Rob:  Few had more of a front row seat on the events of 9/11, than our next guest.  Retired Air Force Brigadeer General Ben Robinson was the commander of the AWACS wing command based out of Oklahoma City’s Tinker Air Force Base.  Earlier, he joined me in studio to talk about how that fateful day changed his world outlook.
Rob:  Ben, when did you realize that our world was changing on September 11th?
Ben Robinson:  We watched the first airplane hit the tower, well actually we saw it right after it hit the tower.  So as we’re sitting here watching the news that morning, we saw the second airplane hit.  All of us, of which there was a room full of military members, all of us realized at that point, this was not an accident; this was an act of war.  And the air war over America, first time in history, had started.  And that was just prior to eight o’clock that morning.
Rob:  As the commander of AWACS, what happened?
Robinson:  Well what we discovered was we had already launched airplanes that morning.  Airplanes had gone to Florida for training, gone to North Carolina for training.  We had an airplane that had spent the night up in Tacoma, Washington, at McChord Air Force Base.  So we had airplanes already deployed.  We immediately got our air staff together, excuse me, our battle staff together, started looking at the situation, realized that sooner or later we were going to be called upon, we might as well get ready for it.  We started generating airplanes, getting airplanes ready for particular missions.  We stopped all the other flying operations.  The airplane that took off that morning, six o’clock that morning, flying over North Carolina when the attack started ended up being diverted to Washington, DC, and New York City.  So those fighters that you hear about that were flying over those two cities shortly after the attack, an AWACS airplane from Tinker Air Force Base was controlling those fighters.  The second airplane, the one that had gone down to Florida for training was the airplane that ended up staying with the President that whole day.  So as the President arrived back in Washington, DC, that evening, an AWACS airplane that had taken off from Tinker Air Force Base that morning had been watching the President all day.
Rob:  In those moments after the attack, was there less confusion or more confusion than you could have imagined there would have been?
Robinson:  Where we were, actually we felt like we were pretty calm.  We had practiced through generation exercises exactly what we would have been doing and exactly what we did.  So that went fairly calm.  There was a lot of chaos on telephones though, that were coming in, telephone calls that were coming in.  Imagine that coming in that morning, there were airplanes that were arriving in the United States from all over the world.  At one point, towards ten o’clock in the morning, there were about eleven airplanes that were no longer accounted for.  We didn’t know where they were.  We didn’t know if these airplanes were inbound with terrorists on them, if they had turned around and gone back to their point of destination, if they had landed short; so that created a lot of concern among those of us that had to realize that we would be part of, could very easily be part of shooting down an American or foreign airliner over America.
Rob:  And this is the only time that the U S airspace has been shut down?
Robinson:  It is the first time in history that we have actually shut down American airspace in the way we did it that morning.  We have a certain program called, SCATANA, which is where DOD basically takes over all of our navigation aids and air traffic control.  SCATANA was declared that morning, first time in American history that’s ever happened.
Rob:  What did we learn from that?
Robinson:  We learned that even though we were in a peace time scenario, sitting at Tinker Air Force Base, our military was very well trained and went on automatic.  The young men that were flying the airplane, the aircraft commander that day that went to New York City, that was his first day as an aircraft commander.  He was solo that day, for the first time.  And yet the young man had the sense of mission that he did not want to land his airplane, and he wanted to get in touch with somebody that would put him into this mission, and that’s exactly what he did.  We learned that we cannot drop our vigilance, that this was an attack like we had never seen before.  It was one that we’ve got to keep this consciousness about us, that we’ve now been at war against this war on terrorism longer than World War II, and that Pearl Harbor was not as significant an attack as it was against the World Trade Centers and Pentagon, and what could have been our Capitol or White House that day.  We learned that across America, we’re all at danger.  This was not an attack against our military.  This was an attack against American freedom, and we’ve got to protect it, and we’ve got to protect it around the world, and that’s exactly what we’re doing today.