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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."
of fuckin' wussy people.
"HOLY COW! Here comes a plane flying near our wonderful New York City! It looks like it is going to hit a building! We better run for it!"
Come on!
It's pretty terrible that we as a nation are this scared by such events.
It's amazing how much people live in fear these days.
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
Da Plane, Da Plane...
I won't lie, I irrationally freak out every time I see a plane flying low. Although it's never anything- just some sight-seeing tourist plane. Still freaks me out. I don't live in the city though, I live in central NH. I can imagine why it freaks out New Yorkers. So before everybody goes on the whole "everybody's just over-reacting" thing, why don't we instead consider other options:
-Building tall buildings underground, instead of above.
-Requiring high altitudes for all planes, military or civilian, and producing auto-shoot auto-aim turrets around the ciy with no warning shots.
- Include parashoots as standard emergency materials for skyscrapers?
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
First off, to get it out of my system:
Was also spurred evacuations
*headdesk*
Okay, now for the real comment:
A plane is being escorted by F-16s. And this causes hundreds of people to flee for their lives by making a mad dash out of their building? There's being careful, then there's being an overly paranoid idiot. I'm pretty sure that if the jets are there, you'd be safer *in a building* rather than where all the explodey shrapnel can get to you.
Canada: The US's more awesome sibling.
Sure people got scared, and rightly so, but is was HIS OWN FAULT.
mnem
Politics is just like the internet: the louder, the flashier something is; the more it jumps up & down for your attention, the likelier it is to be poisonous to your system or at least utter BS.
This was performance art by the Obama administration, the better to show people what paranoid idiots they are.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
It wasn't Air Force One. It was the president's backup plane. It would only become Air Force One if something happen to the real Air Force One.
Actually, Air Force One is only takes the tail number Air Force One if the president is actually on board. Otherwise it goes by it's actual tail number.
Planes don't fly low here anymore. Its not allowed. Certainly not 747s. For the people that were here Sept 11, 2001(I was one of the many)....its very upsetting, disturbing....to look up and see a plane that low and near. So don't jump to conclusions about people over-reacting. Its a real thing for New Yorkers and others in the area.
You know, I don't think those jets could have done anything about a 747 if it suddenly decided to head towards a building. I'm surprised by the amount of *facepalm* happening here. In a city where several major skyscrapers were taken out by low-flying passenger planes, it really wouldn't have hurt if the folks that were planning this had mentioned something to the people at large. They clearly knew there would be a reaction - they let 311 and 911 operators know about it. So why not let the media know? Jay Leno could make a few jokes about it, people would laugh at how crass it was, and then when it happened folks could look up and go "oh yeah, that's strange, but its supposed to be happening. Thanks for the heads-up."
We're in the age of *information* right?
Mon chien, il n'a pas du nez. Comment scent-il? TrÃs mauvais!
People should stop being so godamn insensitive? I mean, a lot of these people either worked in or around the WTC when it was hit. A lot of them lost family and friends in those buildings. There's ALWAYS going to be a sense of fear instilled in these people because of 9/11. It's not that they haven't gone on with their lives, it's not that they harp on the subject, it's that these people witnessed the greatest terrorist event in the history of the United States. If you think you wouldn't be so concerned about a Jet colliding with your building, either killing you, forcing you to jump from 70 stories up, or coming down on top of you, I suggest you think about the horrible realities that September 11th brought to that city and its people, and hwo you'd feel if someone close to you died so senselessy and terribly.
Unfortunately for people who experienced the collapse of the WTC towers first hand, low flying planes crashing into buildings is something that could reasonably happen, and one could argue that it is not sane to wait and see if an unusually low flying plane is actually going to crash into a building before taking steps to save one's life.
From the NYT article:
The Police Department confirmed that it had been notified about the event but said it had been barred from alerting the public. âoeThe flight of a VC-25 aircraft and F-16 fighters this morning was authorized by the F.A.A. for the vicinity of the Statue of Liberty with directives to local authorities not to disclose information about it but to direct any inquiries to the F.A.A. Air Traffic Security Coordinator,â the Police Department said in a statement. The mayor criticized the secrecy around the flyover. The e-mail notification âoedid have the normal language of saying this is sensitive information, should be distributed on a need-to-know basis, that they did not plan to have any publicity about it, which I think is ridiculous and just poor judgment,â Mr. Bloomberg said.
Too lazy to remove the smartquotes, but you get the idea.
terrorism
-noun
1. the use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, esp. for political purposes.
2. the state of fear and submission produced by terrorism or terrorization.
3. a terroristic method of governing or of resisting a government.
Does this not be definition prove that the terrorists have in fact won? Fleeing for your life every time a plane fly's a little lower then normal sure wouldn't be a way I would want to live my life.
Oh how soon we forget. I think people in NY are a bit more sensitive to the topic than the rest of the country/world when it comes to planes flying low and they have every reason to be. Anybody consider that current office workers somehow knew or were related to the victims of 9/11?
"During My Service In The United States Congress, I Took The Initiative In Creating The Internet." -Al Gore
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.
and oh look: a bumper crop of smug slashdot comments calling lower manhattan office workers panicky fear-addled fools
bonus comment: its better to stay inside the building. and this is actually modded up (facepalm)
let's just break it down for you world-weary heart-heavy wise men:
if you saw airplanes flying into office towers on 9/11, then the sight of a 747 a few hundred feet off the ground, nearly clipping office towers in lower manhattan, followed by an f-16, this just might persude you to leave the area as well. but naaah... clearly its low-iq hysteria, right?
you may now continue your overly judgmental certitude in your rural basements, safe in your knowledge that all reactions you disprove of are nothing more than irrational fear. you of course are immune to this. when it comes the federal government's wiretapping policies, copyright laws, and anti-pornography crusade, rather than prudent moves to dispel these unwise ideas, the proper reaction is panty-twisting pronouncements of the end of democracy and western liberal ideals. right?
truly, you are all level-headed fountains of wisdom of the ways of humankind. not in any way hypocritical asses
where oh where would we all be without your insightful words? hmmm. maybe with a little less self-serving and smug condescension? naaah
look: an anti-pornography law! whine and moan about the end of western civilization. nothing fear-addled there
blind overly judgmental hypocrites. that's all i see
xoxoxoxox
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Is it possible that people are complaining about the wrong thing here? Sure, the discussion about whether to run or not is interesting, but how about whether people should have been informed or not?
Given that there were memos sent to numerous organisations, and yet the information was not disseminated at the will of Obama, isn't there a more pressing question here?
Like, why would the president want to scare the crap out of southern manhattan? It's not a huge stretch to assume that flying a 747 low over Manhattan would scare people...
As a general aviation pilot (I'm a regular guy who flies 2-seat Cessnas and other small aircraft on weekends for fun), it's refreshing to see that the double standard for military and VIP aircraft isn't universally applied. I've had more than one lunchtime conversation where someone loudly swears up and down that a 2-seat Cessna 152 is a WMD -- despite only weighing around 1300lbs, barely being able to carry two people, being able to cruise at 110mph on a good day.
Anyway, I can now enjoy a little schadenfreude, while I welcome the presidential airlift crew to my world. Granted they were joyriding in an airliner (which weighs 735,000 pounds and travels 600mph, which can carry 1423 times the kinetic energy of the little Cessna that I buzz around in) with a couple of fighters jets (which are threatening in any circumstances), which is a formula that has a proven track record as a threat to national security... So what they did actually matters! But now they can feel a little twinge of what I've had to go through these few years.
Even though my airplane is around 1423 times safer (based on k=mv^2) for the people on the ground, I have to put up with the same magnitude of hysteria as these people.
And, no, I don't fly very much anymore -- it's just not as much fun as it used to be with the TFRs, fighter jets, and general martial-law in the sky. Maybe I'll try hang-gliders or paragliders in order to address my deep need to get my feet off of the ground now and then.
Based on other comments, my opinion will clearly be unpopular. But how is this not akin to shouting "fire!" in a movie theater? Lower Manhattan is full of people who lived through 9/11, and it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that a low-flying 747 being escorted by a fighter jet would send up warning flags for those people. Add to that the fact that a lot of people stuck it out in the Twin Towers expecting to be rescued (and in doing so, died), and it makes some sense that people would high-tail it out of a tall building in the vicinity. Given all of that, I think it's rather small to dismiss a bunch of people who reacted to this today as wusses.
This wasn't a criminal act, it wasn't an act of terror. It was an insensitive and stupid act. Seems to me a little extra thought could have come up with a better solution than doing this that DOESN'T run the risk of sending a lot of people into a panic?
Besides, isn't this what Photoshop is for?
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
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.
CNN Story
According to CNN, the FAA and Air Force informed the NYPD and the NY Mayors office that this was going to happen, but the staff at both didn't think it would be necessary to 1) inform the public, or 2) inform the Mayor himself(!).
No wonder NYC is a mess :)
(not sure why the initial version of this was posted anonymously)
Brave Sir Robin, that is...
"When danger reared its ugly head,
He bravely turned around and fled,
Brave, brave brave, brave Sir Robin"