[creekster]

Here is a comment by a guy following an incident in DC in 2005 where some bozo in a cessan wandered too close to the White house and was diverted by F-16s. The emphasis is mine, not his.

Drawing on my own dated experience as a WSO in USAF F-4Es some twenty years ago, my opinion of this incident is not so rosy as the rest.

I'm not so sure that the F-16 could have downed the Cessna with a missile because there's not much metal there to reflect radar energy to guide a radar missile and not much exhaust to guide an infrared missile. I had trouble picking up light aircraft on my radar, though perhaps the radars are better now.

I distinctly recall an F-4 alert bird at Homestead AFB, near Miami, rooting around the clouds off the coast for a lost and clueless rich guy and his family returning from the Bahamas without a flight plan back in the early 1980s. The radar return on their twin engine aircraft was so weak that the F-4 lost it and ended up putting its wing through their cabin. The family wondered why there wasn't much of search for survivors but the unpublicized answer was that some of their scalps were caught in the leading edge slats of the intercepting F-4. Light airplanes are a challenge to see on radar.

The seeker head on a heater is tuned to the infrared wavelength of burning jet fuel and the best Pk shot is up the wazoo where the seeker has a good view of the burning fuel. That's not true on the lowly Cessna which is burning the wrong kind of fuel, not much of it to make a lot of infrared light, and no open exhaust. It's hard for the heater to see it.

Even shooting it down with the gun could be problematic. There was a weather balloon adrift over the Keys when I was training at Homestead. A crew from my squadron was sent to bring it down. It had no heat, so an IR missile wouldn't work. They tried shooting it but it kept on flying even when holed. They got a very weak radar return on it and finally popped it with a radar missile. But it was close.

My point is that F-16s and such are optimized to shoot down fast moving fighters and large aircraft. Paradoxically, they are not all that good at shooting down light aircraft. My recommendation would be to do a close fly-by of the Cessna and bring him down with the wake turbulence from the wingtips.

I have a more sobering observation. These two clueless numbskulls were able to fly to within three miles of the White House without really trying. Three miles in the air is arm's length. It's no distance at all. If you get that far, you can go all the way. A determined crew flying at low altitude with a deadly payload, like nerve agent, could succeed in hitting the White House.

The dirty little secret of this event is that there is no reliable way of defending the White House from the air.