Air Force One Buzzing Over New York

On 27 April 2009, one of the two VC-25A aircraft that serve as Air Force One was flown low over New York Harbour and Manhattan, escorted by two F-16s, to produce a new official photograph of the aircraft with the Statue of Liberty.

The public was not told. Neither, it emerged, were the Mayor of New York or the President.

What happened on the ground

People in Lower Manhattan saw a 747 in airline-style livery flying low over the city, pursued by fighter jets, less than eight years after 11 September 2001.

Office buildings began evacuating. People ran into the streets. The reaction was immediate and entirely predictable to anybody who had thought about it for a moment — which is the point at which the exercise had gone wrong, long before the aircraft took off.

The consequences

The flight had been approved by Louis Caldera, director of the White House Military Office. He issued a public apology — “I apologize and take responsibility for any distress that flight caused” — and resigned less than two weeks later.

The photo shoot was estimated to have cost around $328,835.

The photographs were eventually released. They are unremarkable.

Why the aircraft is unmistakable, and why that mattered

The VC-25A is a 747-200 airframe in a blue and white livery designed in 1962 to be recognisable. That recognisability is normally the point — but at 1,000 feet over Manhattan, what people saw was a very large airliner where no airliner should be, with fighters behind it.

Related

• The VC-25A, Air Force One
• The VC-25B and the Qatari 747-8
• Special Boeing 747s