US dilemma in response to DC airspace incursion: ‘Do you shoot or do you not shoot?’
Mike Brest
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The U.S. military scrambled six fighter jets when an unresponsive pilot’s aircraft flew through restricted airspace over Washington, D.C., on Sunday.
The flight took off at 1:13 p.m. local time on Sunday from Elizabethton Municipal Airport in Elizabethton, Tennessee, and was supposed to travel to Long Island MacArthur Airport in New York. The pilot did not respond to air traffic control instruction at 1:28, and eight minutes later, the Federal Aviation Administration reported the situation to the Domestic Events Network, according to the FAA.
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The plane overflew Long Island MacArthur Airport at 2:33 p.m. at an altitude of 34,000 feet, where it then turned around and crashed at approximately 3:32 p.m. near Montebello, Virginia.
The F-16s took off from three nearby military bases and used supersonic speed, which is up to five times faster than the speed of sound, to catch up to the wayward Cessna 560 Citation V, which led some Washington residents to hear a sonic boom. The military pilots tried getting the pilot’s attention using flares, though at least one observed the pilot slumped over in his seat, according to reports.
There has been speculation that the pilot and passengers suffered from hypoxia, or a shortage of oxygen in the blood that can occur in a decompression of the jet’s pressurized cabin, according to CNN.
“They had to turn on the speed to get to them, which is why people here in the District area heard a sonic boom. They had to break the sound barrier to get up to speed to get to the aircraft in question,” National Security Council coordinator John Kirby told reporters on Monday. “When they did, they did exactly what they’re supposed to do: try to get on the radio, communicate to the pilot. That wasn’t working. Made themselves visible; that didn’t work.”
“Throughout that process, there’s a conference call that’s set up when you have a Noble Eagle incident,” which is the North American Aerospace Defense Command’s mission to control U.S. airspace, “where NORAD is on the phone, DOD is on the phone, NSC was on the phone in real time, monitoring it, and getting real-time updates from the pilots, in this case, these two F-16 pilots, and so that everybody is in the loop, literally in real time. And that’s what happened yesterday,” Kirby added.
The aircraft did not seemingly pose a threat to civilians below, which is why the U.S. pilots didn’t shoot it down.
“In balancing that risk, do you shoot down or harm an innocent civilian aircraft that’s just confused, or do you just take the risk of letting it go,” Mark Cancian, a senior adviser for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told the Washington Examiner. “I think they did the right thing.”
“I think you’d look for, first, look for signs of some sort of either hijacking or … checking the owners and flight paths. … And then, of course, they get very close and look at the airplane and get some sense of what’s going on.” He added, “This is a tough choice, you know, do you shoot or do you not shoot, and it’s easy to get wrong. That’s one, but the second thing is we scrambled, like, six aircraft. … They got there pretty quickly. So the air defenses do work.”
Kirby said on Tuesday that the Department of Defense “will take a look at the at the process,” though he noted, “They responded in a very textbook fashion here, but I also said they’ll take a look at this, and if they determined that there might have been a procedure that needed to be done differently, they can speak to that.”
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The plane belonged to a Florida-based company owned by John and Barbara Rumpel, and their daughter and granddaughter and a caretaker were killed in the crash, along with the pilot.
National Transportation Safety Board investigators are on the scene of the crash, though the plane crashed in a heavily wooded and rural area. A spokesperson said the “wreckage is highly fragmented.”