I don’t think anyone was actually panicking, though. Some buildings evacuated; people didn’t flee the city. I really think it was more of an ‘Oh shit, what’s going on now?’ type of reaction than an ‘ohgodohgodohgodrunnnnnn!!’ reaction.
At the risk of sounding like an absolute tool for even bringing it up, I have a friend now living in Manhattan who was seriously unamused by yesterday’s photo op. Panicked, no, but significantly displeased. Her mom worked on one of the top floors of the north WTC tower. When my friend was sixteen she spent about twelve hours not knowing if her mother had just gotten to her desk and then gotten hit by a plane. Mom, it turned out, was waiting for an elevator in the lobby and escaped with a sprained ankle. Friend, quite understandably, found that day rather traumatic, and thus did not feel terribly comforted by the aesthetic similarities presented yesterday.
And seriously - fine, do a damn photoshoot if you must, but tell people in advance, for fuck’s sake.
The secrecy decree I am not getting. If this were a photo-op and you wanted spontaneity: At 5AM on monday morning telix/fax/email/dial-up the radio and tv outlets in the tri-state and tell them Air Force One (not really without The President aboard) will be circling around New York Harbor, nigh to the Statue of Liberty. Oh, and followed by F-16’s. { With super-hi-res trillion pixel cameras that can resolve your molecules SSSSH }
So when can we see those photos?
There’ll be nobody waving from the crown (I assume) as Lady Liberty is closed. After 9-11.
I did read the whole post, and I want a cite that it was supersonic. AFAIK, no aircraft are permitted to fly supersonic over populated areas of the US for any reason. I suspect that the plane in question may have been one of the Blue Angels, Thunderbirds, or some other jet team, rehearsing for or promoting an airshow. It might have been unexpected and honking loud, but I’m 99.9% sure that there has been no sonic boom over Richmond, VA, in the past few years.
Maybe they wanted a backdrop of people running for their lives ? It’s a strong international message, after all : “Don’t fuck with Obama. He scares even New Yorkers shitless !”
I’m kind of skeptical as well. Wouldn’t a supersonic, low-flying aircraft bust every window along its path ?
As a general rule, no, supersonic flight is not allowed over inhabited areas. You can apply for a waiver, but you need explain your reasons for making the boom. Flight involving supersonic booms is done over sparsely or non-inhabited areas and, at least for civilians, requires advance permission from the authorities. (The military has airspace where they can pretty much do what they want and that where they do testing and training.)
The exception would be emergencies - presumably if the nation was under attack the military would go supersonic if that was required to deal with the problem.
Oh, and the space shuttle does generate a boom when landing until is slows down under the speed of sound. They try to arrange a flight path to minimize the impact on the ground.
Anyone want to contribute to the Angry Wanker emigration fund? I will donate 20 minutes of my salary to putting him on a plane to… sorry Canada, you don’t get the benefit. Let’s send him to Tristan da Cunha.
I agree, btw, about the chavs, political correctness, government intrusion, etc. over here. Just not that we’re “fucked”. Relatively speaking, we’re still just about OK, and these are but annoyances.
BTW I used to live in Farnborough, and at the time of the annual RAF Airshow we got all sorts of mad crap going on - USAF Tomcats going over about 200 feet above - noisy as shit - and some kind of supersonic bastards too a bit higher up - bloody loud, but no windows smashed to my knowledge.
Unlike certain others in this thread I am perfectly willing to admit I have no cite and may be entirely wrong about the plane in my anecdote being supersonic. I remember it being a sound unlike anything I’d ever heard, and afterwards two guys on my floor who are aviation nuts saying it had to be supersonic (they go to air shows and seem to know their stuff so I had no reason to doubt them). I did take a look for a cite of the incident just for my own information, but I suspect even if it did make the news it’s gone now. It definitely wasn’t in the past few years, probably 2000 or 2001 (pre- 9/11). Sorry for the hijack, my only point was that planes buzzing cities is scary and moronic regardless of location/speed/reason.
True, I guess. When one target is “hardened”, that sometimes means attention has lapsed somewhere else. There are so many potential targets, so many ways to “deliver” a bomb or poison, or whatever, that nothing can be 100 percent safe. That, and we still tend to think wrong. Most security, most enforcement still assumes the person wants to get out of it alive. When you are dealing with people who don’t care one way or the other, or people who want to die, the same rules and methods don’t apply.
Besides. No one expects the Spanish Inquisition. Ever.
That sucks. He’s between the rock and the hard place, because eomeone else was stupid. Maybe he should just find another job and tell them all to fuck off.
Sorry, I missed this post (and your followups) when I posted my last message, Joey. Thanks for being reasonable (however out of place it may be in the Pit) and please be assured that I wasn’t impugning your character or denying that such a flyby can be extremely startling and unnerving.
I’ve been to dozens of airshows, and one of the Angels’ and Thunderbirds’ favorite maneuvers is the “sneak pass:” as the crowd is watching two planes finish one maneuver off to the left, another plane will suddenly, and **very **loudly, zoom past from the right with no warning. As an airshow regular, I knew to expect them, and it was always fun to watch the whole crowd jump out of its socks!
Now, if I’m some peon in the mayor’s office and a couple of men in black suits and dark sunglasses tell me that I could get in big trouble with the federal gov’t…well, I’d be having a couple of sleepless nights over the situation.
Well, yeah, I don’t dispute that. What I’m saying is that the press is reporting that the aide neglected to tell the mayor (their word). That indicates to me that the reason Bloomberg himself didn’t know wasn’t because he was barred from knowing, but that his aide made an collosal error and forgot or whatever.
From your article:
Bolding mine. It’s still fucked up that Bloomberg didn’t know, but in a way that is a cluster-fuck onto its own.
