9/11/01 - the F16's were Kamikazi's.

[Carnos Jax]

A strike aimed at the center of the airliner (providing a large target to minimize error in the intercept trajectory) with the fighter pilots ejecting at the last possible moment, would be my solution.

The fighters could take turns doing this, giving them two chances at a successful collision.

[eustacetilley]

Ombligo wrote:
CAP - Combat Air Patrol (Fighters on a combat mission)
SAC - Strategic Air Command (in the cold war days, these were the bombers)

I thought that the CAP was the Civil Air Patrol, and they were rarely armed. Oh wait, it is, and they rarely were.
We're running out of TLAs...

Eustace

[rgG]

Carnos Jax wrote:
A strike aimed at the center of the airliner (providing a large target to minimize error in the intercept trajectory) with the fighter pilots ejecting at the last possible moment, would be my solution.

The fighters could take turns doing this, giving them two chances at a successful collision.

Now, now, you are being practical and pragmatic, not thinking like an action figure in a movie.

[RAMd®d]

Yes. That's SOP.

He would have know that if he checked the POD.

[ztirffritz]

Boeing has an entire book that they publish full of TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms).

[Racer X]

Even the Washington Post article is abreviated. They had to scramble immediately. No time to arm up. At that time, there were no armed planes kept on alert 24/7.

There was a longer write-up that I read in either the AAA magazine, or the USAA one.

[yeoman]

BA has a book of ABBs?

[N-OS X-tasy!]

rjmacs wrote:
[quote=freeradical]
[quote=raz]
[quote=davester]
[quote=cbelt3]


Not a surprise. US military personnel are damn brave.


Also not a surprise... armed CAP went away with SAC. I expect it's back now.

Is this the cool macho dude thing...citing military abbreviations without saying what they are.
Yes. That's SOP.
FTW
WTF LOL
One man's WFT is another man's FTW.

Q.E.D.

[Will Collier]

I used to work for the Air Force; this time in 2001 I'd just left Tyndall Air Force Base, outside Panama City, Florida, after several years to move to Atlanta.

Tyndall is the home of the USAF Weapon Systems Evaluation Program, which conducts a couple of hundred live-fire air-to-air missile tests a year, shooting at drones over the Gulf of Mexico. It's also the home of the Southeast Air Defense Sector (SEADS) which always has a couple of fully-armed fighters on alert. Those two guys were the first ones to take off that morning. They were too far away from the hijacked airliners to engage, of course.

A couple of fighters wasn't enough that day. Tyndall in those days had a huge F-15 training school (they're all gone now, replaced by F-22's), so there were a ton of jets and pilots available when the general alert went out, but no armed weapons. All the missiles for WSEP had their warheads removed and replaced with telemetry packs. So an emergency call went out on the base for everybody who'd ever worked in the bomb dump before to get over there and start re-converting those test missiles back into live rounds.

They swapped out as many as they could as quickly as they could, and loaded them up on every jet that could fly, and took off to fly CAP over Atlanta, New Orleans, Jacksonville, several other cities from what I recall. I had a senior (Major) F-15 instructor pilot tell me later that was the first time in his life he'd ever flown with war rounds loaded on his jet.

[Will Collier]

Racer X wrote:
Even the Washington Post article is abreviated. They had to scramble immediately. No time to arm up. At that time, there were no armed planes kept on alert 24/7.

There was a longer write-up that I read in either the AAA magazine, or the USAA one.

There were six, actually. Two at SEADS (Tyndall, FL), two at NWADS (Tacoma) and two at NEADS in (I think) Rome, NY.

That wasn't enough.