Posted on 11/16/2001 1:14:02 PM PST by kattracks
FARGO (Reuters) - Fighter pilots sent into the air during the attacks on New York and Washington said on Wednesday they were prepared to shoot down one of the hijacked airliners if it had come to that, even though one them was himself a commercial airline pilot on leave from his job.
"Life would be different if we'd have been tasked to shoot down Flight 93," said a 29-year-old Air National Guard captain identified only by his call sign, "Honey."
But, he added, "We were in a position to intercept Flight 93," had it approached Washington. "We are prepared and have procedures to go through," said the pilot who has been on active duty and on leave from his airline job since April.
United Airlines Flight 93 was the hijacked airliner that left Newark for San Francisco carrying 45 people but crashed in Pennsylvania. Passengers apparently battled the hijackers and forced the plane down, preventing it from carrying out a fourth suicide attack, perhaps aimed at the White House or other Washington landmark.
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Honey and two other pilots were scrambled in F-16A jet fighters from Langley Air Force Base in Virginia on Sept. 11 after the first hijacked airliner hit one of the World Trade Center's twin towers in New York. By the time they got into the air they could already see smoke rising from the Pentagon where one of the hijacked airliners had struck.
"It looked like some kind of detonation," he said of the conflagration at the Pentagon. "An airliner never crossed my mind."
The pilot was joined at a news briefing by a 34-year-old major, whose call sign is "Lou," and who was in the air alongside Honey that day. The two are members of the North Dakota Air National Guard who were on assignment at the Langley base that day.
"It's the last thing you ever want to do," he said of the possibility that they would have been ordered to shoot down Flight 93.
"We're the tip of the spear. We're the last link. All the orders have to go through the chain and be authenticated at each link," he said.
"But you're gonna have to do what it takes," he added, saying that downing the plane would have been a "risk/rewards scenario" balancing lives likely to be lost on the ground against the lives of those on the plane, whose fate he said was already sealed.
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Asked if he was confident the chain of command could have acted quickly enough that day to have ordered Flight 93 shot down, Lou said, "Before Sept. 11, no. Today, yes. Because of what happened we are that much more prepared."
But he also said the fighters were over the Washington area in "plenty of time" and would have been able to stop Flight 93 had it approached the city and an order been issued. Flight 93 crashed 80 miles 128.7 km southeast of Pittsburgh about 20 minutes after American Airlines Flight 77, carrying 64 people from Washington to Los Angeles, crashed into the Pentagon.
In all, the suicide airline attacks and the crash in Pennsylvania killed about 4,500 people.
The two men met reporters at a hotel in Fargo in a briefing arranged by the 119th Fighter Wing of the North Dakota Air National Guard, which is headquartered in Fargo. Part of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, it said it arranged the briefing in response to numerous media requests for interviews with the pilots who had not spoken publicly before about the events of that day.
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