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Despite the air conditioning we have both started sweating into our oxygen masks and flight coveralls. This is a complete nightmare. From the very beginning of flight training school, we have been told time and time again that civilian airliners are sacrosanct. Combat aircraft and civilian airliners do not mix. Not ever. Get too close to an invisible airway in the sky and it’s an automatic Court of Inquiry. Fly so close to an airliner that the crew can read your ident numbers, and that means the end of your career. I repeat, time and time again, the end of your career. The same rules apply in all other western nations. Our breath rasps noisily through our oxygen masks as our brains try to come to grips with the magnitude of the situation. We are subsonic again now with our swing-wings fully forward, conserving fuel as we circle slowly and look down on Greater London far below. Apart from a single pall of black smoke rising up from the banking complex in the City, everything else looks so normal. Then mild paranoia slowly starts to take over. How can we be sure it is the real Sandman we have been talking to? Is this a cunning enemy plot to make us shoot down an airliner full of our own citizens? How can we verify these are correct orders? If only we had the American system where they carry cards with codes on them, which have to be matched from the ground before you can open fire. No, that’s wrong, only the armed nuclear bombers carried those, and that was years ago. No matter what we think our brains are still numb. How could this happen, and why me, why me? “012, this is Sandman” “012” “Target is tracking in from the east, currently over Southend-on-Sea heading west at an altitude of 16,000 feet, and descending. Tell your rear to get a lock with his radar. This is not a drill, I repeat this is not a drill. Engage and destroy the target” “012 arming weapons” Reactions are automatic. Throttles through the gates, afterburners alight as the wings start swinging back to the supersonic position. Roll inverted and pull through, heading east to get behind the target. The Tornado slips through the sound barrier as a numbed finger reaches out and selects the first pair of Sidewinder heat seeking missiles on the weapons panel. The Sidewinders come alive and start their low murmuring in the headphones. Reassuring in a real life combat situation, but disconcerting now. A sickening swoop and then throttles back, air brakes out, wings fully forward to the subsonic position. Speed matched with the airliner as we level out alongside. Passengers waving at us idiotically from the windows. Throttles back through the gate and we accelerate diagonally across its nose, waggling our wings, the international aviation daylight code for “follow me or else”. No response. So we buzz the giant airliner again, this time only just missing its nose. He must have seen us, but still no response. We fall back behind the target. At five miles range, the murmuring in the headphones is starting to get louder as the Sidewinders catch their first faint whiff of a hot target. We stalk the target, getting closer all the time, and the murmur in our headphones turns to a clamor. The Sidewinders have locked onto the target and want to be let off the leash. Safety off, gently touch the unsheathed trigger with a gloved hand. No, dammit, no! The target is less than two miles ahead, resplendent in its shiny white, blue and yellow colors. A giant lumbering beast of a plane incapable of taking evasive action, stuffed full of unsuspecting British citizens. While the Sidewinders continue to clamor in the background, a mixture of sorrow and pity takes over. Sorrow for the passengers and crew we have been instructed to kill without warning, and pity for ourselves at the prospect of spending the rest of our lives in prison for carrying out the order. The thought process has only taken about two seconds, but it is enough to distract us from the target ahead. Now both aircraft are flying over the densely populated East End of London. Poorer people than in the West End to be sure, and perhaps not as important as the politicians in the House of Commons, but who are we to choose who must die? In those little houses and apartments below us are men and women who survived thousands of tons of bombs during World War Two, and lost many thousands of relatives. They just got on with their lives and hardly ever complained, but they don’t need any more of it now. The bottom line is that if the target crashes anywhere in London, its three hundred ton mass travelling at 200 knots will kill thousands of people regardless of whether we fire or not. We know it, and are utterly powerless to prevent it. Feeling is starting to come back to the finger that such a short time ago selected the deadly Sidewinders. As if by itself, the same finger reaches out and deselects the weapons. Throttles through the gates for the last time. Tail alight in an soaring climb to the north. “Sandman, this is Tornado 012. Breaking away, weapons safe, returning to base” “This is Sandman, continue the interception 012, destroy the target, destroy the target” “Negative Sandman, returning to base, changing to approach frequency. Good day” Flaps down, wheels down, line up on the centerline and ease the throttles back to the stops as the runway threshold rushes up underneath the wheels. A faint squeak as the rubber touches the tarmac, and then still soaked with sweat, we turn off the runway and and taxi back to dispersal. Cockpit canopies up, oxygen masks and helmets off, shut down the engines. We sit motionless for a moment or two gathering our thoughts, and eventually all is completely still. There is a only a faint ticking from the jet pipe metal as it cools down and contracts, and in the distance a blackbird sings. We are both dejected at this stage, because disobeying a crucial direct order will probably result in both of us being drummed out of the service. But as we return to the crew room we can see the operations officer waving his hands excitedly, rushing out to tell us that our target has just made a perfect landing at London Airport Heathrow! Apparently he suffered a major electrical failure after takeoff from Manchester, which also knocked out his radios, and decided to divert to the main servicing hangars at Heathrow. The Captain of the airliner followed procedure exactly, flying out over the North Sea to dump some of his heavy fuel load for safety purposes, before making a long sweeping right-hand turn in over the Thames Estuary. We are told that immediately after landing, the Captain filed an official near-miss report, outraged that “some crazy people in a Tornado buzzed us over the East End of London”. So was Sandman responsible for almost getting 259 people killed? No, not really. To issue a kill order like that, Sandman would need direct authority from the Chief of the Defence Forces. Nor does it stop there. In turn, and in order to protect his own backside, CDF would have first obtained political authority from the Prime Minister at 10 Downing Street. So in reality, 259 people were sentenced to death by a panicky politician in a grey suit. On orders from very similar panicky grey-suited politicians, Americans in general are now far more at risk than they were before the attack on September 11, 2001. For the first time in history, air defense fighters now roam the skies over populated areas armed with live missiles and cannon shells. Regardless of whether or not Home Run is used to hijack any more of the 600+ vulnerable airliners in American airspace, a new dimension of danger has been added. Live missiles can be [and sometimes are] jettisoned from the pylons by mistake, and an accidentally launched Mach 3 heat seeker will, I repeat will, find a target to kill somewhere in the crowded skies over New York or Washington. Critically of course, the American fighters can do nothing more constructive than watch. As with our simulated incident over London, regardless of whether or not the pilots shoot down one of their own airliners over an urban area, thousands of people will die anyway if the jet is really on its way to an urban target. There has never been a viable defense strategy against unarmed airliners flying their own national colors, and there never will be. Anyone who believes there is a viable strategy in place, has clearly been overwhelmed by ignorant politicians and members of the mainstream media. Authors like Carol Valentine can write what they want, though I must say that in this case she misquoted and misrepresented me. In her article Ms Valentine writes: “In a nutshell, Mr. Vialls says that technology that allows air traffic controllers on the ground to assume remote control of aircraft had been secretly installed in US commercial passenger jets.” No, I did not say that. Air traffic controllers would not have the faintest idea how to remotely control an aircraft of any kind. Instead, what I actually said was “specialist ground controllers” and “Home Run controllers”. There is a world of difference between these statements. There have also been claims that I have refused to reveal “sources” or “proof” of the classified Home Run system, which is not true. In my first report I carefully stated that “two American multinationals collaborated with the Defense Advanced Projects Agency (DARPA) on a project designed to facilitate the remote recovery of hijacked American aircraft.” This should have acted like a homing beacon for any serious researcher. DARPA has a web site that can be accessed by anyone on the Internet, and within that web site is a search engine. A judicious advanced search of the DARPA web site should yield, as they say, “something of interest”. Finally, there is former German Defense Minister Andreas Von Buelow, who is frequently available for questions at meetings around Germany. Because of national security Von Buelow is most unlikely to comment directly, but he might respond to the following question: “Can you deny that during the mid-nineties, Lufthansa removed and replaced the flight control computers on certain American aircraft in its fleet for security reasons?” |
