A student pilot in Chandler took his first solo yesterday. A big milestone for any pilot where usually the most exciting part is getting your shirt tail cut off. He made one small boo-boo though. His transponder was set to the hijack code. NORAD scrambled two F-16 fighters from Tucson’s ANG base to incercept. Holy flerking schnit! I have a little bit of stick time but I can’t imagine what this was like for this poor schlub who still has the training wheels on his 172. He landed okay but I think it will take a week to get the pucker out of his butt.
Intercept? What kind of plane was the student in?
Can an F-16 fly slow enough to keep up (keep down?) with a, say, Cesna?
I dunno, but the missles go fast enough to shoot it out of the sky. Man that kid must have shit his pants.
Well, yeah, but you’d hope they’d check out a Cessna before they blast it out of the sky. 
Agreed.
My information when I was in flight training and asked that question was “yes, it can slow down to Cessna speeds” (SEL Cessna, we’re obviously not discussing Citations. At least not the jet type of citation - legal citiations might be a different story…)
Apparently, it involves lots of flaps and gear down, slow flight, and maybe S-turns.
Personally, I want to avoid finding out first-hand.
A Cessna 172. I don’t even think the airspeed envelopes even overlap with the F-16 as dirty as it can get and the 172 at full throttle. They’d have to do S-turns or keep flying circles. I saw that in the Indian Ocean in the early eighties when F-14s could not slow down enough to stay behind Soviet Bears.
FWIW the student is 41.