Every week or so, Panetta would get a report of a small plane violating flight restrictions in D.C. “Sometimes, we would scramble fighter jets to fly alongside the plane, tip wings, shoot flares, or in some cases ‘head bump’ the offending pilot by flying right up next to him – anything to get his attention and alert him that if he failed to turn around, he would be shot out of the sky.”
Those mishaps occurred so frequently “that I was petrified we would eventually shoot down some clueless amateur pilot out for an afternoon in his Cessna,” he laments. “Our fighter jets were too fast for these small planes, and our system for warning pilots about airspace closures” – which occurred anywhere the president traveled – ”were no more sophisticated than a dog-eared ‘Notice to Airmen’ pinned up over the coffee machine at private airports every few days.”
He recalls that one day when Obama was out west, “a pilot innocently strayed into the airspace and somehow missed attempt after attempt to turn him around.” A call was placed to Panetta “for me to authorize shooting him down.”
Just as aides were interrupting a meeting “so that I could give the fatal order, he got the message,” Panetta writes, with relief. “I’ve long wondered whether he realizes that he came within seconds of our shooting down his plane.”
