F-16
US Air Force
NORAD scrambled 2 fighter jets after an aircraft flew too close to President Joe Biden’s vacation spot.
The jets fired flares near the civilian pilot to get their attention.
The NORAD fighters ultimately helped escort the plane out of the Lake Tahoe area.
US fighter jets had to wave off a civilian aircraft that wandered into the air space near Lake Tahoe, where President Joe Biden and Jill Biden are vacationing, on Friday.
The crews of two F-16s fired flares to catch the civilian pilot’s attention and escorted it out of the temporarily restricted airspace without an incident, North American Aerospace Defense Command said in a statement.
A Coast Guard helicopter helped with the intercept, which happened Friday morning West Coast time. No information about the civilian aircraft or its pilot was released.
Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said on X, the site formerly known as Twitter, that the incursion was “not of protective interest” and had no impact on Secret Service operations.
White House principal deputy press secretary Olivia Dalton added there also was no impact on the president.
Biden is due to fly back to Washington on Saturday after a week of vacation with his family in California’s Lake Tahoe region.
It’s the second time in months that NORAD has had to scramble fighters to intercept a civilian plane. In June, a NORAD jet intercepted a civilian plane that flew over Washington, DC, and later crashed in Virginia, causing a loud boom heard in the area.