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SnapShot: Suicide, The 9/11 Mission No One Was Meant to Return From · Murders to Music: Crime Scene to Music Scene (Streamline Events and Entertainment)

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to a Murders to Music Snapshot.
• 0:02
  Speaker 1: So this week I was listening and watching some YouTube.
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: I do that sometimes when I'm bored, and recently I've been seeing some stuff about military that have been popping up in my feed.
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: And this show popped up and it's called.
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: It was CBS Evening News.
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: It's called the Extended Interview with F-16 Pilots that flew on September 11th 2001.
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: So I clicked on this video and I watched it.
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: You know, and this video, just, I've always got respect for military.
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: I think military is it's awesome, right, it protects our country both near and far.
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: I think law enforcement is a handshake away from military.
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: Law enforcement fights domestic terrorism right here on the streets of our town, which allow you guys to sleep peacefully at night while military defends our borders and our country, and I think those things are pretty close.
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: So, as I'm watching this video, it's two fighter pilots being interviewed and it's a man and a woman and they talk about September 11th, and these two fighter pilots were in the Washington DC area and on the morning of September 11th it was any other morning.
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: Just like every one of you listening to this can probably recall what you, if you were alive, you can probably recall what you were doing that morning of September 11th when you heard about the tragedy that occurred in our country and the two planes flying into the Twin Towers.
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: So these two fighter pilots are talking about how they're starting their morning briefing.
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: They're just going through the motions.
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: They got some training that day.
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: Who needs some checkoff rides?
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: What do they need to do?
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: What are they doing for lunch?
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: Just the normal stuff that they did every single day and got into this routine in the ranks.
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: These people are the creme de croix of fighter pilots.
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: So they're talking about what they're going to do and they said they were in a briefing and the door opened and somebody came and said hey, just so, you guys know, a plane flew into the twin towers and they're like ah, you know, they made some inappropriate jokes and they thought well, you know, it's a little Cessna, those things will bounce off of the Twin Towers, we're not worried about it, it's not that big a deal.
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: And a couple minutes later the door opened up and they're like a second plane has flown in and it's a jetliner.
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: So at that moment they knew that the nation was under attack.
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: They said the next thing they got to do is they got to go out and get into their airplanes and they need to get airborne to see what's going on.
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: But they don't have a lot of information.
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: You know, everybody is, this is new, things are unfolding, it's a dynamic situation.
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: So we really don't know a lot other than two planes have flown into the twin towers.
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: Well, the planes they were flying that day.
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: They don't keep them armed, they don't keep missiles on them, they don't keep bullets in them, they don't keep them ready to scramble and get up in the air for wartime, because there is no wartime.
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: So they have to put the missiles on, they have to put the bullets in, they have to arm these planes before they can get up in the air.
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: But they know that things are unfolding so fast and so dynamically they don't have time to load these things up with all the munitions, so they just have to get airborne.
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: So these two fighter pilots, this man and this woman, jump in their each aircraft, two aircrafts.
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: They hit the runway, they're in the air and they have limited communication.
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: They talk about the radios.
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: The radios they had, one would talk to the tower and the other radio just between aircraft to aircraft, so very limited, they couldn't monitor the news.
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: They couldn't monitor the talk radio and hear what was going on or hear about the planes incoming or anything else, and they were really just scrambling to put together a hasty plan as to how to respond to this, because this is not something that they planned for.
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: So in their communication the two pilots decide okay, here's what we've got.
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: We have got two planes jetliners that have flown in to the Twin Towers.
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: We know that our country is under attack.
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: It is our job to protect our country domestically in this moment, and we need to do that without being armed with munitions.
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: So they went on the prowl, they communicated with the tower to identify all the planes on the radar and aircrafts and helicopters and are they life flight helicopters, are they police helicopters?
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: You know who's up in the air and anything that they couldn't identify through the radar, they flew and they checked out.
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: And they checked out, so they would fly across the way.
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: They'd say, okay, this is a medevac, we're good to go.
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: But their plan was that if they found an inbound airplane probably a jetliner that was going to be coming in, filled with passengers, and they suspected that plane was being hijacked either because it wasn't communicating correctly, because it was headed for a target, because it was flying outside of the altitudes and parameters that jets usually do.
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: If they could take the totality of the circumstances, put those things together and say this is a known threat or a suspected threat on America's turf, they had to take that plane out.
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: So their plan was to do this.
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: The gentleman pilot was going to crash into the jetliner at the front of the plane.
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: The female pilot was going to crash into the jetliner at the rear of the plane.
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: You do not survive that.
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: That is a decision for a suicide mission.
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: There's a priority of life.
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: In law enforcement, the priority of life is hostages, innocents, police and suspects.
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: Innocents are those people who are not involved in the incident but happen to be in the area, so they could be standing on a street, they could be nearby a crime that's being committed.
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: Those are innocents that are not intended targets but are maybe victims or potential victims of whatever the bad guy is doing.
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: Police are police and then the suspect is finally at the bottom of that list, identifying their priorities of life in protecting the nation that they are going to sacrifice themselves, commit suicide, collide, midair collision, intentionally with a jet airliner, knowing they're going to kill every soul on board, including themselves, all for the sake of protecting our nation.
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: When I heard that, it was astounding to me and awesome it was.
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: You know, as a law enforcement officer, I have often thought about stopping that wrong way driver and running into him head on.
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: Or I see somebody going to get hit in a crosswalk so I intentionally create a crash and take some car out to keep somebody from getting hit, to keep somebody from getting hit.
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: But that's on the ground, that is, you know, on the land.
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: We're not falling out of the sky, we're not ending in a fireball and it's not a complete suicide mission.
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: But the idea of me taking on another vehicle at 70 miles an hour in my car, 70 miles an hour in their car, on a freeway and we hit each other at a combined speed of 140 miles an hour, and we hit each other at a combined speed of 140 miles an hour, there's a good chance that I could die, but it's not guaranteed.
• 7:38
  Speaker 1: No-transcript.
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: So these pilots spoke about you know, knowing this, they're communicating it.
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: They don't have time to think about their families, they don't have time to think about.
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: Her father was actually a commercial airline pilot, flying that day on that same route.
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: She could have intentionally crashed into her own father's airplane, but she said she didn't even think about that.
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: The mission was to protect the nation and to find an identified target or a threat and to take it out to eliminate the threat, to neutralize the threat on the nation.
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: That was their role and to hear them talk about it was pretty awesome and just chilling because there was zero hesitation in both of these individuals.
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: Once they got back on the ground they were able to realize that a third plane had crashed in the Pentagon and they set up a rotation of airplanes to go up.
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: Now they're armed because we've had time to arm them and now we can go up and we can protect our airspace.
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: Later in that day the female pilot actually flew and escorted Air Force One back into Washington DC, into the Air Force base there, and was the escort for that.
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: She said that was actually pretty anticlimactic in comparison to what she did earlier in the day.
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: She said she's honored to do it and it's a memory.
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: But compared to what she had already done and where her adrenaline had already been flying and escorting Air Force One back with President Bush on it, you know, was like man, it's pretty mundane, right.
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: So they go on to talk about how they can see the war and they can see, you know, that day for the devastation and the trauma and the pain and the anguish and the anger and all of that and see the negative side of it.
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: But they both spoke, which I thought was pretty cool about.
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: That wasn't their perspective.
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: Their perspective was the opportunity that this nation had to come together as one to stand and fight for what we believed in as Americans and for them.
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: They were thankful for their role in being able to protect it, them.
• 9:46
  Speaker 1: They were thankful for their role in being able to protect it and the fact that the military is there, willing to sacrifice themselves in a suicide mission to protect this nation.
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: It was pretty awesome.
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: They see it all as positive, not as negative, and I thought that was such a great perspective.
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: If you guys get a chance, check this episode out.
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: It's about 45 minutes long.
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: It's a CBS extended special with F-16 pilots that flew in 9-11.
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: That is a snapshot.