9/11 Fightercraft

[ordos45]

On 9/11, fightercraft were scrambled, but not in time, to shoot down hijacked civilian airliners.  This was something the 9/11 commission went into at length, thus I give you a scenario as I somewhat imagine it on that Tuesday in 2001.

Your post is leftover from the days when Russia might attack, something the post Cold War budget slashers haven't killed yet.

Then...one day... It's a simple Tuesday, but you see people offduty gathering in front of TVs, you can see something's smoking, but not much else at this distance. Before you can get closer an NCO runs up with orders from your CO. You're being scrambled, your target is a civilian aircraft, capacity of possibly several hundred people.

What goes through a mind at that point? I mean really...you're being asked to commit a war crime against your own people, it's an illegal order. But do you stop to think that? Or is everything secondary to a numb feeling of shock...never in your wildest nightmares have you been asked to shoot down innocent civilians.

Then as you finally begin to push out of the shock it comes over the radio, you're too late, the second tower has been hit, but you're being redirected, there's another en route to the Pentagon. You're roughly three to five minutes out when it comes over your radio, take up patrol over D.C. airspace, an aircraft has hit the Pentagon.

You've failed, you had no chance...but still, you failed. Does your conscience nag you? Are you plagued by What Ifs? It doesn't matter that you have training, that's not going to help much in this case.

As for the final aircraft, it took itself down before another pilot could get to it.  This is the only one of the three after the initial you probably don't feel anything for not getting to. 

Anyhow, that's my questioning line. That is the story I would like to see a documentary on, with the plethora of 9/11 documentaries floating around. I want to see one from the fighter pilot's perspective, having been deployed from something kept around as a relic of the Cold War, and told to fire on airplanes full of his own people. Because out of the all the human interest stories that came out of 9/11, that was the least reported...and quite possibly the most internally wrenching.

[nemafakei]

If they were ordered too late, that's hardly their fault or responsibility. By the time they got up there and had their orders, they already knew the threat, did they not? So I don't think there would be that much to say.