Homework Responses Wk 8

Class,

For this final week we have been tasked with picking a specific security incident in the news and discussing the specifics of the event.  We are then asked to provided lessons learned from the event.

This week the security incident that I have decided to talk about is one that is a little out of the normal for most.  The incident I will be covering for everyone is the incident of an aircraft entering a Temporary Flight Restriction area.  The incident occurred in Arizona where President Trump was holding a Rally, when a small airplane entered the air space above the president’s rally (Starr, Diamond, Hoffman, & Kelly, 2020).  The small aircraft was not in contact with the local air traffic controller and did not respond to initial intercept procedures (Rambaran, 2020).  North American Aerospace Defense Command or NORAD was tracking the small aircraft and sent two F-16 fighter jets to intercept.  The airplane did not respond as stated above and the pilots signaled the small airplane with signal flares. This is an incident that happens quite more than most would think and I have been a part of and near many of these types of incidents.  These violations like the one stated above constitute a security breach for the United States Secret Service and are taken very seriously.  Prior to 9/11 airspace was controlled a lot less for when the president traveled and the White House in general since then the Secret Service has ramped up security measures, one that can be seen in this incident.  On 9/11 fighter aircraft were sent to intercept United Airlines Flight 93, the issue with this though was that aircraft had no weapons aboard it.  The intercept mission sent out was at all costs stop United Airlines Flight 93.  Since then the military has become postured as requested by all of the major cabinet members to always have loaded aircraft just like this F-16 was yesterday, so that if it were to come to it the fighter aircraft could shoot down the threat.

 

-Brandon

References:

Rambaran, V. (2020, October 28). F-16s intercept plane flying too close to Trump rally in Arizona. Retrieved October 29, 2020, from https://www.foxnews.com/politics/f-16s-intercept-plane-flying-too-close-to-trump-rally-in-arizona

Starr, B., Diamond, J., Hoffman, J., & Kelly, C. (2020, October 29). US fighter jet intercepts aircraft near Trump rally, deploying signal flares. Retrieved October 29, 2020, from https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/28/politics/trump-rally-fighter-jet-arizona/index.html