Why on earth spin a story like this? What on earth could they gain?
Do planes fly close enough together to actually be able to recognize each other? I thought the distance was 3-5 miles about over the open ocean. Of course I could be mistaken.
I was wondering about that story myself. It did seem to good to be true. Has there been any word yet on the turkey itself? i.e. Was it roasted in Iraq, or did it fly in on Airforce One?
It’s a weird story all right. I don’t know what the deal is.
Having been in the cockpit of an Air Alfa 737 some ten years ago over Austria, I can assure you spotting a plane in clear daylight is dead easy. Even if the passing distance is a couple of miles, a livery as striking as AF1’s would be easy to make out. Hell, I could tell the KLM 747 we passed from a Korean Air one, easily.
[Gordon Jump] As God as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly!!![/GJ]
Let me get this straight:
The White House makes up a story about a BA pilot seeing Air Force One.
The White House makes up a story about the necessity of putting the President on a jet in order to land on the Abraham Lincoln.
The White House makes up a story about Air Force One being a target on September 11.
Good god, keep these people away from airplanes! Is this Administration’s ability to tell the truth actually inversely related to its altitude?
Because they’re EVIL!!
OK wait. On this super top-secret mission, they flew the President in a jet with standard White House “Air Force One” livery?
(Keeping in mind that any plane the President is flying in, is Air Force One by definition – it never occured to me that they’d fly him secretly in one of the planes we recognize as “Air Force One”.)
Well, any Air Force plane. Any civilian plane carrying the president has the callsign Executive One.
I did not know that. Stands to reason “Air Force” refers to the USAF, dudnit? 
Maybe the real identity of the aircraft is secret. Or maybe they don’t know who the hell the guy on the radio was. Or maybe the British Air pilot felt some perverse duty to keep it the secret after everybody on Earf already knows.
He didn’t fly in on the fancy plane, did he? My mom always told me not to bring my nice plane into the desert. Never get the damn sand out.
And they accused Gore of lying for the sake of lying…
Don’t planes have audio recorders in the cockpits? It should be relatively easy to prove or disprove the story with access to such recordings (of course, I’m not going to hold my breath for them to release any details of recordings from AF1).
I read somewhere that they decided to use the real Air Force 1 747 rather than some other unmarked plane because it has defense systems to protect from missile launches.
who is bushco?
I like the conspiracy element to this one, Reeder.
The best wacky theory I’ve read is that the President didn’t, in fact, eat turkey with the soldiers. It was one of his doubles who went to Iraq.
Some indie news operation was about to publish frame-by-frame video and audio comparisons.
The White House was forced to put out the “BA sighting” as a cover story.
Well, yeah, sure, John. But that’s not why.
WAG: the story was frothed up to add a bit of the ol’ Tom Clancy skullduggery and derring-do. George Bush as Tom Ryan.
Helpfully, this story was posted by the AP before the OP even: Bush’s Baghdad-Bound Plane Was Spotted
To summarize, the updated Bush story is that the BA pilot radioed the tower, not AF1 directly. Also that BA didn’t actually ask all of the pilots of the “hundreds of planes in the air in the United Kingdom”, but just that none of the pilots had come forward yet.
Well shit how hard would it be to figure out which planes were in the immediate vicinity at that time?
From the AP story:
It’s amazing what the Echelon system is capable of these days, picking out that one mention of Air Force one from all the control tower traffic in the hemisphere in such a short time!
I was wondering what Timothy Bottoms has been up to since “That’s My Bush” went off the air…