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Interview
with Capt Borgstrom and Leslie Filson
Beginning
of
Tape
Side
A
(opening
conversation)
F: You are
Capt Craig Borgstrom? Were
you
active duty before
the
guard?
B:
No,
I've been
in the
guard
my
whole
life.
F: You were on alert on
9-11,
or what happened?B: No, I am
full-time
here at Langley. I'm the operations officer.
Prior
to September
11
th
, 18
people work
at the
alert
site
full-time.
Of
those
14
maintainers,
1
supply
personnel,
1admin,1 DetCommanderand 1Operations Officer.The DetCommander
and
Operations Officers are both pilot
jobs.
So there is two full-time pilots at alert. Then
with
that,
two
pilots that come
sit
alert that rotate weekly.F: So, you are always going to have two full-timers on hand and then the two alert guys?
B:
We
will
always have
two
alert
guys.
A
local requirement that
we
have
set our
self
is
weneedtohavealeastone
full-time
pilot around,
within
thelocal area,so ifsomething
happens, we get
called
in.F:
From what
I
understand
from
Dave Somdale, three people actually took
off
that
day,
you
must
have been
the
full-time
guy.
B: I was the
full-time
guy and I
took off.
I was not
planning
to fly
that day,
actually I
had
planned
to do a local
training
mission
that
morning.
F:
That's what
he
said,
you
were doing some
4 v 2 of
something
with
Langley.
B:
We
were
planning
to go
fight
against
the
First
Fighter
Wing.
F: So for you did it
start
out as a
fairly
normal day?
B: YepF: You
guys
are the
lastmissing
link,
I've talked
to the
commander
of
NEADS,
the
guys
at
Otis
who
flew,
the
guys
at the
113
th
,
guys
at
Ellington
and
General Arnold
andI'mmissingyouguys.
What happened?
(more
conversationto
clarify
Leslies
position)
B:
That
morning
we
didn't
really
do
much. When
I got
done
talking
to
everyone
I
spoke
with they
said
the
same
thing.
NCT0067575
F:
Yea,
but you
were there,
you
were
a
presence.B: We were but so was everybody
else
in the country.
I'll
caveat
everything
I'm going
to say with that. I was in my office that morning, I was
flying
with Otis, another guy in
our
unit.
We use to
come
off
alert
to go do
local
flying.
So
Otis
was
getting ready
tobrief
and I was
doing
junk
in the
office.
My
girlfriend
called
me in my
office
and
said
somebody just
hit the
trade center.
I
just clarified with
here
to
make
sure
she
heard
itrightandat first I
thought
it was
just
a
small generation airplane
and I
talked
to
here
a
couple
minutes.
Then
the
admin
troop
came down
and
said "the
intel
officer
is on the
phone,
he
needs
to
talk
to you
right away."
I
talked
to our
intel troop
and he
askedme if Iknew whatwashappening.Itoldhim allthatI
knew,
which wasn't muchjust what
Jen had
told
me. He
said
"?????
Just
be
ready"
because
he
thought
there
was
something
up
with this.
He is an
extremely sharp guy.
So he
gave
me a
heads
up on
what
was going on. I hung up the phone with him, I talked to our chief enlisted managerMark Kelley
who is now
retired
At
this point
I'd
still assumed
it was a
small
aircraft.
But I did think it was sort of odd that Jen called me right away with this
information.
With that
the
horn sounded
to get the
pilots moving.
We
have differentorders we get from horns. We have the battle station, the pilots will run to the airplanes,
sit
in the
airplanes
but not
start them.
F:
Right
B:
We have runway alert,
which
means pilots
will
get in the
jets,
start then, taxi themonto the runway, but not take off. We have active air scramble, which means go.
F:
Let's back
up, I
know what
battle
stations are, runway alert
is
what?
B:
You start the airplanes,
taxi
them onto the runway, but don't take off.F: Then scramble is take
off?
B: Scramble
is get
airborne
as
quickly
as you
can.
But big
picture
with
an
alert
facility,
anytime
thehorn goes off,
everything
stops whatyou aredoingandyour priorityis to get
two
airplanes
with
two
pilots airborne
as
fast
as you
possibly can.
F: On
September
11
th
,
was it
called
5-minute
alert that
you
were
on?
B:
UrnF: If you
were
on
alert,
on a
normal day.
B:
I'll just
tell
you
that
we can get
airborne extremely fast.
As far as the
time, you'll
have to get
that
information
somewhere else,
I
cannot disclose that.F: So youhearthe
clax
(?) andwhat's next?
NCT0067576
B: In
that situation,
the Det
Commander
was out of
town,
so it was
just
me. He was out
of town visiting friends in California. Which he is now retired, and we have a
different
Det Commander now. So, it is just me there and in that situation if we get scrambled, Iassume
what's called
the SOF
position rather than
flying.
Normally what I'll
do is
justmonitor
a
flight from
the
ground. I'll
get
intel
briefs
for the
guys.
We'll
monitor weather,
if
they
spot something
way out I can
start
to
coordinate
tankers,
I can
coordinate
??
stuff
like
that. If they have an emergency, I've got a checklist. Any AF flying unit has a SOF,
so
it's
a
little more
in
depth
I
guess with
an
alert scramble.
Because
now you are
dealing
with
intel
and it divert automatically. So, ran over there to the command post just to
find
out what was going on and I
didn't
get a call off really, I just saw on TV the fireball at thetrade center.
So we got a
battle station order,
I
briefed both pilots, they didn't knowwhat
was
doing
on,
that
in New
York
somebody
hit the
trade
centers
so we
were
sitting
battle
stations
as a
precaution,
that's
what
I
told
both
pilots. It's always
better
for the
pilots
to
know
what's
going
on
because once
you
take
off you are
pretty
much segregated
from
all the intel that's going around unless the sector tells you what's going on. Youdon't really know what's going
on, you
don't have
the big
picture,
we
don't have
a CNNTV in our
cockpit.
So the
more
you
know before
you
take off, typically,
the
more
situational
awareness you are going to have throughout the
flight.
Then
phone callsreceived
by one or our
crew
chiefs
??? who
answered
it, he
said "it's
the
sector, theyneed
to
talk
to
you."
F:
Must have
been
the
Northeast.B: Yea, so I got on the phone and to
this
day, I don't know who it was. The guy just said"how
many
airplanes can you get airborne right now?" I said
"there
is two on battle on
battle
stations right now",
he
said
"that's
not
what
I
asked,
how
many total airplanes
can
you
send up?"
I
said "I'll give
you
three"
he
said "go".
Then
at
that point, then
I
realized
that
this is pretty odd, but still I had not really correlated what had
happened,
just theseverity of the situation. I don't think anybody before that day could
really
fathom what
had
happened.
(conversation about their thoughts,
not
informational)
B: So I
called
the
wing commander real quick
at
Fargo.
I
called
the
command post real
quick,
he was already there, so I talked to him for about
10
seconds.
Just to let you know
they
are sending all three of us up.
F: The
other
jet is
loaded
or not
loaded?
B: It is a
spare,
it is on
alert.
So I ran and got my
gear,
by the
time
I got my
gear,
thehorn
sounded again
with
a
green
light,
an
activation
scramble.
In a
matter
of a
couple
minutes
we went from a 2-ship to a 3-ship.
F:
Okay,
at
that point you've
seen
one
tower hit.
NCT0067577
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