Fighter jets and a plane from the Customs and Border Protection Agency
Customs has more experience with airborne intercepts than any other current branch of the military, makes sense to me.
He said the program for patrolling the Washington airspace is a cooperative one involving the Department of Transportation (DOT), the Department of Defense (DOD) and, of course, the still-evolving DHS. He said a pair of ICE’s Citations, together with two Sikorsky Black Hawk helicopters, represented the so-called “low slow” end of the airborne defense system for the Washington area. Jet fighters handle the “high fast” side of the equation, while a deeply classified matrix of surface-to-air defenses covers the “inside game,” or last line of defense close to the ground. Stallworth was deliberately vague on the latter component, politely declining to answer follow-up questions on numbers, locations and types of surface-to-air defenses.He did say that some of Customs’ eight Lockheed Orion P-3AEW mobile detection and sorting radar surveillance aircraft have also been part of the contingent that keeps tabs on Washington’s airspace. The network is also linked to the National Capital Region Coordination Center in northern Virginia, and coordinates with the U.S. Customs domestic air interdiction coordination center (DAICC) at March Air Force Base in Riverside, Calif. Substantially upgraded in 1998, the DAICC is like a mini-Norad center, coordinating regular ATC radar data with military radar, aerostat balloon-mounted radars and other secret radar assets to provide an impressive level of coverage. If it’s any larger than a condor, it probably doesn’t fly without the DAICC’s computers knowing about it.
Originally posted by Charon You're right Mavrick Charon
