Week six of Civil Air Patrol’s 85th anniversary series returns to Sept. 11, 2001, under the timeline tile “Eyes of the Home Skies, Part 2,” which is the organization’s preferred way of saying that a Cessna 172 was allowed to take pictures of a crater and that this has been national defense ever since.
Col. Richard Greenhut had been Northeast Region commander for two weeks. He left his Upper West Side apartment into a morning he still describes as golden, gorgeous, and crisp, which is the sort of weather report that becomes doctrine when the person giving it is in command of unpaid airplanes. From the street he could see the top 25 to 30 floors of the Twin Towers, nearly four miles away. He was still standing there when the second aircraft hit the South Tower. His first official act of the era was therefore to watch the job from the sidewalk and then dispatch Civil Air Patrol aircraft into an airspace that had, minutes earlier, stopped belonging to civilians.
Flight 3131, Also Known as Proof
The sortie that now occupies a museum did not occur until Sept. 12. CAP Flight 3131 — then-Capt. Andrew Feldman, Lt. Col. Jacques J. Heinrich, and then-Capt. Warren Ratis — flew Cessna 172 “44 Lima” over Ground Zero at 1,300 to 2,000 feet and were permitted three passes, a restriction that headquarters later filed under historic. Heinrich flew. Feldman and Ratis took photographs. The pictures went to FEMA executives and to President George W. Bush as “situational awareness,” a phrase that in this case meant overhead confirmation of a fact already visible from the street.
The airspace was a designated war zone. A New York Police Department helicopter, unaware that the Skyhawk had federal clearance, told the crew to leave. The crew, in the register unique to volunteers who have been told they are on an Air Force mission, declined. Kennedy International explained the same thing to NYPD. An F-15 escorted the Cessna. The photographs were accomplished. Ratis later told VOLUNTEER magazine that the memories still haunted him and that the mission “had to be played out using the best of my knowledge,” which is how a photography flight enters the archive as combat-adjacent.
Feldman and Ratis both made lieutenant colonel. Both died earlier this year. Heinrich is still in Civil Air Patrol. The airplane outlasted two of the three men who flew it and is now easier to visit than most of the briefing slides that followed.
Command and Control Relocates to the Basement
With New York telecommunications crippled, Greenhut moved region command to a FEMA Cold War bomb shelter in Massachusetts, from which Civil Air Patrol enjoyed a secure line to NORAD. The auxiliary’s contribution to the first day of the century’s infamy was thus a camera in a Skyhawk and a headquarters that worked better underground. Several Northeast wings later flew with Air Force fighters in exercises named Fertile Angel and Fertile Spade, in which member-owned twin-engine aircraft ran practice tracks offshore so that fighters would have something slow enough to find. These were advertised as the first civilian air-defense missions since World War II, a comparison that does a great deal of work for a Cessna.
Membership rose about 10 percent over the next two years. The fleet was repainted red, white, and blue. In 2015 the organization was folded into the Total Force, which is the paperwork name for what Greenhut described more plainly: the Air Force had discovered missions CAP could prosecute “at a fraction of the cost of their overhead.” The fraction is the point. The paint scheme is the sacrament.
The Relic in Dayton
In 2024, at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, 44 Lima was placed in the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force, one of three Civil Air Patrol aircraft now on display there, the other two being actual World War II machines. Feldman and Ratis posed beside it. The Skyhawk that took pictures of Lower Manhattan now keeps company with a Fairchild and a Piper Cub, which is how a photography sortie becomes indistinguishable, in museum lighting, from a war.
Lt. Col. Bob Ditch, then an Air Force colonel, volunteer firefighter, paramedic, and Department of Defense liaison at Ground Zero, is the anniversary series’ other witness. He spent years with pulmonary disease, kidney cancer, and vision damage from the dust. He had taught terrorism response for a decade. Two years before the attacks, manuals he used showed the New York skyline in a bullseye; an Air Force course animation put an explosion in a tower. He had warned of something like it at the Army War College two weeks prior. His conclusion, after the pile, the groaning buildings, and the F-15s overhead, is that 9/11 and then Katrina taught the Air Force to look inside the country and notice that Civil Air Patrol had been there the whole time. “Civil Air Patrol had only been an ornament for them until 9/11 and Katrina,” he said, “at which time, [CAP] became the tip of the spear.” The spear, in the surviving documentation, was a 172 with a camera and a subsequent talent for being intercepted.
Northeast Region chaplain Lt. Col. Father George Kelly, a Veterans Administration chaplain trained in critical incident stress management, was assigned to make sure Greenhut’s people were not in denial while they worked diligently on mitigation. Greenhut has said he does not want to get touchy-feely about it. The anniversary series gets touchy-feely about it for him, at length, and then returns to the airplanes.
The Inexpensive Intruder
The operational afterlife of the photographs is still flying. Greenhut, on a golden day in mid-October 2026, was again in Falcon Virgo over the capital, replicating “the most common likely incursion” in “the kind of aircraft most likely to do that,” which is Civil Air Patrol’s most honest mission statement in the file. The same work shows up as Fertile Keynote, as Super Bowl TFRs, as F-35s chasing a CAP aircraft near Levi’s Stadium before Super Bowl LX on Feb. 8, 2026. Unheard of before 9/11, Greenhut said; now it has to be in the planning scenario. The planning scenario requires a volunteer airplane willing to be the target of interest at a fraction of the cost.
The series also notes that United Flight 93’s Capt. Jason Dahl had been a CAP cadet, a fact the timeline absorbs the way it absorbs everything else: into the story of the organization that photographed the hole, painted the fleet, gained 10 percent, moved a desk into a bomb shelter, and put the Cessna in Ohio so that no one could say the mission had been only pictures.