Defending Home Air

Jun 1, 2005 12:00 PM, BY MICHAEL FICKES

In May, unauthorized pilots flew small single-engine planes within miles of the White House twice. Two Air Force F-16 fighters intercepted both planes and escorted them out of the restricted airspace.

While the events above Washington, D.C. were real, the pilots of both F-16's benefited from the practice of having flown numerous training missions designed to bring such events to a safe and peaceful end. According to Lieutenant Lisa Citino, deputy chief of public affairs for the First Air Force (1AF), Air Force pilots have flown more than 2,000 intercept-training missions in restricted airspace around the country since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11.

Civil Air Patrol Colonel Rock Palermo, an attorney from Lake Charles, La., has played a key role in a number of these intercept-training missions — using his small, single engine plane to pose as a suspicious aircraft. The missions enable the Air Force to test the speed and efficiency of its response, as well as the effectiveness and quality of air defense radar, weapon systems and operating procedures.

In these exercises, which may be announced or unannounced, volunteer members of the Civil Air Patrol (CAP) pilot the encroaching aircraft. CAP is a nonprofit organization with 60,000 members nationwide. It performs 95 percent of the continental U.S. inland search-and-rescue missions ordered by the Air Force Rescue Coordination Center. CAP members also perform a variety of other Homeland security missions, as well as missions related to disaster relief and law enforcement as requested by federal, state and local agencies.

The Air Force asked CAP to fly intercept-training missions to help keep down the cost of training. It can cost nearly $12,000 an hour to fuel an F-16 training mission. So it makes sense to replace F-16's with single-engine planes as targets for intercept-training missions. According to CAP, small, single-engine planes use about $100 in fuel per hour.

Intercept training missions begin when a CAP pilot flies into restricted airspace and commits what the military refers to as a temporary flight restriction (TFR) violation.

When a real or training violation occurs, the local air traffic control tower calls the plane on the radio. Pilots of small planes, however, sometimes do not have their radios tuned to the appropriate frequencies. “If radio contact cannot be established, then there is an intercept mission,” Citino says.

When the fighters scramble — Citino will not say how long it takes — the Air Force pilots approach the offending plane and attempt to identify it as friendly or not by reading the tail number. Next the Air Force pilots attempt to communicate with the pilot in the small plane by using hand signals, rocking their wings and flying passes. If attempts at communication have no effect, the fighters may release flares stored in the undercarriage. “They do whatever they can to get the attention of the pilot in the small plane,” Citino says.

It can take a while, Citino says. The jets travel so fast that an inattentive pilot may not see them for a couple of passes. “Once the pilots do see the fighters, they are compliant,” Citino says. “We've never had an event that goes beyond this.”

Determined to do everything possible to avoid responding with force, the Air Force recently introduced a new technology designed to attract the attention of pilots committing TFR violations. Called a visual warning system (VWS), the ground-based technology uses eye-safe low-level laser beams to flash a pattern of colors — red-red-green — into the cockpit of a plane. “Any such intrusion not only is a safety issue, but is also disruptive for thousands of people,” says Major General Dwight Wheless, CAP's national commander. “This new Visual Warning System will give pilots immediate feedback when they are straying into a no-fly zone.

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