09-11-2014, 07:55 PM
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.
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.