The 1st Air Force Pilot at Ground Zero—and the Last to Know What Happened

And we continue with our American Stories. Up next, a story by Peter Braxton about his Air Force training, his Air Force pilot training, on the morning of September 11, 2001, that would come into play because he was the first military pilot in the air over the burning Twin Towers. Here’s Peter with his story about his pilot training at the Air Force.

In the seven, during training, it’s a fully aerobatic, subsonic trainer, so you can like do loop-de-loops and immments and cuminates and all these other tricks in the thing.

You know.

Just think, that’s not Thunderbirds or the Blue Angels. You can do that stuff. We just do it way higher in the air. Okay, we don’t do it near the Earth where there’s zero room for error. So again, pre-war, I’m in pilot trending. I wanted to be a doctor. I’m like flying around, and then what they do is they make you solo. You have to like fly this thing alone, you know, very fairly quickly, within like ten hours of flying, and, you know, some of it’s confidence, and some of it’s, ‘Can you do it well?’ I remember at that point I was like, ‘Well, I guess I’m not going to fly a fighter because there’s no base near where I grew up, and I’ll just, I’ll go fly a C-17 or KC-10. This might be one of the last times I ever fly alone.’ So I’m like, you know, ‘I’m gonna make it. I’m going to make it worth my while.’ So there’s a, there’s a problem with me: is I’m more of a Cadillac guy than a Ferrari guy, right? So I like things a little loose, where I can move and not restrict blood flow and all this other stuff. And, you know, and yeah, you got like G, you get G-suits, and you’re pulling Gs, just training. It was so funny. I never used to… this is embarrassing. I used to, you know, you have the helmet on, and I would wear the chin strap like it was a hockey. Like it was just dangling. Like this doesn’t even need to be there, but it’s got to be connected because that’s part of the rules, right? Like if it’s not connected, you’re breaking safety law. So I would connect everything, but I wouldn’t tighten it, tighten it, tighten it down to myself. And so I’m flying alone. I’m like, ‘All right, here’s your chance. Do all the… get it out of your system, do it, do it all.’ So I start whipping this jet into full speed, entering all of these maneuvers, and then I get this bright idea that I’m going to try to fly like Top Gun, like, upside down for a like sustained period of time. And I know, I forgot, I forgot one thing: I didn’t like strap in tight. So, like, I flipped the plane upside down. Gravity took over, and I like fell out of the seat. And I remember, I was like laying on the cockpit on the glass, upside down. Can’t reach the controls, and the oxygen hose isn’t built for this, so it’s like yank in my head to the side. It’s still connected. I was like, ‘I mean, I’m like, I’m not immortal. This is how it ends. I can’t reach the ejection handles. I can’t reach the stick or the throttles.’ And just like it, like you see the altimeter, just it starts going down. And I’m at, I think I was at seven. I had the block fourteen to seventeen thousand feet, and I mean, I’m, I’m going straight down and the jet is accelerating, and the vertical loss that you must have been ten thousand feet a minute. I probably had a minute and eighteen seconds left to live. And it’s funny, these… the base I was that was, it was a student pilot training base. It was also a student air traffic control base. It was a zoo. It was a bunch of little kids. And so, the, the kind way to ask a pilot, like, ‘What, what are you doing?’ is they say, ‘Say your say intentions.’ That’s the way they do it. ‘Say intentions.’ It means, ‘What are you doing? I see on my screen that you’re not… You’re gonna write.’ It’s like one of those things where your life lashes in front of your eyes, and a millisecond, I remember my grandmother, like, I don’t know, feeding me or pushing me on a swing, and my brain instantaneously took over and said, ‘I’m gonna fix this. We need to survive.’ It was like, ‘We need to live, we can live, we can do it.’ And I did this like neck push-up, and I kind of like slid my leg on the stick. Instead of going straight down, I kind of sliced down through the air, and the gravity kind of like helped me shim me back in the seat, and I’m approaching like the speed limits of the airframe, and I remember, I mean, throttle’s idol, speed bricks out. There’s no speed limit on that, and pulling what’s called to the buffet, right, max performing the plane. They’re trying to pull out of this dive that I’ve never been in and never been in since, and I’m like, ‘I mean, I mean, the whole thing is shaking,’ like in The Right Stuff, like, ‘the right… The whole thing is shaking,’ and I’m pulling out and still flying, and I pulled back into the area. And I remember responding to the control, I was like, ‘You know, Tiger Two, I request a river recovery,’ which is like, ‘I want to go home. I want to go home, no more. I’ve had enough. That was enough fun.’ And here’s the issue. The issue is these planes are so old. I mean, I think, Chuck Yeager… I mean, these are like 1950s-era training jets. They have a T-6 now, and you have to fly the plane straight and level for one minute, holding this like fast slave button to get like the INS and the, and the compass to snap into place after you’re doing all these… maybe because it kind of tumbles, and so you’re like, ‘I want to go home,’ and I request the recovery, and I hit the button, and I hit it for like, I don’t know, forty-five seconds, not a minute. But it looked like it snapped into place. It like it kind of tumbles, and then it goes like this, and it goes, and it snaps, and I saw that happen, so I was like, ‘All right, let go.’ And the controller, who’s probably also a student, you know, it was like, ‘You know, turn right Zero Three Zero.’ And I’m like, ‘You know, I’m, I’m going Zero Three Zero. Like, what do you mean you’re talking to me? Tiger Three Zero Three Zero?’ That’s all you say? And they say, ‘Turned again right now, Zero Six Zero.’ Yeah, great, so you do that, and then they’re like, ‘Say intentions.’ The compass never fully snapped back, and no. By the way, I was looking at the window; I didn’t recognize any of the stuff on the ground. I was like flying into Mexico. I was going the wrong direction. Well, here’s the problem. Well, if you don’t know, you have something called no gyro. You know, I don’t have any dry. I need, I need, like, you need to tell me when to start my turn and stop my turn. So we’re trained to do this like in an emergency. So I’m like, ‘Look, I need, I have no gyro. I need no gyro vectors back to…’ and they’re telling me. And then it’s, it’s coming to me that my compass is… So I reslave the compass straight and level, hold the finger down, and it snaps back into place, and now all everything’s making sense. Well, here’s the problem: I’m so far away that I’m running out of gas. And in the T-37, we have these, these light we call the disco lights. There’s a red light and a yellow light. When you’re getting low on fuel, they start to like dance. They’ll flash on an off, like an ambulance or something. And so I’m coming back, coming back, come back, and I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m run a field. I need direct to initial. I need a vector direct to initial,’ which is where you fly in, fly with field and land. And I had obviously already said, ‘I mean I knowed gyro,’ so they knew something was wrong. And I’m running a gas, and I’m like, ‘You know what, better strap in. You better put those seat belts back on, because if you have to eject, you know, your body’s gonna be torn to shreds. You want to go out as one piece, not like a bunch of different pieces.’ So I really, I mean, I buckled everything up, and I landed Wan to a full stop, pulled into parking, and one of my engines started flaming out, like, just automatically shutting down when I was on the ground. I think fuel starvation, I guess, or fueld cavitation, I don’t know, but I was out of gas. I was literally, I was out of gas. So I come in, and it’s funny. The flight commander has like a little radio, and he listens, especially to the students that are so low. He’s like, ‘What was going on up there?’ And we have a saying, and then, and it’s, I will tell my kids, ‘Does mess up? Fess up. You mess up? You fess up.’ So I told him, ‘This is what happened.’ And I remember, this is back in the day. I mean, these guys are like gruffy fighter pilots that are training kit. He had like a, like, dipped in his mouth, and he takes it out and he puts it to this cup, and it’s disgusting, right? So disgusting. I think it’s discussing habit. People will do it; enjoy your nicotine. I don’t really care. And he’s like, ‘You ain’t gonna do that again, are you? Never, ever, ever again?’

And a terrific job on the production, editing and storytelling by our own Greg Hangler, and a special thanks to Peter Braxton for sharing his story with us. He also shared us the story of being the first pilot over the Twin Towers and that he was the last to find out what happened there, and it was a lesson in just doing your job and doing what’s ahead of you. And we heard a lot about that pilot training in this particular story, and I love that line: ‘You mess up, you fess up.’ If only we all lived by that credo, how much simpler our lives would be and better. And the story of how the training, well, it has to sort of get kicked into you sometimes through a crisis, for pretty soon the protocols and the training, well, they turned you into a professional. The story of Peter Braxton, his near-death experience, here on our American Stories.