story8907.xml
Title
story8907.xml
Source
born-digital
Media Type
story
Date Entered
2003-01-02
911DA Story: Story
My favorite direction is magnetic north, which on Piper Cub 7006H takes me toward a pyramid I believe is Mount Moosilauke. On this line, I fly across Lake Winnipesaukee from southeast to northwest, generally refueling at Moultonborough airport.
That's what Zero Six Hotel and I were doing on Tuesday morning, September 11. The weather locally was fine, but Bangor Flight Service Station had been full of warnings about high winds, "mountain obscurations," and military activity in the Yankee One and Yankee Two MOAs, which cover the western part of the White Mountain National Forest. So I told George, the airport manager, that I intended to fly to Moultonborough, refuel, and check the weather and the military activity again. If things looked good, I'd file a flight plan and fly around the mountains, heading up the Sandwich Notch Road to Interstate 93, then turning east along the Kancamagus Highway to Conway, and so to home.
I took off to the north and made a wide turn back toward the ocean, so that I crossed the airport at 2,500 feet. This gave me a good departure time (8:42 a.m. local time, or 1242 Zulu) and put me high enough to pass over the top of the controlled airspace surrounding Pease International Tradeport. There was a stiff northwest wind, and Zero Six Hotel was making abut 38 knots along the ground according to the GPS mounted on the seat-back in front of me. In addition to the GPS, I have a handheld radio mounted by a suction cup to the port-side window, complete with earphones and a push-to-talk switch. Thus equipped, Zero Six Hotel is a throughly modern airplane, all on the strength of 12 AA batteries.
I kept the radio tuned to 122.8, which is a common frequency for airports without control towers, including Hampton, Wolfeboro, and Moultonborough, plus Marlboro in Massachusetts and Sanford in Maine.
About 9:45 a.m. (1345 Zulu) I heard a very clear voice announcing that there was a National Defense Emergency, and that all aircraft were grounded. The speaker didn't identify himself, but I think he was at Marlboro, and one of the airports I can hear mostly clearly. While processing this information, I heard another airport (Sanford, I think) tell a plane taking off that it was grounded, and when the pilot replied that he was already airborne, the radio operator gave him a one-word instruction: "Return." By this time I was over Alton Bay.
I was now persuaded that something was up, and I considered landing at Wolfeboro. But Wolfeboro has no fuel pump, so I pressed on to Moultonborough, where I landed just after 10 a.m. A lad came out on a golf cart, told me that two "707s" had crashed into the World Trade Towers, but had heard nothing about traffic being grounded. So I tied down the airplane, went into the shack, and got on the phone. Hampton Airfield's telephone was busy, so I called Bangor Flight Service, where the briefer told me only that "VFR flight is strongly not recommended." (VFR: visual flight rules, as opposed to flying on instruments and--usually--in continual contact with the Air Traffic Control system.) Then the phone rang, I answered, and found myself being interviewed by the Laconia Citizen. I thought that was pretty funny until I learned that nobody else knew what was going on, either. The reporter told me that Laconia airport was still open, but that all airports with control towers were closed.
At last I got through to Hampton, told George where I was, and asked him what he wanted me to do. He called Bangor again, talked to somebody with more authority, and got permission for me to fly home, staying well away from controlled airspace. So I got the plane started, took off, and plugged the Newmarket Gym into the GPS.
What an eerie feeling to be the only plane in the sky. Twice I was called from the ground and warned that I wasn't supposed to be up there, but these gents didn't identify themselves, so I took them to be the sort of busybody who gets his kicks out of monitoring police calls. In addition to staying a mile outside of Pease airspace, I flew at what to me is a very low altitude, 2,500 feet, with the thought that the Manchester air-traffic controllers wouldn't be able to see me on their radar screens.
With the wind behind us, Zero Six Hotel made 75 knots over the ground, and we were over Exeter in about half an hour. I turned east for Hampton and landed at just about noon. I called home to say I was on the ground, secured the airplane, gathered my stuff, and went into the shack, where George was just getting off the phone with Manchester Approach Control. He'd also been called by Pease. Evidently an airborne AWACS radar post had picked me up over Exeter, identified me as a "Cessna," and called Manchester and Pease, who both fingered Hampton as the most likely culprit. The conversation, George said, went like this:
"Where's he going?"
"He's landing here."
"Is he taking off again?"
"No."
"All right, we'll recall the F-16s."
That raised an interesting question. The international signal for an intercepted plane to surrender is for the pilot to lower the landing gear. But a Piper Cub doesn't have retractable gear! What was I supposed to do if the F-16s had come--roll Zero Six Hotel onto its back? (It's possible, of course, that the controller was having his little joke on George.)
I still don't know the answer to that one. But I do have one bit of information that I didn't have on September 11: a VFR pilot flying in a National Defense Emergency should be tuned to the designated emergency frequency, 121.5. That's where the F-16s would have been broadcasting.
------------------------------------------------------------
[Six days later, I flew from Manchester to Baltimore on Southwest Airlines. It was a lovely day--"visibilities unlimited," as pilots rather ungrammatically say. We were at 30,000 feet and perhaps thirty miles to the west of Manhattan, yet we could clearly see the gray plume trailing off to the southeast from the pit that once was the World Trade Center. It reminded me of the Durham dump in the old days, when the trash periodically caught on fire, and the noxious gray smoke drifted off on the prevailing wind. In a more bitter mood later, I wondered if Auschwitz had looked like that. "I hope there were a lot of Jews in there!" one excited Egyptian girl cried when she heard the news. There were, of course, and a lot of Muslims as well.]
That's what Zero Six Hotel and I were doing on Tuesday morning, September 11. The weather locally was fine, but Bangor Flight Service Station had been full of warnings about high winds, "mountain obscurations," and military activity in the Yankee One and Yankee Two MOAs, which cover the western part of the White Mountain National Forest. So I told George, the airport manager, that I intended to fly to Moultonborough, refuel, and check the weather and the military activity again. If things looked good, I'd file a flight plan and fly around the mountains, heading up the Sandwich Notch Road to Interstate 93, then turning east along the Kancamagus Highway to Conway, and so to home.
I took off to the north and made a wide turn back toward the ocean, so that I crossed the airport at 2,500 feet. This gave me a good departure time (8:42 a.m. local time, or 1242 Zulu) and put me high enough to pass over the top of the controlled airspace surrounding Pease International Tradeport. There was a stiff northwest wind, and Zero Six Hotel was making abut 38 knots along the ground according to the GPS mounted on the seat-back in front of me. In addition to the GPS, I have a handheld radio mounted by a suction cup to the port-side window, complete with earphones and a push-to-talk switch. Thus equipped, Zero Six Hotel is a throughly modern airplane, all on the strength of 12 AA batteries.
I kept the radio tuned to 122.8, which is a common frequency for airports without control towers, including Hampton, Wolfeboro, and Moultonborough, plus Marlboro in Massachusetts and Sanford in Maine.
About 9:45 a.m. (1345 Zulu) I heard a very clear voice announcing that there was a National Defense Emergency, and that all aircraft were grounded. The speaker didn't identify himself, but I think he was at Marlboro, and one of the airports I can hear mostly clearly. While processing this information, I heard another airport (Sanford, I think) tell a plane taking off that it was grounded, and when the pilot replied that he was already airborne, the radio operator gave him a one-word instruction: "Return." By this time I was over Alton Bay.
I was now persuaded that something was up, and I considered landing at Wolfeboro. But Wolfeboro has no fuel pump, so I pressed on to Moultonborough, where I landed just after 10 a.m. A lad came out on a golf cart, told me that two "707s" had crashed into the World Trade Towers, but had heard nothing about traffic being grounded. So I tied down the airplane, went into the shack, and got on the phone. Hampton Airfield's telephone was busy, so I called Bangor Flight Service, where the briefer told me only that "VFR flight is strongly not recommended." (VFR: visual flight rules, as opposed to flying on instruments and--usually--in continual contact with the Air Traffic Control system.) Then the phone rang, I answered, and found myself being interviewed by the Laconia Citizen. I thought that was pretty funny until I learned that nobody else knew what was going on, either. The reporter told me that Laconia airport was still open, but that all airports with control towers were closed.
At last I got through to Hampton, told George where I was, and asked him what he wanted me to do. He called Bangor again, talked to somebody with more authority, and got permission for me to fly home, staying well away from controlled airspace. So I got the plane started, took off, and plugged the Newmarket Gym into the GPS.
What an eerie feeling to be the only plane in the sky. Twice I was called from the ground and warned that I wasn't supposed to be up there, but these gents didn't identify themselves, so I took them to be the sort of busybody who gets his kicks out of monitoring police calls. In addition to staying a mile outside of Pease airspace, I flew at what to me is a very low altitude, 2,500 feet, with the thought that the Manchester air-traffic controllers wouldn't be able to see me on their radar screens.
With the wind behind us, Zero Six Hotel made 75 knots over the ground, and we were over Exeter in about half an hour. I turned east for Hampton and landed at just about noon. I called home to say I was on the ground, secured the airplane, gathered my stuff, and went into the shack, where George was just getting off the phone with Manchester Approach Control. He'd also been called by Pease. Evidently an airborne AWACS radar post had picked me up over Exeter, identified me as a "Cessna," and called Manchester and Pease, who both fingered Hampton as the most likely culprit. The conversation, George said, went like this:
"Where's he going?"
"He's landing here."
"Is he taking off again?"
"No."
"All right, we'll recall the F-16s."
That raised an interesting question. The international signal for an intercepted plane to surrender is for the pilot to lower the landing gear. But a Piper Cub doesn't have retractable gear! What was I supposed to do if the F-16s had come--roll Zero Six Hotel onto its back? (It's possible, of course, that the controller was having his little joke on George.)
I still don't know the answer to that one. But I do have one bit of information that I didn't have on September 11: a VFR pilot flying in a National Defense Emergency should be tuned to the designated emergency frequency, 121.5. That's where the F-16s would have been broadcasting.
------------------------------------------------------------
[Six days later, I flew from Manchester to Baltimore on Southwest Airlines. It was a lovely day--"visibilities unlimited," as pilots rather ungrammatically say. We were at 30,000 feet and perhaps thirty miles to the west of Manhattan, yet we could clearly see the gray plume trailing off to the southeast from the pit that once was the World Trade Center. It reminded me of the Durham dump in the old days, when the trash periodically caught on fire, and the noxious gray smoke drifted off on the prevailing wind. In a more bitter mood later, I wondered if Auschwitz had looked like that. "I hope there were a lot of Jews in there!" one excited Egyptian girl cried when she heard the news. There were, of course, and a lot of Muslims as well.]
Collection
Citation
“story8907.xml,” September 11 Digital Archive, accessed January 16, 2025, https://911digitalarchive.org/items/show/13732.