Under Their Wings

High above the clouds, the view is the only thing that remains the same--Earth’s curvature on the horizon, the beautiful orange sunsets over the Pacific, the snow-capped Sierra.

But in these days of heightened security and terrorist alerts, 100 fighter jets have joined the airliners that travel the nation’s skyways. For fighter pilots such as Maj. Rob Swertfager, that means sitting in the snug cockpit of an F-16, four to six hours at a time, several times a week, no distractions, no daydreaming, just hours of unrelenting focus and tension. With his air-to-air missiles and wing-mounted cannons at the ready, Swertfager’s job is to intercept and escort commercial planes and small craft when the federal government requests it. In a worst-case scenario, his job is to shoot them down.

After three years of flying, Swertfager, who is stationed at the 144th Fighter Wing at Fresno Air Force Base, still gets goose bumps at the view, but that’s been his only constant since the world changed on Sept. 11 and Operation Noble Eagle began.

“Coming to work every day has a new meaning,” said Swertfager, 35. “When I kiss my kids goodbye in the morning, you realize that you’re going out to defend them. It sounds kind of corny but it’s the reality. We have all had to sit down and think about the ramifications of shooting down a civilian plane. This is something we are all trained to do, but it’s not something we ever thought we might do. Up there in that small cockpit, you have a lot of time to think about the seriousness of homeland defense.”

Operation Noble Eagle--the surveillance of U.S. airspace underway for the past five months--marks the first time combat air patrols, or CAPs, have been used to fly over the nation since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. The patrols fly over 30 major U.S. cities, including Los Angeles and San Francisco. Nearly 14,000 missions have been completed.

So far, the missions have cost $324 million and are straining the resources of pilots, planes and crews around the nation, according to the Air Force and Air National Guard, which have been lobbying to cut the patrols over some cities even as President Bush hopes to increase funding levels. The president’s $2.1-trillion budget proposal for fiscal 2003 includes an increase of $18.2 billion for homeland defense. Of that, $1.3 billion has been earmarked for maintaining combat air patrols.

The 144th Fighter Wing in Fresno flew 1,105 hours of CAP missions through December, according to Staff Sgt. Heather Pratt. Swertfager, who flew his first such mission as the terror on the East Coast was still unfolding, has completed about 60 hours on patrol.

At 6:30 a.m. on Sept. 11, Swertfager was driving to work when he turned on the radio. As he listened to news of jets smashing into New York skyscrapers, he knew his job was about to change. “As soon as I arrived, they were configuring a jet for an interception mission,” Swertfager said. “Obviously there was a national emergency, and we were scrambling. We didn’t get to watch the whole thing on television like everyone else.”

As the pilot sat in his cockpit waiting to taxi, people kept running up to him with updates. The Pentagon has been hit! One of the towers collapsed! Now the other one! Swertfager, followed by his wingman, was ordered to intercept an overseas flight headed to San Francisco. His mission was to reach the aircraft as quickly as possible, communicate with the pilot and assist in landing it.

In the sky, at 1,500 mph, Swertfager kept thinking: What if the pilot doesn’t do what we tell him to do? What if he’s not who he says he is? What if this plane has been hijacked?

“Our rules of engagement are not ambiguous,” he said. “It’s pretty cut and dried. We were absolutely terrified about what was happening in our country. We were expecting attacks on the West Coast. I’m focusing on the task at hand, but in the back of my mind the entire time is: What if I have to shoot down a plane of civilians, the very people I am sworn to protect?”

Seventy minutes later, the airliner landed safely and Swertfager was back in Fresno, exhausted. He had been in Saudi Arabia over the summer, patrolling no-fly zones in southern Iraq, and was shot at so many times he lost count. “I felt very confident in my ability to attack the hostile fire.... That was mentally challenging and tense. But that hour on Sept. 11 was the most emotionally, physically and mentally draining day I’ve ever had.”

Swertfager, of course, wasn’t the only one patrolling the skies after the attacks. At midnight, Maj. Sean Navin, 35, went on his first post-terrorism patrol, his F-16 the only jet in the vast, empty California sky since the FAA shut down all airline travel.

“On any given day, we vector in and around airliners and listen to the traffic chatter on the radio,” Navin said. “For us not to see or hear anything was very eerie. The fear I felt was about the uncertainty of what had just happened on the East Coast. Am I going to be in the position of shooting down the people I’m sworn to defend? The possibility of that exists now every time we are airborne. If you had to do it, how would you ever recover emotionally from something like that?”

The pilots’ commander, Col. Phil Skains, said he is confident about the ability of his fliers to handle the toughest challenges in the pursuit of homeland security. For 50 years, the 144th--the longest-established air defense unit in the nation--has protected the Southwest’s airspace, often intercepting planes carrying drugs from Mexico and Central America. By nightfall on Sept. 11, the 144th had more airplanes and pilots ready for action than any other unit in the country, Skains said. Eight of the unit’s 15 fighter jets are now assigned to Operation Noble Eagle, ready to be called to duty by NORAD, the nation’s air defense command center, at any time.

From September through December, the combat air patrols responded to Federal Aviation Administration and NORAD concerns 214 times, said NORAD spokesman Maj. Mike Snyder. The typical CAP mission begins two hours before flight time. Pilots arrive and check the weather, receive their instructions from NORAD, calculate fuel, make sure the jet is carrying the proper equipment, consult with intelligence operatives and brief each other. They are not allowed to give details about specific missions, but the 144th generally flies over California.

Pilots don their G-suits, which can weigh up to 48 pounds. The suits are equipped with a bladder-type device that fills with air in the helmet and chest to keep blood flowing in the upper part of the body, to prevent blacking out under the intense pull of gravity pilots experience.

Following instructions, the fighter pilots fly to a certain area where they may be called upon to escort airliners in which there have been disturbances involving passengers, or simply to communicate with the commercial pilots to make sure flights are running smoothly.

Three miles into the air, the jets become invisible to those on the ground. When they reach their assigned patrol space, they radio air traffic controllers to find out which airliners are supposed to be in the area. They make periodic checks with NORAD, and they wait.

“You’re really not doing anything,” Swertfager said. “It’s like sitting in a chair for five straight hours without being able to go to the bathroom or watch TV. But the challenge is that your mind cannot drift. You have to constantly be on alert.”

To that end, Navin said Mountain Dew and energy bars have become his best friends. “We also do a lot of singing.”

Because fighter jets cannot hold enough fuel for the entire mission, they must be refueled in midair. An F-16, for example, had to refuel eight times to cross the ocean during Operation Desert Storm. Before Sept. 11, the 163rd Air Refueling Wing in Riverside was already the busiest such unit in the United States, said Col. Albert Aimar, the commander. “Now we’re even busier.”

The 163rd’s 10 KC-135 Stratotankers refuel long-range bombers, F-15s and F-16s, which are performing training missions or CAPs all over the country. Pilots fly tankers to target areas and wait for fighters in the zone to arrive and line up for fuel, both planes traveling at about 475 mph.

“Without the tankers the fighters couldn’t do any work,” said Master Sgt. John Haus on the tanker Grizzly II. Haus and Staff Sgt. Allen Gittins operate the “boom,” which acts like the fuel pump. “They cannot exceed a certain weight for takeoff, and carrying the weapons adds a lot of weight,” said Haus, who has been refueling jets for six years. “So they go up in the air and burn down about 70% and come back to refuel. Once they have airspeed, they can fill up.”

Inside the tanker as it soars above Utah, doing figure-eights in a 45-mile orbit, Gittins sits in the cockpit calculating fuel measurements. Since the refueling pod is at the bottom and back of the tanker, fighter jets line up 40 to 50 feet beneath the tanker and wait for Gittins to “lower the boom” and begin the refueling.

Waiting for the fighter jets to arrive, Haus relaxes in the pod, admiring the reflection of the heavy snow on the ground in Utah against the crisp blue of the sky. “This is the best view in the house,” Haus said. “The pilots see where they are going, but we get to see where we’ve been.”

Swertfager would argue that his vantage point is the best. On active duty for seven years, he was inspired to become a pilot after a conversation with a former Vietnam War pilot. Married for eight years and the father of three little girls, Swertfager says that flying, even in these tense times, fills him up like nothing else can.

“A lot of the enjoyment of flying fighters was stolen from us on Sept. 11,” he said. “Everything is really serious now and, at times, scary. But when you’re flying an F-16, since the cockpit is all glass, you get the sensation that you’re sitting on top of it. That view of the world, there’s nothing like it.”