By Bill Scott
STARRS Board of Advisors
This was from a September 2021 Aviation Week podcast where Bill was one of the people interviewed. Listen:
I was supposed to go to egress training that day at Edwards Air Force Base, in preparation for a flight the next day—on the 12th—in an F-15. We would be chasing an F-22—which was still in the test program—for its first guided AMRAAM missile shot.
As the day started, I put on my flight suit and went downstairs in the hotel. I was eating breakfast, watching TV, and saw news about the first tower in New York having been hit. And like everybody, thought, well, it must have been a small aircraft. Before I left the breakfast room, though, we saw the second airplane hit.
Everybody was stunned, and I immediately thought, “terrorism”. So, I hustled down to the rental car, drove out to Edwards Air Force Base—which was 20-odd miles to the west gate—where I reported in.
The guard confirmed, yes, I was supposed to be there. But my public affairs officer host told the guard at the gate, “Don’t let him in, because we’re not letting media on the base.”
I explained to the guard that, hey, I had to get this egress training done for a flight the next day. He looked at me, then my flight suit, and said, “You don’t look like a terrorist,” and gave me a base pass.
So, I drove on down to the Public Affairs office, which was another 10 miles or so inside the base’s gate. But, when I got there, I couldn’t get into the building. Same public affairs officer said, “No. You can’t come in! You’ve got to get off base. No media on the base!”
Well, I looked around and saw all of these young sky cops—security police—running around with M16s, Kevlar helmets and vests. I said, “No way. It’ll just be a matter of time, before I’m face down out there on the ramp, with an M16 in my back. I’m not going anywhere.”
So, I stood outside, watching people come and go, at the Public Affairs office. Finally, a colonel that I knew—the number two guy on the base—stuck his head out and said, “Scott, what are you doing out there?” Told him. Public affairs officer hustled up and said, “No! We can’t let him in.” Bob, this colonel, said, “We’re supposed to be protecting people, not leaving them standing outside. Get in here.”
Then the PAO didn’t know what to do with me, because the book, the protocols, didn’t cover a reporter in their midst during an emergency lockdown. So, they stuck me in a dark conference room. And I mean dark! You could not see the hand in front of your face. Nothing I could do, but just sit there. Had no idea what was going on. While I was enroute to the base, I’d heard that an airplane had hit the Pentagon. So, I was frustrated. I couldn’t do anything!
Then the door opened again and a lieutenant colonel came in. Before the door closed, we introduced ourselves. As the room got dark again, I said, “So, what are you in for?”
He said, “I’m a brand new squadron commander, and my name’s not on the list of approved people at headquarters yet.” So, we were stuck in the public affairs holding cell for a while. Finally, that same colonel, Bob Hall, came in and said, “I think we can treat our guests a little better.”
The PAO turned the lights on, got us a cup of coffee and Bob filled us in a little bit about what was going on. Finally, we were released, and I went into another room where I could watch TV. And finally get to a phone! I called the Washington office, talked to several people.…And the decision was made, “just stay put.”
We had worked a long time to get this chase flight, and that F-22 firing its first guided AMRAAM missile was going to be a photo on the cover. I was going to write the cover story, so, “Stay put; try to get this done.” A little frustrated, I sat there watching TV in the PAO office.
Doug Pearson, the general running the Air Force Flight Test Center at the time, came in and sat down with me. I’ve known Doug a long time. We sat there, talking about what was going on. Finally, we saw the first tower go down, collapse. Doug looked at me and said, “Bill, nothing will ever be the same again.”
I hung around for a while longer, but it was clear that I couldn’t do anything there. So, I jumped in the rental car, and went back to Lancaster.
For two days, I kept going back out to Edwards. And it was surreal. For those few days, not an airplane moved; there was no engine noise. It was dead quiet. No noise of any sort. You usually heard airplanes taking off, landing, moving around. Now, nothing.
I hung around with the F-22 people. Of course, these were all test pilots, flight test engineers, many of whom had combat time. There was a seething anger there. Our country had been hit. Weren’t sure exactly who had done it at the time, but there was just this need to retaliate. And yet you didn’t know who to retaliate against, or how.
So, there was a lot of discussion about what might happen from here on, how the military would be involved. This went on a few days, and it became clear there was not going to be any flying at Edwards or anywhere else, for a while.
So, I jumped in my rental car and drove up to Las Vegas, where my son lived. There, I could get some kind of connectivity. I could finally get on the Internet, file a story and stuff. I started working with airline pilots that I knew.
And what evolved was: How do you protect airplanes when we get them back in the air? That’s when arming pilots, hardening cockpits —all of those discussions started coming about. Of course, another question was: How do you keep bad guys off the airplane?
Through a contact, I got in touch with Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld, an Israeli, and she knew a lot about profiling. So, we had her write, what we call a Viewpoint at the time—that’s basically a guest editorial for the magazine—about how the Israelis did profiling. That stirred up a lot of, I guess you’d say, “discussion”, even among editors on the magazine.
Now to fast-forward. About a month later, I was invited to fly with the Atlantic City Air National Guard on an actual combat air patrol over Washington.
So, I flew back East, we got in an F-16, did what they called a scrambled take off: take off, suck the gear up, at 400 knots, pull to the vertical, and we were off, as if scrambling to intercept somebody. Joined up with another F-16, and I could tell we weren’t headed for Washington, DC.
Finally, the pilot said, “We can’t tell you where you’re going, and you can’t write about this.” We went up over Northern Maryland, where I’d hiked a lot and circled for an hour or so over Camp David. We later thought that might have been where Vice President Dick Cheney was being cloistered.
Then we headed to Washington. We literally had hot guns, hot missiles, flying a true combat air patrol over the city.
As we were approaching the city, I could see the perfect cover shot shaping up. I scrambled, pulled my camera out, and got a picture of the other F-16 flying over the mall, the Capitol, Washington Monument, Lincoln Memorial—all in a single picture.
Unfortunately, [our Production chief] later said, “Bill, this is not a high enough resolution. You should have gone to the higher resolution on your camera.” But he did his magic. We actually put three images on the cover of the magazine. Mine was one of them, and two others depicted people loading missiles on airplanes, et cetera.
We later decided that one of the big stories, which had not been covered well, was the military response on 9-11. So, the Managing Editor, Dave Hughes and I put our heads together and said, “Okay. Let’s go get that story.”
I first went to Rome Air Force Base, in upstate New York. Those were the NORAD people who were most involved—and it was fascinating. I talked to the actual people who were on the radar scopes that day, the commanders who were there….
The bottom line was: they were equipped and trained to look outward; look for bombers coming in. As one sergeant said, “We were not trained and we were not equipped to look inward for threats.”
He showed me the actual playback, the radar images that day, and it looked like a shotgun blast had hit that scope. It was just a bunch of dots moving around. He said, “You tell me which is one of the bad guys.”
I also visited NORAD headquarters in Colorado Springs. I went inside Cheyenne Mountain, interviewed any number of the people who were actively involved that day, including General Eric Finley. He was a Canadian general—the number two NORAD guy—who astutely made the call to get all the airplanes out of the air that day, instituting what they called a partial SCATANA.
Full SCATANA would have shut down not only all the aircraft in the air, but also all the navigation aids throughout the country. But he was smart enough to say, “No. We’re going to need those navigation aids, because we’re going to have all kinds of response flights. We’re going to have combat air patrols. No. We will just get our airplanes out of the air. If there’s anything left, we know those are the bad guys.”
I also interviewed the two F-15 pilots, the first ones out of Otis Air Force Base, that went streaking down to New York.
When I asked one of them…. he said, “I was in full blower all the way.” He was in afterburner.
I said, “Well, why did you do that? You were going to be out of fuel when you got there.”
He said, “I just felt I had to get there now.” They arranged for tankers, and he was over the city for hours.
Also interviewed the two pilots who were scrambled from Andrews Air Force Base in F-16s. They both were only equipped with target rounds of 20-millimeter ammo. They had no missiles. They scrambled to get into the air very quickly.
Interviewing each one of those separately…I asked the lieutenant colonel, ”How would you bring that airplane down, the one coming in?”
He said, “Well, I thought I could shoot right at the wing root, weaken it, and maybe the wing would come off.”
I said, “Wait a minute. I used to work on the F16. The first F16 that had a gun. You only had 500 rounds of target rounds, there’s no way you’re going to saw that wing off.”
“Well, I thought maybe I could.”
And then I said, “Well, what was your backup plan, if that didn’t work?”
“I was going to get behind the airplane, go to burner, as fast as I could race towards the target airplane—the one headed for Washington, probably. Go into a bank and try to slice into the backside of the airliner with my wing. I would eject just before we hit.”
I said, “Come on, Sass. There’s no way you could do that. I know how long it takes to eject. You were planning to sacrifice yourself and hit that airplane to bring it down.”
He looked at me funny and said, “Well, you’re the first reporter that’s figured it out.”
I also interviewed the wingman—the second pilot in that flight—Lieutenant Heather Penny. She was not cooperative. She did not want to talk to me at all, because she was afraid I was going to write a story like she had already experienced with a TV station. That one was, “Oh my God! We’ve got a woman pilot out there saving the country!”
She was not cooperative, but she, too, finally admitted that she was willing to sacrifice herself to bring that airplane down.
It was a pretty amazing story.
It wasn’t all done on 9-11, but the stories we put together for Aviation Week were the first—and probably the most in-depth—of how the military responded to 9-11.
I wasn’t the only reporter; there were others that provided information for that series.
But, in a nutshell: I didn’t get to do much on 9-11 to help the magazine, but ultimately, I think we had pretty good coverage of what happened that day.
STARRS Board of Advisors member William B. Scott retired as the Rocky Mountain Bureau Chief for Aviation Week & Space Technology, following a 22-year career with the international magazine. He covered advanced aerospace and weapons technology, business, flight testing and military operations, wrote more than 2,500 stories for the magazine, and received 17 editorial awards.
He’s also written or coauthored seven fiction and nonfiction books.
During a nine-year U.S. Air Force career, he flew then-classified nuclear-debris sampling missions; helped develop space communication security systems as an electrical engineer for the National Security Agency, and served as an instrumentation and flight test engineer with various units.
Bill is a Flight Test Engineer graduate of the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School and a licensed commercial pilot with instrument and multi-engine ratings. As a pilot, aircrew member, both military and civilian flight test engineer, and aircraft/system evaluator for Aviation Week, he logged 2,000 hours of flight time on 81 aircraft types.
Articles on STARRS by Bill Scott
Books include:
Space Wars: The First Six Hours of World War III, a War Game Scenario
Counterspace: The Next Hours of World War III
Bill talks about General Titus in this podcast:
Tribute to the Leadership and Legacy of Warfighter General Robert F. Titus, “Earthquake”
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