Scrambling at the Siren's Call

Since '01, an Andrews Air Force Base squad has fired up its jets 2,000 times to intercept aircraft entering Washington's no-fly zones.

In the Air National Guard office along a runway at Andrews Air Force Base, every pilot wears a green jumpsuit, except two. They wear the sand-colored ones of pilots flying combat missions overseas.

When Maj. Rob Balzano goes to the gym, he neatly folds his jumpsuit on a bench close by. At night, Maj. Chris Hardgrave lays his next to the bed. Like a good firefighter, he tucks a sock in each boot.

"It sets the tone for them and for us: Today they're at war," Lt. Col. David Miles said of the sand-colored flight suits and of the expectation that within seconds the two could sprint to waiting F-16s.

Balzano and Hardgrave are two of about 20 pilots who take turns waiting for an alarm that has sounded almost every day at Andrews since Sept. 11, 2001.

The 113th Wing of the D.C. Air National Guard recently marked its 2,000th scramble since the terrorist attacks. Almost every time, one of the pilots has climbed into an F-16 loaded with missiles, taxied to the end of a runway and waited for an order to intercept, and possibly shoot down, a plane headed toward Washington.

More than 90 percent of the time, Miles said, the suspect planes are cleared before the jets are launched. But each time the pilots, who call themselves the "Capital Guardians," must prepare for much more. Each has pondered the worst-case scenario, they say: shooting down a plane loaded with Americans. But none of them dwells on it.

Rather, like a company of firefighters, the pilots spend most of their time focusing, preparing and practicing for the next alarm.

"You never want to let yourself get really hungry or really tired, because that's when it will happen," Balzano said. The alarm, a wailing siren called a Klaxon, also goes off when no one can prepare for it.

"I ran out one night in my socks," said Master Sgt. Chuck Desot, head of the flight crew that keeps the planes ready to launch 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. It was 3 a.m., Desot said, and he awoke so disoriented that he decided not to waste time trying to put on his shoes until he got to the tarmac.

Hardgrave, Balzano and Miles said they have become so attuned to the alarm that they often react to the barely audible "click" that precedes it. "It's like the first sound when someone gets on the PA system to make an announcement at the grocery store," Hardgrave said. "My eyes pop open a split second before I hear" the siren, he said.

The alarm blares from speakers on the walls of a double-wide that has been parked beside the Guard hangars since shortly after Sept. 11. In the living room of the trailer, where the two on-duty pilots spend a good part of their 24-hour shifts watching a large-screen TV, flashing lights go off in a color that corresponds to the threat level. Usually, the light is yellow, meaning pilots must fire up their jets and prepare to launch.

In the spring, the light went yellow, then red, three times, meaning suspect planes were heading directly for the restricted airspace over downtown Washington and the F-16s would launch to intercept.

Miles, who at the time of the 2001 attacks was flying jets for United Airlines and until recently led the squadron at Andrews, was on duty during the most memorable of the three. He took off but quickly realized that the data link that provides the location of the suspect plane was not working and that it was dusk and would be hard to spot the plane without the link. It being evening, there was another factor: It was rush hour in Washington's airspace, with commercial flights circling in for landings at Dulles, Reagan and Baltimore airports.

"It was an intense first few minutes," Miles said, before he spotted the two-engine plane cruising along at 14,000 feet. He was ordered to look into the plane's cockpit "to see if we could determine intent," Miles said. He couldn't slow down the jet to the same speed as the plane without stalling, Miles said, so he flew by "close enough to see his baseball hat." "It wasn't the Nats, I could tell you that."

The plane's pilot soon began fumbling with his radio and responded to orders by air traffic controllers to land in Virginia, Miles said. Although it was more difficult than usual to find him, Miles said, the interaction with the small-plane pilot has been the most common type of intercept by the squad, known officially as the 121st Fighter Squadron Air Sovereignty Alert Detachment.

The number of private pilots who inadvertently wander into Washington's no-fly zones is decreasing, Miles said, but they still account for most of the incidents that trigger alerts at Andrews.

A handful of times, he said, the squad also has scrambled to tail commercial airliners arriving from overseas after disturbances onboard or suspicious activity by passengers. Miles said the airliners were never intercepted. He declined to say how many of the 2,000-plus scrambles resulted in intercepts.

With the Andrews squad remaining busy with intercepts, a permanent $16 million hangar with barracks for Guard pilots and flight crews is under construction near the end of a runway, said Col. Jeffrey R. Johnson, commander of the 113th Wing.

The location will cut down taxi time needed to get an F-16 airborne, Johnson said. "It will shave a minute or two, but that could be the difference."