“Air Force One” Flies Low Over NYC – What a STUPID thing to do!
April 28th, 2009
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If you’re in New York City and you look up to see a Boeing 747 flying unusually, chances are you’re not going to immediately assume it’s something benign like a photo shoot. If you see the aircraft is buzzing major landmarks like the Statue of Liberty, then that’s not going to be very reassuring, and if the next thing you see is two F-16’s trailing it then you’re not going to feel reassured at all. In fact, while New York would be the WORST city to fly a big aircraft low over, I think I’m safe in saying that such a stunt over any major city is going to scare at least a few (hundred thousand) people. Hell, I know if I were in the Empire State Building and saw such a thing, my first thought would be to get out as fast as I can and my second thought would be to call my family on my cell phone and tell them what to do with my assets should I not make it out and that I’m sorry for the bad stuff I did as a little kid.
Apparently this did not occur to the federal government. It was decided that flying a VC-25 aircraft around New York City accompanied by a couple of F-16 fighters would be a great way to get some photos to use as desktop wallpaper at the Pentagon or something like that. The official statement is that the event was to produce “souvenir photos” of the aircraft to be given to the media, family and friends of the flight crew, supporters and so on.
The VC-25 is a heavily modified version of the 747-200. It’s commonly known as Air Force One, as that is it’s primary duty. Officially, the aircraft only is designated as Air Force One when the president is on board (actually that call sign has nothing to do with the aircraft type, any Air Force aircraft is designated Air Force One when the president is on board).
Clearly whatever beancounter gave the approval stamp to this exercise was not thinking with more than a few brain cells. However, it gets worse: If this stunt had been widely publicized, such that most New Yorkers were aware that the aircraft was coming by for a visit, it might have been received as a positive thing: take a break from work and go look at the airshow being held over the Hudson. But no. Officials have insisted that they had informed the states of New York and New Jersey of the planned flight, but the New York and New Jersey Port Authority said they were completely unaware of the stunt and officials were confused and startled when they received thousands of calls from terrified New Yorkers asking about the flight. The Port Authority is responsible for the three major airports in the New York City metropolitan area and could only respond that aircraft wasn’t related to any of their facilities.
Apparently the event was not published ahead of time and was considered “classified” for security reasons. Officials must have been more concerned that someone who knew ahead of time might take a shot at the aircraft, which didn’t even have the president on board or somehow might otherwise compromise the security of the aircraft, which does contain several classified systems for evading potential threats.
I wonder if they considered the fact that given the secrecy of the event, someone with a clear shot at the aircraft might have actually considered trying to take it down to prevent another 9/11. Quite honestly, I can’t blame them. Some New York City police officers such as those involved with SWAT teams actually carry the M-16 sub machine gun in their patrol cars. If a group of police officers had seen the jet flying low over the Hudson from Battery Park and decided to try to take a shot with what they had, in the hopes that they might get a lucky hit on one of the engines and take down the aircraft, could you blame them? I wouldn’t. In fact, I know one of the first things I’d think is whether or not my weapon might be capable of downing the aircraft. Granted, small arms and the M-16 are not very effective weapons for air defense, but in such a situation, one might feel compelled to use what they’ve got in a last ditch effort to defend thousands of innocent lives.
As one might have expected, the event did cause quite a lot of panic and emergency measures to take place. Police didn’t take any shots at the aircraft, but police and fire fighters did mobilize and brace themselves for another 9/11-style attack. Thousands of workers in New York and New Jersey evacuated their office buildings and flights in the area were canceled at the last minute.
Obama has stated that he was unaware of the planned maneuvers and is “furious” that this took place. That very well may be the case, although I have two thoughts on the matter: first, had this occurred when Bush was still president, I’m relatively certain that the public would immediately have assumed that the president was at fault and that it was just another example of the White House not caring and being insensitive, stupid and negligent of security. Secondly, whether or not Obama new about this event, the buck still stops at the US president. He is the one ultimately responsible for the Department of the Air Force and especially for the VC-25, if not directly than through whomever is appointed to run those departments. Clearly whoever President Obama entrusted with the decision making here is not capable of preforming the function. As such, the only responsible remedy for this is to apologize to the American people for an error in judgement in appointing wholely incompetent individuals and imediately assuring that those responsible join the growing ranks of America’s unemployed (in other words fire them).
President Obama says that this mistake won’t happen again. That’s all well and good, but he needs to assure that is the case by firing those who made this moronic error in judgement. Don’t bring them before a committee to explain their actions. Don’t give them an opertunity to apologize or offer excuses, just give them the boot – NOW.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 28th, 2009 at 1:37 pm and is filed under Bad Science, Conspiracy Theories, Culture, Events, Just LAME, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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April 28th, 2009 at 2:00 pm
Just to be pedantic, the M-16 (in this case the Colt model R0977 M4 carbine, which the NYPD uses) is a genuine Assault Rifle, not a submachine gun.
The 9mm variants (RO635/639) are submachine guns, though.
(And on the topic at hand, here in the office we called it “gongshow amateur-hour”. Because we like to talk like Canadians.)
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April 28th, 2009 at 2:18 pm
Breathtaking stupidity.
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April 28th, 2009 at 3:51 pm
Actually, I can understand the secrecy. Assuming some terrorist group had managed to smuggle in something like a Stinger missile or even had a heavy anti-material rifle (I think Barrett makes some good ones), it would have been one hell of a nasty surprise and PR coup for them, and probably killed a bunch of people with falling debris as well.
That said, it was still a really dumb stunt.
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April 28th, 2009 at 4:00 pm
Matthew said:
The point here is that this was done over New York of all places. This is like following someone that you know is a past rape victim through a park at night without identifying yourself. It demonstrates a total lack of foresight or sensitivity. Worse, I am sure this wasn’t lost on some of those involved, who were probably laughing up their sleeves at the sort of panic they knew this would cause, and are now hiding behind ’security’. Doc is right, heads should roll.
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April 28th, 2009 at 4:52 pm
Matthew said:
Shooting down Air Force One has always been a concern. For a terrorist group it would be all the more so if the president were on board versus just VC-25 with the crew on board. I suppose they might be tempted from a propaganda standpoint, but one could just as easily make the argument that a terrorist group would rather shoot down a fully loaded passenger 747. It wouldn’t be as iconic a target but much more killed and also it would have the whole “you’re never safe” kind of message to the general public.
Also, shooting down the VC-25 is hardly going to be an easy thing. Remember this aircraft has taken the president into Iraq and has the latest systems of any military aircraft for threat evasion. The systems are classified but it’s well known it has active IR jamming systems that can confuse missiles with a diffused strobe system. It probably also has decoy flares and if struck, it has self-sealing fuel tanks, backups for all the control systems, hardened components etc.
It’s not as if Airforce One generally flies without anyone knowing. The exact times and routes are not published, but if a city knows that the president is visiting for an event then it can obviously be inferred that the aircraft will be landing and the approximate time. Therefore, a terror group would know that it could be shot at when landing or taking off from the airport.
Of course, this is a real concern and it’s why the aircraft has so many safety systems and is flown by the best of the best in the USAF.
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April 28th, 2009 at 5:02 pm
Normally when there is a “terrorism scare” i find it ridiculous that people get panicked. There are plenty of cases where someone finds a white powder somewhere and they bring in hazmat and evacuate the area because everyone is scared its a terrorist bio-weapon but it’s really detergent or gypsum powder. When I first heard this story I was thinking something similar, like someone saw a plane they thought was a bit low and everyone freaked out without necessity.
I’ve since seen this video above and videos on the news and I’ve made a 180 degree turn on it. People evacuating buildings and running for cover was not an overreaction. This was not a plane just flying a little lower than normal. It was close enough that people could barely yell over the engine noise and it was clearly not behaving like a normal aircraft.
I believe if I saw something like that anywhere (not only New York), where an aircraft was flying that low anywhere other than the landing approach of an airport, I’d assume that it was either hijacked or in distress and trying to ditch or find a landing place.
I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a really big plane doing tight turns at a low altitude, but it’s extremely dramatic. At an airshow a long long time ago I saw a C-17 that was coming around and doing low passes in a figure 8 over the area. If not for the fact that it was an air show and I was entirely aware that this was part of the plan and that the aircraft was perfectly under control and well within safety margins, it would have really been scary, because you don’t normally see an aircraft of that size flying like that in normal operations.
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April 28th, 2009 at 7:10 pm
Sigivald said:
Okay, point taken. However, I’m actually saying this given some real context. The aircraft was so low, loud and unusual (And i’ve heard from several friends in New York City, that people were sure it was a terrorist attack and it was so bad that police officers were on a street corner waving people into a subway station, to get some shelter if it hit something) that someone might actually try to shoot it down with whatever they have out of desperation.
This is not entirely impossible or without precedent. When Pearl Harbor was attacked in 1941, it was so unprepared for any response that soldiers and sailors tried to use whatever weapon they could get to to shoot back, including rifles and small arms. Aircraft on the ground were heavily damaged and airmen were pulling their machine guns off even as the airplanes were burning and then trying to use the guns from the turret to fire back.
Reliable reports are that it worked on a few lucky shots. There are reports that an aircraft was show down with a service pistol during a divebomb run when an officer shot the plot directly in the forehead, but that may be a tall tale. There are, however, confirmed incidents where aircraft were shot down by fire from Browning Automatic Rifles. Obviously these are not very well suited to shooting down aircraft, but given that they mad passes as low as 50-100 feet a few got a lucky shot on the ****pit or possibly the oil cooler or something.
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April 28th, 2009 at 8:13 pm
drbuzz0 said:
I’m not sure why the secrecy. It’s not as if it’s hard to see the VC-25s flying around. Just go to Newport news VA and wait near the airport. Those aircraft use the long runway left over from WW2 for touch and gos just about very day. Biggest scare I’ve ever had was one of the VC-25s doing a very low approach while I was stuck in a traffic jam near the end of the runway and the 747 about left skidmarks on the roof of my car. I guess nobody in the AF thought that NYC might be just a bit different than Newport News. Stupid.
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April 28th, 2009 at 9:30 pm
J Carlton said:
Well yeah, I’d assume if they do it fairly often in Newport News then it would not really be a big deal. I didn’t realize it was so often, although they do train very very heavily the crews of those planes.
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April 28th, 2009 at 10:23 pm
Federal officials knew that sending two fighter jets and Air Force One to buzz ground zero and Lady Liberty might set off nightmarish fears of a 9/11 replay, but they still ordered the photo-op kept secret from the public.
In a memo obtained by CBS 2 HD the Federal Aviation Administration’s James Johnston said the agency was aware of “the possibility of public concern regarding DOD (Department of Defense) aircraft flying at low altitudes” in an around New York City. But they demanded total secrecy from the NYPD, the Secret Service, the FBI and even the mayor’s office and threatened federal sanctions if the secret got out.
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April 28th, 2009 at 10:30 pm
DV82XL said:
Apparently Obama has ordered a probe of the matter. I’m not saying that he personally knew about this, but this is still not how you run the white house and he shouldn’t order an investigation, he should just order the upper staff of the white house military relations office (or whatever the hell office was involved) fired.
That’s how a company would generally hire an egregious event – fire those responsible.
Having seen the memo it looks all the worse. It might even rise to the point of firing those involved without severance and revoking pension. Even so bad as to give military personnel who were aware that this was going on without informing the public and officials a dishonorable discharge.
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April 29th, 2009 at 7:16 am
Sounds like a silly over-reaction to me. We get low-flying large aircraft all the time here in London, and yes, very occasionally they go over where I live so low that you have to shout over the engine noise. Every time it happens I assume that someone just had to go round again from Heathrow or Gatwick, or the wind suddenly changed direction. And no, I’m not on any of the normal approaches to either airport.
And no, any reasonable company would *not* fire someone for making a simple mistake. Everyone makes mistakes. You only get fired for them if you **** up all the time.
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April 29th, 2009 at 4:22 pm
David Cantrell said:
You think you wouldn’t get fired if you caused panic in a major metropolitan city that resulted in a Presidential investigation?
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April 29th, 2009 at 7:50 pm
David Cantrell said:
Normally when there’s some false terrorism scare I’m the first to criticize the over-reaction, but I’ve heard from a lot of people in Lower Manhattan and this was something that was so out of the ordinary that it was not the kind of thing anyone would not immediately recognize as an unusual event. Occasionally planes do fly at a lower than normal altitude if they are forced to abort a landing at LaGuadia Airport or something, but this was a case of a very large aircraft literally flying at about 600 feet off of the ground in a manner that planes never fly in that area.
If you have any idea what the geography of New York City is, the airplane was basically off the coast of Brooklyn near Liberty Island coming north toward lower manhattan in the exact manner one would if it was going to hit a major building downtown. It vered to the side and up the east river, but it was not apparent right away. Manhattan is long and comes to a point at the bottom and the plane went to the west up the Hudson and gained altitude.
As described by one person who was in the area to me “This would have scared people if it happened in 1999″ it was that out of the ordinary.
Given that there was no forewarning, there didn’t seem to be any likely legitimate reason why an aircraft would be behaving like that.
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April 30th, 2009 at 1:11 pm
An investigation is perfectly reasonable. Just firing the idiot who ordered the flight (and his name has been publicized, but I don’t have time to go look it up right now; I’m taking a brief “sanity break” from work) would be great for saying “look how proactive the Prez is!” but would not actually solve the problem.
Thing is, the office of the POTUS is bigger than Obama, and most of its functions and processes persist unchanged between administrations. Indeed, many of the *staff* remain unchanged. Oh, we hear about the flunkies given jobs as political favors, or the high-ranking folks who are appointed by the president, but most of the day-to-day operations have to persist from administration to administration or the first few months in office would be sheer chaos. What’s more, many of the functions associated with the office are actually performed by other entities. The two VC-25s are operated by the US Air Force, which works with the White House to organize their maintenance schedule, training schedule, public appearances, presidential missions, and stuff like this photo op.
What this means is basically that many functions are ordinarily outside the purview of the President. They derive authority from him, but he isn’t calling the shots on those things unless he decides to get involved. And something like this, he probably wouldn’t even know about until it was over.
Obviously, that caused some serious problems here. I do think they need to discipline the guy who made the decision (possibly including termination) but that’s not all they need to do. They need to find everybody who makes these kinds of decisions and make sure they know to get things like this cleared. Talking of “cleared”, they also should take a look at what needs to be classified and how much they need to emphasize security with the people they’re obliged to notify. For instance, there’s not a lot of point of informing somebody at the police department if you follow it up with “by the way, you’re not allowed to tell anybody about this”. There is a reason the rules call for notification; obviously the people who send out notifications aren’t grasping that reason, focusing too much on zealously protecting national security. This will probably mean procedural changes, and it would take an investigation to work out what all needs to be changed.
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April 30th, 2009 at 3:23 pm
Calli Arcale said:
Like I said, he is not personally responsible for this incident, but everyone involved who knew this was happening and had the opportunity to object should be fired.
It’s immaterial of Obama. If he can’t fire them because they’re not directly under his command then someone else needs to fire them. Whether it’s congress or the Joint Chiefs of Staff or whomever has that authority.
Calli Arcale said:
The idea that classifying this is somehow important to security is ridiculous. It’s not like we operate all our security-related assets in a vacuum and nobody ever knows where the president is or where the VC-25 is. There’s a reason why it’s guarded and has so many systems to prevent attack.
The press office does not keep the president’s travels completely secret. If you know that the president is schedualed to be in a city on a given day for a fundraiser or something then you can be pretty sure AF1 will be coming into that city’s airport. I don’t think the arrival time is even classified. You can also infer that the aircraft will be traveling from Washington to that city, although you probably won’t know the route ahead of time, you could always track it with a radio scanner. The aircraft has to report occasionally to non-secure stations like general purpose air traffic control, because it does need to share the skies with other aircraft and have them kept away from it. Even if they don’t use the call sign AF1, if there is a large exclusion zone moving from Washington to the final destination, you can pretty well assume that’s the president’s aircraft.
If you wanted to take a shot just the VC-25 without the president being on board that’s even easier. Just hang out at Newport News or Anderew’s Air Force Base and wait for a training flight which happens fairly regularly.
Point being: People know where the damn airplane is all the time already.
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May 7th, 2009 at 12:51 pm
The stupidity comes from members of the public who believe the cover story that was made up about this terrorist attack. The claim that this operation was an attempt at a photo shoot is a cover story and a mighty thin one at that and what kind of president wouldnt know about something so important. This is more evidence that barry soetoro is a puppet. Check out the Alex Jones movie, “The Obama Deception” for more information about this phony in the White House. This movie is free for download. Go to http://www.infowars.com
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May 7th, 2009 at 1:31 pm
Joe said:
Sometimes, you know, a cigar is just a smoke. Have any conspiracy theorists ever heard of Occam’s Razor?
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May 7th, 2009 at 3:08 pm
Joe said:
What was the purpose then of this “terror attack”? They flew they plane around low and had people for a couple hours and then flew away and a few work days were cut short and many people were angry that they were spooked. What exactly does that accomplish for the NWO or whoever the hell you say is doing this???
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May 9th, 2009 at 3:12 am
HA! I knew someone was going to come up with the conspiracy angle on this. Clearly this was a bad covert operation if it was one, because it was pretty obvious something was up. What exactly could this have accomplished for the conspirators? Fly a plane around and scare people and interrupt the work day?
Or was the plane packed with some kind of magic mind control system or chemical sprayer or something?
Oh brother. Like the government never does something stupid because the compartmentalized bureaucrats have their heads up their asses. In general, most of the harm the government does comes less from mallace and more from incompetence and internal snafus.
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May 10th, 2009 at 7:23 pm
I assume everyone would like to see where the White House New Media folks intended to land Scare Force One on the web. For some reason the New Media folks were able to talk Mr. Caldera into taking new pictures of Air Force One for the recently released White House Web site. I wonder if they will use the NYC images to replace the current one. http://pfx.me/l7
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May 25th, 2009 at 3:05 am
I find it stupid that so many people were scared. The fact of the matter remains that it was obvious that the government knew about the aircraft and could easily deal with the threat if there was one.
2 F-16s can easily take down a large jet. The presence of Air Force aircraft point out that the government knew. Why would the government scramble jets to deal with this and not put out a warning to the target area?
It is just an example of how people have been conditioned to fear everything and abandon thinking. If I were there that day, i would have been reassured by the presence of the fighter aircraft. I would also have some faith that a warning would have gone out if there was a real threat. I also know, that if there was a communication breakdown and no warning went out, that an F-16 can easily take down the threat.
About the comment on the investigation, it is always a good idea to investigate before firing. You want to make sure that 1. You don’t fire people that don’t deserve it and 2. You dont miss firing people that should have been.
This doesn’t really relate to the blog post, but I find it a bit biased to critisize Obama over the handling of this incident, yet critisizing people that want the same treatment done to wrongdoings done during the Bush administration. Causing some fear in the population is small compared to a war that might have been started under false pretenses. At any rate, I believe that investigations and consequenses should be handed out in both cases, regardeless of the political parties of those involed.
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