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Air Force One Flyby Causes Brief Panic In NYC
pdclarry writes "A Boeing 747 that serves as an Air Force One backup and two F-16 fighters escorting it caused a brief panic among office workers at the World Financial Center in lower Manhattan this morning, as large numbers evacuated the buildings. The incident was also spurred evacuations in Jersey City across the Hudson River from Manhattan."
I didn't check either box... and the only people I'm afraid of are the people that did.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
Disrupting the structural integrity of the 747 so it became lots of little pieces of 747 would greatly lessen the damage it could do to a building. The engines and other large chunks might cause a few people to have a very bad day but the building would be fine.
For posts like this, +5 just isn't high enough.
Makes me wish for a logarithmic mod scale....
For reference, here's some video taken by someone in the area. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMoy8JprKI0&fmt=18
Etiquette is etiquette. He kills his mother but he can't wear grey trousers.
Ok, I work downtown on the edge of Battery Park on the 7th floor of this building (http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&hs=eXt&q=17%20state%20street%20new%20york%2C%20ny&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wl ) and saw the whole thing. Here is what was seen by me as an uninformed observer:
A *really* low flying plane is flying over New York Harbor. The airspace there is very restricted, and you will see helicopters, very light planes like cessna's and the occasional vintage warbird during fleetweek flying below building level, generally at a low speed conducive to sightseeing, but most planes and specifically commercial planes stay way up in the sky. It is EXTRAORDINARY to see a large jet that looks like a 747 anywhere in the vicinity of New York Harbor at an elevation below 3000 ft, let alone 1000 feet. It also appeared to be going full speed. When was the last time a low flying plane at full speed was seen in NY flying below the height of skyscrapers? Oh... yeah...
Anyway... just as the thundering sound of the engines was heard, confirming audibly that this is NOT a normal event, what do I see trailing behind it... a fighter jet. At this point the oh shit circuit in your brain automatically triggers.
The plane comes in and just past my building does a hard bank that no normal 747 on regular business would ever do and from my vantage point appears momentarily to be making a bee line for the tallest building in NJ, 30 Hudson St which is owned by Goldman Sachs, an iconic investment bank that has taken TARP money and a highly likely target, which also houses my old coworkers whom I am still friends with. Again- "oh shit." I apparently only saw the last iteration of the passes it made because it immediately went off into the distance and appeared to be headed to Newark airport, tailed by two fighter jets.
So yeah I think a plane crashing into my building is just going to be a once in a lifetime event too, until I see a 747 buzzing my building at full speed less than 200 yards away tailed by fighter jets. This came without warning, and even if people were warned, the pilot was making some cowboy moves- a friend of mine said it looked like the plane came within 100 feet of the Goldman building. If on any given day you have stared down the nose of a 747 heading at your building at 300+ mph, and didn't have a glimpse of fear because "that will never happen again," I would say there is something wrong with you.
They're a coffin if there's a fire on the ground floor and you're on floor -50?
I wonder... if there was a fire on the ground floor, would you even care if you're on floor -50?
The smoke and hot air will go up and out. I suppose the fire could burn down to that level but that would probably take a long time and firewalls between floors could probably prevent most of the spread.
There might be a problem with water used to fight the fire, but then you probably would already have sump pumps to take care of ground water that is probably already seeping in.
I suppose if you had any number of these deep buildings that you'd interconnect them below ground level and have escape routes that don't require going straight up.
The only thing I wouldn't like would be the lack of sunlight.
There are low flying planes all the time. It's not a reason to panic, and no reasonable person would believe they were likely to die there.
Easy to say when you weren't looking the plane dead in the eye coming straight at your building. While low flying planes may be "normal," this plane was in restricted airspace, was flying extremely irregularly, and was tailed by a fighter jet. That's anything but "normal." You have seconds to react to something like this. I'm rather happy I evacuated, anything else would have been foolish.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
You might mention this to your friendly local fire inspector. A company having policies in place that could discourage people from evacuating a burning building in an orderly fashion because they're worried it's not "real" sure sounds like the sort of thing they'd be interested in.
Read my blog.
My question is, why the hell were they flying so low? They HAD to have known this would cause a scare!
I remember last summer feeling a huge rattling in my office building in Newport News, VA, to look out the window to see a 747 with a US flag painted across its tail pass by just a few hundred feet above. (This was also notable, because I'm pretty certain that the building is in restricted airspace)
This repeated two or three times more. Apparently it's normal for Air Force 1 to fly at ridiculously low altitudes (below radar?)
AFAIK, the only 747s operated by the US Government with that paint scheme are operated as Air Force 1.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose