Pilot for the president

COEUR d'ALENE - The Air Force One pilot charged with protecting President George W. Bush on Sept. 11, 2001, recounted that experience to a room full of pilots at The Coeur d'Alene Resort on Friday.

Retired Air Force Col. Mark W. Tillman served as pilot and commander of Air Force One from 2001 through 2009. Before that, Tillman was co-pilot of Air Force One under President George Herbert Walker Bush. Tillman spoke at the MMOPA convention Friday.

His mission was to protect the power of the president. And much like the rest of the world, he never imagined what he would go through on 9/11.

Tillman said on Sept. 10, 2001, he flew President George W. Bush to Jacksonville, Fla., to meet with teachers in that state, and flew the following day to Sarasota to do the same.

Tillman can recall every detail of that fateful day. He said he had just returned from exercising that morning and was checking out the plane as Bush was reading to students at one of the schools in Sarasota.

"The radio room called over the PA for me to pick up the white phone," Tillman said, explaining that the plane has two phone systems: The white phone, which is for ordinary calls, and the beige phone, which for classified conversations.

Tillman said he went to the radio room in the plane to see what was happening and saw that the first tower of the World Trade Center had been hit by a plane, but the media was reporting a small plane had hit the building.

"There was no command and control until the second tower was hit," Tillman said, and that's when the beige phone rang.

He was told to execute a plan to relocate the president, so his crew jumped into action. There was a lot of confusion, he said - intelligence reports said there were nine planes hijacked across the country and three of them had hit their targets.

Tillman said they later learned that there were only four aircraft hijacked and the other five aircraft had their transponders off and they were not communicating with air traffic controllers because they were talking with their companies who were warning them to take precautions.

President Bush had informed his staff that he was going to stay put and address the nation from Florida.

"But at the same time (the Federal Aviation Administration) advises Air Force One you have an airliner overhead you and descending into you," he said, adding the plane was supposed to be headed to Tampa but it was off course and was not responding to controllers.

The aircraft was at 30,000 feet and descending, so Tillman said his first instinct was to move Air Force One off the runway.

Tillman said he wanted to get the plane in the air so he could avoid the other plane, and then he would land when the president wanted to leave.

"I let the Secret Service know," he said. "Secret Service said 'Negative. We are leaving the schoolhouse now and we will be at your location in six minutes.'"

The only one who the president had talked to at that point was the vice president, who was in a bunker and acting as command and control.

As the Secret Service loaded everyone on the plane, the Pentagon was hit.

"We were told it was hit by a truck bomb, and the president was told the same thing," Tillman said, but as they were loading the plane they learned that the Pentagon was actually hit by a plane.

So they decided to just get up in the air and decide where to go from there.

"Then I get a call from the Secret Service saying we have an unidentified man at the end of the runway with a long gun," he said.

Tillman said every call was a potential threat. He had to adapt his takeoff using only half the runway, with Secret Service traveling alongside him to check out the threat at the end of the runway.

"What it was, was a man on the runway in the back of a van," he said. "The man opened the back of the van and opened a case - a long case - and what he did was pull out one of those old VHS video cameras and he was going to film us while we were leaving. He was with his kid."

Tillman got the Boeing 747-200 off the ground and started climbing at 8,000 feet per minute.

He said he turned toward the Gulf of Mexico to avoid a collision with the other airliner that was still descending on them. The plane followed their trajectory and still was not talking with controllers.

Traffic eventually reached the plane - which was Delta Flight 202 headed for Miami - and asked them to divert to Tampa. It turned out the plane's transponder quit working and they were talking with their superiors about it when controllers were trying to reach them.

Tillman said the day was incredibly intense. They finally made it to the most secure airbase in the country and landed safely, but the world changed that day.

He recounted the president's travels from that day forward, showing slides of how the nation pulled together after the attacks and had to adapt to threats ever since.

Tillman was also the first pilot to fly a sitting Commander-in-Chief into a war zone. The challenge was unprecedented: Transport the most-targeted man in the world into the heart of terrorism.

Tillman secretly planned and executed a trip to Iraq in the heat of battle so the president could serve Thanksgiving dinner to 45 servicemen. It was feat that required complete secrecy until the day the president left the U.S.

"Only 12 people knew what was planned until the day we left," he told the pilots.

Tillman's hour-and-a-half speech was full of intense stories that illustrated how the attacks of Sept. 11 affected the world, and his message to the pilots was to never forget what happened.

Tillman's distinguished career spans 30 years in the United States Air Force. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross in 2004 and promoted to brigadier general by President George W. Bush. He was the first military line officer to receive this honor. For political reasons this was not confirmed by the Senate, and Tillman retired as a colonel.