The sixth weekly tile in Civil Air Patrol’s 85th Anniversary Series, “Eyes of the Home Skies, Part 2,” treats Sept. 12, 2001, as the morning the unpaid auxiliary was finally allowed into the sky. The towers had already come down. CAP’s assigned contribution, executed with the gravity of a national-defense tasking, was to put a camera in a Cessna 172 and make three passes over the hole.
Col. Richard Greenhut had been Northeast Region commander for two weeks. From his Upper West Side apartment he could see the top 25 to 30 floors of the World Trade Center, nearly four miles as the crow flies, and he was looking when the second airliner hit the South Tower. He then did what region commanders do with a morning like that: he launched airplanes. New York’s telecommunications having collapsed, he relocated command and control to a FEMA Cold War bomb shelter in Massachusetts, where the organization could sit on a secure line to NORAD and, at last, feel adjacent to the war.
A former CAP cadet, airline Capt. Jason Dahl, was among the passengers and crew who stormed the cockpit of United Flight 93. The anniversary series records this in the same inventory as livery changes and intercept-exercise names, which is how the auxiliary files proximity to courage.
The Sortie That Became Scripture
On Sept. 12, the crew of CAP Flight 3131 — Jacques J. Heinrich piloting “44 Lima,” with then-Capts. Warren Ratis and Andrew Feldman on cameras — became the first civilian aircraft permitted in American airspace after the attacks. The Pentagon had approved the flight so FEMA executives and President George W. Bush could obtain situational awareness of a scene already on every working television. Authorization was three passes between 1,300 and 2,000 feet over what the organization still prefers to call a designated war zone.
A New York Police Department helicopter, unaware that federal clearance had been extended to a Skyhawk, told them to leave. The aircrew informed NYPD, in equally strong terms, that they were on an Air Force-assigned mission for FEMA and intended to finish the photography. Kennedy International confirmed it. An F-15 escorted the Cessna. The pictures were taken. In CAP’s telling, this is the moment the 21st century began for the auxiliary.
“The memories of 9/11 still haunt me,” Ratis later told VOLUNTEER magazine, adding that the mission “had to be played out using the best of my knowledge, plus the inputs of the entire team,” which is the language of a photography sortie that has been asked to carry more history than a 172 was built for.
44 Lima now occupies floor space at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force at Wright-Patterson, one of three CAP aircraft so honored. The other two are a Fairchild 24 and a Piper Cub from the actual war. A 2024 recognition ceremony enshrined the Skyhawk among them. Feldman and Ratis, both later lieutenant colonels, posed beside it. Both died earlier this year. Heinrich remains a member.
New Paint, New Members, Same Twin Cessnas Offshore
In the two years after the attacks, membership grew by some 10 percent, a figure the series places near Pearl Harbor before conceding the comparison is misleading. The fleet also received the red-white-and-blue livery it still wears, which is the form of strategic transformation available to people who cannot scramble fighters.
What the photographs purchased, Greenhut said, was the Air Force’s belated appreciation that CAP could prosecute certain missions “at a fraction of the cost of their overhead.” The practical expression of that appreciation has been decades of member-owned twins flying practice tracks well offshore so fighters have something cooperative to intercept. The drills acquired names — Fertile Angel, Fertile Spade, later Falcon Virgo and Fertile Keynote — that suggest a naming convention left in a room without adults. Greenhut calls them the first civilian air-defense missions since World War II, a sentence that does a great deal of unpaid labor with the word “missions.”
The work has not concluded. In mid-October 2026, on another “gorgeous day to fly,” Greenhut flew Falcon Virgo over the capital to replicate “the most common likely incursion” in the aircraft most likely to commit it, which is to say a CAP airplane pretending to be the problem. Before Super Bowl LX on Feb. 8, 2026, in Santa Clara, Air Force F-35s chased a CAP aircraft acting as a “target of interest” near Levi’s Stadium and then escorted it out, thereby reinforcing temporary-flight-restriction compliance and the auxiliary’s mature niche as the unidentified flying object that files a flight plan.
The Ornament Learns It Was a Spear
Lt. Col. Bob Ditch, then an Air Force colonel, volunteer firefighter-paramedic, and Department of Defense liaison at Ground Zero, later developed pulmonary disease, kidney cancer, and vision damage from the dust. Two weeks before the attacks he had warned of a similar event at an Army War College counterterrorism symposium. His 1999 training manuals already showed the New York skyline in a bullseye; the Air Force course even animated an explosion out of one of the towers. The anniversary series records this without deciding whether it is prophecy or cover design.
Ditch’s institutional finding is the finding the series exists to deliver. Before 9/11 and Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, he said, Civil Air Patrol had been “an ornament” to the Air Force. Afterward it became “the tip of the spear.” The mechanism of promotion was Homeland Security Presidential Directive 5 and CAP’s immediate, devout compliance with the Incident Command System and the National Incident Management System, still evolving, as all such systems are, through CAP.
Northeast Region Chaplain Lt. Col. Father George Kelly, a VA chaplain credentialed in critical incident stress management, made sure Greenhut’s people were not in denial while they mitigated. Greenhut, who compared the missing towers to a lost front tooth, allowed that anger was permissible. “I don’t want to get all touchy-feely about it,” he said, which remains the register in which the auxiliary prefers to discuss both trauma and air tasking.
The 85th anniversary arrives Dec. 1. The timeline is titled “Be a Part of the Story.” The story, as published, is that a photography sortie, a Massachusetts bomb shelter, a 10 percent recruiting bump, a new paint scheme, and a generation of being intercepted on purpose constitute the hour the United States Air Force auxiliary became, in its own briefing, indispensable.