything up that we can get up and still can't do anything."
Two of the pilots patrolling north east America told the programme how they struggled to get to New York as fast as possible after the first plane had hit the World Trade Center.
Pilots "Duff" and "Nasty" recalled they were only minutes away when the second plane hit the towers.
Pilot Duff said: "For a long time I wondered what would have happened if we had been scrambled in time.
"We've been over the flight a thousand times in our minds and I don't know what we could have done to get there any quicker."
Clear the Skies - presented by the BBC's special correspondent Gavin Hewitt - was broadcast on BBC Two on 1 September.
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