Noble Eagle

So, now that I’m fully operational (after no kidding 3 years in the USAF) I’ve started flying some real world missions.  We are tapped every other weekend or so to fly Operation Noble Eagle which is the Air Defense of the United States.  Our job is basically to fly over the President and other vital areas in order to protect them from an air attack of any sort.  What this usually boils down to is flying in big circles for 4-6 hours and getting kind of bored.  Hopefully.

  My first sortie was actually kind of exciting.  We were flying over D.C. and Camp David on a Saturday afternoon and after a couple of hours and a few aileron rolls over the Washington Monument we got our first call to check out a plane heading toward Camp David at low altitude.  I was on the tanker at the time so my flight lead started monitoring him and went down to ID him.  I quickly got off the tanker and picked up the high CAP monitoring them visually and on radar.  So once we had him ID’ed as a little Piper we figured it was probably some lost doctor; but he was still heading right at Camp David so you never know and we can’t take a chance.  At this point we were told to intercept and get him out of there.  So the other pilot pulls right in front of him in full afterburner and dropping flares to get his attention and make him follow.  However he radios back that the target didn’t turn.  So he tries it again; and this time he reports that the target turned in the wrong direction.  So at this point the voices on the radio are getting more excited and I’m up high watching all this and start positioning myself between them and Camp David.

  After one more head butt though, the target finally started following and set down at a nearby airport.  So a good lesson for some idiot and good practice on running low level intercepts for us.  It was also interesting thinking about how the people we were protecting never even knew any of what happened.