Touching History

Up for a good book this summer? if you pick up Touching History by airline pilot Lynn Spencer, you won’t regret it and it’ll be gone in a weekend, if you are anything like me.

It is the story of the skies over America on Sept 11, 2001. Spencer, an airline pilot for ExpressJet Airlines, spent much of the last few years interviewing the principles in this infamous day, from air traffic controllers in Boston and Washington and Indianapolis to military controllers at the Fleet Area Surveillance Facility, Virginia Capes (FASFAC VACAPES, also known as Giantkiller, the controllers I talked to on nearly every F-14 hop out of Oceana), to the pilots themselves in 747 aircraft over the Pacific enroute to an unknown-to-them-at-the-time closed US airspace or in F-16 and F-15 fighters striving to make sense of this crazy day.

Spencer is an aviator and as such, the book is easily digested by those with “lifties” in their blood (lifties, for the uninitiated, are the little critters that run around the wing of an aircraft and make it fly). At the same time, however, those unfamiliar with the vernacular and the language of the sky will take very readily to this book since Spencer is meticulous at spelling out those pesky acronyms and translating the sometimes archaic and mystifying code spoken by those who fly.

This book shines a bright and needed light on the confusion of that day, from the controllers who can’t understand what is happening to the aircraft under their controlto the fighter pilots, launched on an alert but are vectored over the ocean because…how do you define a “mission” for something that has never, ever, ever happened before – as evidenced by this snippet of the conversation between lead Otis Air National Guard Base alert F-15 pilot Lt Col Tim “Duff” Duffy and the Weapons controller “Huntress” at NEADS (Northeast Air Defense Sector):

Okay, people are dying now, Duff thinks as he gapes at the smoke spewing from the burning towers. He instantly shifts into a combat mind-set.

“Huntress, Panta 4-5, say mission!” he impatiently calls to the Weapons controller at NEADS. “What do you want me to do next? What do you need from me right this second?”

“Uhhhhhhhhh….,” comes the hesitant response. The controller, staring up at the shocking CNN coverage, has no idea what to tell the fighters.

With no clear mission and no target information, Duff knows he has few options available. It would hardly be helpful or prudent to simply rocket into the crowded skies over Manhattan. he would be putting other aircraft in jeopardy. And what would he do? He has no authorization, just who is the enemy?

“Okay, tell you what,” he says, remaining calm and pulling his F-15 out of afterburner, bringing its speed down from supersonic, “we have Whiskey 105 reserved this morning,” referring to a military airspace training area over the Atlantic just south of Long Island. “How about we just jump in there and I’ll stay at the northwest corner so that we’re protected from airliners and out of your way. If you need us, we’re just 40 miles from the city.”

“Yeah, okay,” the bewildered Weapons controller responds, not knowing what else to tell them. “Go do that.”

Any sense of invincibility that the fighter pilots felt has turned to roiling feelings of anger, horrible frustration, and impotence. They glare at the smoke in the distance over Lower Manhattan, ready and willing but unable to do anything about it. His heart pounding, Duff takes a deep breath and reluctantly turns his F-15 away from the city.

Those of you who are familiar with my posts over on the Instapinch know I have an ongoing, running gun battle going on with some elements of the Moonbat Left, those lunatic moronic idiots who insist 9/11 was an “inside job” or that things like a military stand-down order was issued to keep the military from “doing its job” on that day. This book dispels those crazy notions – in fact it doesn’t just dispel them, it shatters them into a million minute pieces that can be crunched under the heel of a flight boot.

Lynn Spencer has done us all a wonderful duty here – she has captured the history of that day in a superb book, a history that we cannot and should not forget.

The book is available pretty much everywhere now. I picked up my copy from the local Borders, but you can order it online at Barnes and Noble, Simon and Schuster, and Amazon, among other book stores.

A nice bio of Lynn can be found here. Not your typical airline pilot, but she writes one hell of a book.