It says that cell phones had not been invented yet:
> When we were ready to head back to Teterboro Airport, I got to a phone, [cell phones had not not yet been invented], and called Departure. [...]
That's not precise enough to really know. It could mean "before the 90s", "before 1983", or even "before 1973". The plane's registration is from 1977, so TFA can't mean literally "before cell phones were invented". Though I suspect it really means something like "before cell phones became widely available to private pilots", which presumably means "before 1990".
I've just finished reading, "Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service"
by Carol Leonnig [0]. In that book the author describes an incident on September 12, 1994 [1] in which a pilot landed a small plane in front of the white house. Secret Service members she interviewed were dumfounded that they were asked there to run to the white house roof with rifles to protect the building, and that there were no such thing as anti-aircraft missiles available at the time. More recently, another person landed a small aircraft on the Whitehouse grounds [2] with (apparently) no missiles involved.
Maybe the missiles are elsewhere, or maybe they're just a cost-effective rumor. The book makes it clear that the Secret Service is constantly underfunded and sorely lacking in modern technology, with agents sometimes having to use their personal car to transport the people they're protecting because their official cars aren't working.
>The book makes it clear that the Secret Service is constantly underfunded and sorely lacking in modern technology, with agents sometimes having to use their personal car to transport the people they're protecting because their official cars aren't working.
Maybe the answer is to cool it with the idea that government officials all need to have large personal protective details. Isn't that the job of the police? And aren't they all just citizens of this country? If it's not safe for various politicians to walk around in the streets, then maybe they should do something about that because it means that it is unsafe for everybody.
General rule for me is If any person has soooo much power we need a dedicated team of people to protect them continuously, that person has too much power and the solution is not ever-increasing amount of security, but ever decreasing amount of power to that individual
That is the issue, the foundational principle of the United States was that we were a federalist system with a weak and narrowly defined federal government. The office of Presidency should be inconsequential to the Everyday citizen of either the US or the world.
The fact that we continually shift more power from Local / State government, then from Congress to the Executive is the exact reason the president is a "Symbol of Power"
>Kind of like how 9/11 wasn't about killing some office workers
Again the theory of Distribution apply here to building as well. World Trade Center was attacked because NYC is seen as the Central Place for world finance.
NYC has become too powerful and that power should be distributed.
> The fact that we continually shift more power from Local / State government, then from Congress to the Executive is the exact reason the president is a "Symbol of Power"
This is all rank and dubious speculation wrt your general rule about POTUS needing a dedicated security team.
Hell, Duane Johnson needs a dedicated security team.
If you are positing a federal government so weak that POTUS is not widely known within the U.S. population, you're political views are more radical than you're letting on.
What part of GP's take on the American federalist system are you describing as radical? Seems to me that the truly radical thing is what the federal government has morphed into over the years, its founding constitutional document notwithstanding.
Reducing the federal government to that scale would involve getting ride or the DOD and almost every federal agency. It is "radical" because that position is completely unacceptable to the vast majority, while parts of that plan might appeal to parts of the political spectrum, taken as a whole it is a plan thay has miniscule support. Thus, it is considered a radical view point.
Yes, advocating such widespread changes to society on the basis of a specific interpretation/understanding of the constitution (the root document of our government) fits the meanings of the word almost too perfectly:
> Arising from or going to a root or source; basic.
>Departing markedly from the usual or customary; extreme or drastic.
> Relating to or advocating fundamental or revolutionary changes in current practices, conditions, or institutions.
> designed to remove the root of a disease or all diseased and potentially diseased tissue
> of or relating to the origin
> favoring extreme changes in existing views, habits, conditions, or institutions
> Favoring fundamental change, or change at the root cause of a matter.
If we have to put up with mass shootings and forcing women to choose between unwanted pregnancies and prison because of specific interpretations of the Constitution based solely on 18th century idioms, then we should go all in.
I don't think they had to defend against threats from the air or space when they drafted the constitution. Nor were spies all that useful outside of wartime.
This "well it is old document" falls on deaf ears with me. The solution on if parts of the constitution are out-dated is to pass amendments to the consititon, which has been done 27 times in our history.
It seems today however we have allowed the federal government to simply ignore it because it is "too hard" to pass an amendment. Sorry if it important enough to expand the power of the federal government is should be important enough to put in the work to amend the constitution, and if you can not pass it then clearly the nation agree's it is not in scope of the federal government.
And by "nation" I do not mean a "democratic vote where by 51% of the population tells the 49% what do to" which seems to be common in the "Protect our democracy" crowd.
Where are they even overstepping? They don't get involved in situations outside of their power, like defending the country and regulating interstate commerce.
What you're not seeing with your point is that the federal government actually hasn't really expanded their power, it's just that more and more things have been "capitalism-ified" to where doing business purely within one state is uneconomical. More and more of society has transition to conducting business over state and national lines, and thus the federal government is governing more of the everyday person's life than they were 100 years ago.
The same Interstate Commerce Clause that in Wickard v. Filburn the federal judiciary interpreted as giving the federal legislature the authority to regulate intrastate non-commerce; and in turn relied upon in Gonzales v. Raich that the federal government has the authority to regulate the growing and use of cannabis for medical purposes by one man acting within one state and according to that state's laws for his own person.
> More and more of society has transition to conducting business over state and national lines
This is true, but the above examples show that the federal government is intruding in people's personal actions with no commercial purpose that stays confined to one state, on the basis that those actions might exert a force, however minute, on interstate commerce. The federal government may as well say that they can regulate everyone since people breathe air which crosses state lines and therefore is under federal jurisdiction.
>>federal government actually hasn't really expanded their power
You have to be kidding me. I did not think anyone would honestly make that case. Many argue about how the federal government needed to expand their power but I have never seen anyone claim they have not expanded their power at all
That is new one for me, and not supported at all by the historical record, which for example was clear there needed to be a amendment passed to ban alcohol but then magically due to some very bad court rulings (like wickard) they could ban whole classes of drugs without a constitutional amendment
History is VERY, VERY clear that FDR massively expanded the size, and scope of government and held the supreme court hostage forcing them rule his way after striking down many of his laws originally as unconstitutional
No one that has studied American History can say with the strait face the Federal Government has not expanded its powers
The government changed because the nation changed. It's now the richest country in the world, with a population of 330 million people, and spans an entire continent from ocean to ocean. Even if you just consider the constitutional commander-in-chief duties, whoever holds the role is going to be a person of global importance.
This is the nation that hosts the davos summit, is the hub of FIFA and red cross, plus several other high profile multinationals, NGOs, and wotld bodies, and is also the only core european country not parricipating in thr EU zone agreement.
Surely if you know the PM of Spain, Norway or Poland you ought to know switzerland right?
The position of the Swiss president by design (i.e. the Swiss constitution) doesn't hold any special powers. That's quite different than the US president or even European PMs. A Swiss-style executive in the US would be a fascinating scenario, but it's really not how the systems in the US are set up (nor would the non-required aspects of it necessarily form the same way, e.g. the many-party nature is not strictly required and it could devolve into a two-party-system in Switzerland too in theory)
The Japanese emperor has zero power and lives in one of the safest countries in the world, but no one would be naïve enough to think he doesn’t need protection.
It’s almost as if such an investment is a brittle monarchical single basket of collective eggs.
The would be assassins are as backwards about the symbols as the sycophants. They don’t see symbols as a byproduct, a shelved trophy of societal achievement, rather than its cause. It is understandable that a religious person would invert cause and effect, as if the shine of wet streets made rain. It is a bad thing for the US to become a cargo cult of itself.
A lot of presidents have been assassinated in America. Not one assassination has affected the continuum of government or been more than a personal tragedy.
> Not one assassination has affected the continuum of government or been more than a personal tragedy.
The formerly-enslaved workers in the American South would like a word about Abraham Lincoln's assassination in 1865 and his replacement as president by the (Union-loyal) southerner and states-rights advocate Andrew Johnson, who had very different ideas about Reconstruction and the rights of Blacks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Johnson#Reconstruction
EDIT: Recall as well the 1914 assassination of the Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife by a Serbian nationalist: That one murder started the dominos falling for a 30-year, continent-wide war (with a 20-year intermission) in which tens of millions of soldiers and civilians died — with millions of those being systematically murdered. Moreover, that new Thirty Years War (Churchill's term) destroyed the fairly-prosperous international commercial system of the early 1900s; devastated most of Europe's physical- and economic infrastructure; and catapulted Russia and the U.S. to the status of global hegemons.
So yeah: Assassinations can indeed be quite a bit more than just personal tragedies ....
> The Federal Government does far too much and most of its function should be left to State and Local governments.
Except that state and local governments are more vulnerable to capture by rent-seekers and other special-interest groups bent on shaping public policy to suit their desires.
Aside from that not actually being true. To the extent it is, the impact of that is far less than when Large Multi-National corporations use comparatively less money to capture the federal government.
This idea that Federal Government is opposition to rent seeking is laughably absurd given the context of the last 50+ years where ever single omnibus spending bill that is passed is littered with pork to rent seekers.
I certainly don't dispute that the federal government is vulnerable to regulatory capture by rent-seekers. But if you imagine that state- and local governments are any different, you must live in a laudably-different place than do most of us.
1. A Single vote in a smaller political division carries more weight than being diluted in a large nation like the US at the national level.
2. If the local rent seeking becomes too harmful it is far less costly to relocate to a new City, County, or State than it is to immigrate to a new nation
3. It is infinitely more costly for a large corporation to rent seek thousands of cities / counts, and/or 50 US States, than it is for them to rent seek 1 federal government.
I could add probably 5 more things. IMO Federalism is a more desirable system of governance, and provides ways to limit the damage the inevitable corruption can cause.
An elephant falling the proportion of twice his own height will probably die.
A mouse falling the same proportional height will survive without a scratch.
Systems behave differently depending on the scale. Small is beautiful, and its a good heuristic that the smaller the scale the more tolerance to variance that system has.
A few local govts that have been captured (SF? NYC?) will not collapse the US.. But if the FBI, the executive, legislative get captured...
> I have four orders of magnitude more influence over my city council rep than I do over my president.
And yet you need the federal government to defend your right to select which state to live in if you decide that you want to move https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saenz_v._Roe
Believe it or not, the current situation yields tons of power to your state, just not powers that involve anything outside of the state (wars, interstate commerce, etc)
Does that stop corruption in your city? (hint: The answer is 'No")
Or even abuses? (hint: The answer is "No")
In its final days, even slavery was a "more local" policy.
People should get their mindsets right on democratic vigilance. The problem is not ceding decision making to the federal government. The problem is ceding decision making to any government. That's why we need to not only be able to remove people from power, but actually do so from time to time. So that every one from the local sheriff and judge, all the way up to the president and chief justice never get too comfy.
> Because I have more power as a voter and constituent to influence policies that affect me.
If only things actually worked that way. The vast majority of voters don't exercise that power. Moreover, state and local governments are more vulnerable to capture by rent-seekers and other special-interest groups bent on shaping public policy to suit their desires.
That's not an inherent state of affairs, though. We've been consciously pushing as much of our politics to the federal level as possible, from both left and right, for several decades now. Why is it a surprise then that voters don't engage much with local governments? After all, even if they do it, the states and the feds tend to override if it's an important "wedge issue" (i.e. the voters have been riled up about it) on the higher level.
They should and education and empowering is needed, globally. Democracy in all forms and colours needs participation. The minimum level of participation is to vote in all occasions.
> They should and education and empowering is needed, globally. ... The minimum level of participation is to vote in all occasions.
1. It'd be great to use the Australian system of compulsory voting (and it's kind of a community event, from what I've read). But that's not likely to happen in the U.S., because certain segments of the political spectrum don't want "the wrong sort of people" to vote, and so when they gain power they make it as difficult to vote as they can get away with.
2. "Education and empowerment" has worked so well in other areas of life — among other successes, absolutely no one smokes tobacco anymore; everyone drives carefully and soberly while obeying all posted speed limits; everyone eats healthy foods in moderation to maintain an appropriate weight; etc. (Not.)
And that's why in the tech world, for example, everyone takes the time to properly document their code, thoroughly test every release, refactor when appropriate, and clear away technical debt. (Again, not.)
And in medicine, doctors never misdiagnose illnesses or forget important steps in treatment because they always use authoritative best-practices checklists, which the medical establishment works hard to keep up to date and quickly disseminate to practitioners. (Yep, not.)
Apropos of that last example: Remember the crash of the FAA's Notice to Air Missions [NOTAM] system last week? That's a federal system; 50 state systems would be unworkable.
While we're on the subject of NOTAMs, here's a thought experiment: Imagine that the NOTAM system were somehow to be privatized — investor pressure for growth to boost the stock price would eventually and inevitably lead to dangerous corner-cutting and underinvestment.
3. Bottom line: Every human being is a mixed bag: We're created co-creators helping to build a universe, but we can also be short-sighted and narrowly focused on what we want without regard to how it might hurt others. All this can lead to stupid decisions — or malign ones — which we're great at rationalizing. So: Our political structures and laws need to deal with humans as we are, not as we wish we were.
What, besides MAD, has prevented Putin from using tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine?
inb4 "they don't work anymore", Russia has a mature nuclear industry and huge stockpiles of nuclear material. They're more than capable of making nuclear bombs which work.
The risk of further global isolation and the loss of any military restraint from NATO.
I could foresee a wide range of of responses to Russia using a nuke in Ukraine. I highly doubt the US would respond by dropping a nuke on Russia. That just wouldn't accomplish anything useful.
> I highly doubt the US would respond by dropping a nuke on Russia. That just wouldn't accomplish anything useful.
And you’re probably right—it wouldn’t achieve anything useful.
What I’d expect is the first gulf war all over again. Some good 2 months of non-stop relentless air campaign with surgical strikes, and boots on the ground for the final phase. And a dismembered, completely dysfuncional Russia wrapped into endless internal conflicts between the constituent republics at the end.
There is also a standing order that if the UK government is decapitated, its nuclear submarines are to take orders from the US president.
(The actual orders are of course secret and sealed until that time comes, and could be AU/NZ/CA depending on the persuasion of that particular prime minister. However the US is the most logical choice as the other countries have no nukes themselves and would likely be looking to the US for guidance anyway.)
For many years the secret code to launch nuclear missiles was for a long time 00000000 https://sgs.princeton.edu/00000000 Now they claim they changed it, but be sure that if the president is dead the military have some workaround to launch the misiles.
> if the president is dead the military have some workaround to launch the misiles.
The presidential line of succession exists for a reason. It's the office of the president that has the power to authorize a nuclear strike, not the person.
They are bodyguards. Ex-presidents pissed off a lot of people, domestically and internationally, when in power. They are much more likely to be targeted for murder than the average citizen.
Yet, despite the fact that one of the foundational principles of good governance is to avoid excessive concentrations of power, that does NOT mean that there can be no concentrations of power.
The sad fact is that, whether it is the neighborhood bully or the authoritarian state next door, anyone who wants to live a self-determined life, with a self-determining government, must be better armed, better prepared, and better allied than the abusers and autocrats, or they will be taken over in short order. This includes being able to make decisions quickly. This requires a concentration of power in something like an executive branch.
Similarly, regulating society requires making of laws, and again, by the time a society gets to tens or hundreds of millions of people, this will literally take forever without some kind of representative government; heck, just look at how long it takes to get a couple hundred congress or parliament members to get a basic majority something passed...
So, sure, when you have a tribe of several dozen or maybe the 150 of Dunbar's number [0], the leaders can be near-anonymous or completely unremarkable. Maybe even up to the size of a small town.
But once the size of organization, financing, and weilding of power just required to get anything done to maintain the society gets large, so must the concentrations of power.
The trick is not to pathologically avoid concentrations, it is to balance them.
This is the difference between a democracy and an autocracy. In a democracy, all of the institutions, the govt executive, legislative, judiciary, as well as the press, academy, industry, etc. are all independent, having their own will, centers of power, etc. In an autocracy, all of these govt and societal/economic institutions are bent to do the will of the executive. The trick is keeping those healthy, independent, and balanced.
Nowhere near as large, or influential, as the Secret Service. If you’ve ever had to commute near airport, and the POTUS is flying in or out, you’re essentially screwed, for potentially hours.
Musk or Bezos could request a place deny entry to other customers while they shop or eat. Secret Service can demand. It’s a whole different beast altogether.
Oh you're singing to the choir on that stuff. Don't get me started on who we can and can't feed into the woodchipper because I'm already rate-limited. I'm just always surprised when people limit their thinking (and I'm not saying the post that spawned my response was guilty of that, though it's possible) of the powerful in society to government officials.
I think there's merit to at least forestalling rule-by-assassination.
Like, yes, I would not mourn a lot of people who end up having protective details. But I absolutely don't want to live in a world where all it takes to change a policy is one particularly motivated sociopath. Keep in mind that John Hinckley Jr's assassination attempt on Reagan wasn't out of disagreement with Reagan's policies, it was to impress Jodi Foster. A nobody's obsession with an actress is really, REALLY not the thing we should allow to materially affect our civilization.
I think there's a good argument to be made that the WWII-era Japanese government became the one capable of its atrocities in China specifically because assassination was so frequently employed to check to its power.
Reagan had an elected vice president. Bush Sr. being in charge instead of Reagan is not what I would call a material effect on our civilization. These guys are all interchangeable, as evidenced by the fact that we change them on purpose at least every eight years.
I think that was kind of OP's point - if one person has so much power that a major change in policy can be achieved solely by assassinating them, then they probably have too much power in general.
I'll bet it's large but nothing close to that of the President and other top government officials. For example, the U.S. government is currently paying $2 million per month to protect former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo due to Iran threats[1]. That's the former, now think of what it'll cost to protect the current Secretary plus all the private travel costs on that giant Boeing 757.
It seems likely he gets less bang for his buck. The Secret Service is a much larger organization so they can take advantage of economies of scale. On the other hand, government agencies can be very inefficient when permitted to be, so who really knows.
So I sympathize with the idea of this in a sense. But it feels like we're so very far removed from that point that there's hardly any point in talking about it.
Also, maybe the US President and other super high level individuals are too powerful. But then if we make them much less powerful, who keeps other bad actors like Russia and China from stomping on whoever they want - ask the Ukrainians or the Uyghurs.
> Maybe the answer is to cool it with the idea that government officials all need to have large personal protective details. Isn't that the job of the police?
So like Shinzo Abe?
Edit: I picked Shinzo Abe because it was a recent example I felt people would be familiar with, but honestly it seems like any notoriety at all is dangerous. Someone assassinated MLK Jr's mother[1] while she played a church organ. Relying on the general reasonableness of other people doesn't seem to scale at all.
Shinzo Abe is actually a very good example, because his tragic death occured in a country where violent crime basically doesn’t exist and where it’s virtually impossible to acquire any kind of a firearm (I am aware how far 3D printing has come)
This would of course be far worse in a country that’s very familiar with violent crime and where everyone and their dog has at least 1.2 firearms, like the United States.
She might have escaped her fate if she had replaced her Sikh bodyguards with non Sikhs after Operation Blue Star that removed a militant Sikh religious leader and his followers from the Golden Temple in Amritsar.
Bruce Schneier once said something that really stuck with me. He was talking about the culture of the DHS I believe and how their mission was "Never Again" in the wake of 9/11. But never is basically an impossible standard to meet, and the result was that we get security theater instead. I would imagine you can also soak up a near infinite amount of money and effort trying to achieve never again. Zero Fail sounds like the same thing.
'Never' and 'Zero' programs are all aspirational. We want Zero pedestrian deaths, but we know it's not possible (even in back in the age of horses), but still something we should aim for within reason.
"Maybe the answer is to cool it with the idea that government officials all need to have large personal protective details."
I lived in the DC area on and after 9/11. There was a huge increase of governmnent officials having drivers and flying private jet "for security reasons"
Indeed, these very same people who demand a well-armed and trained _personal_ security detail are the very same people who enact laws to deprive the convenience store worker from having a firearm to defend themselves with while working in the middle of the night.
> Maybe the answer is to cool it with the idea that government officials all need to have large personal protective details.
It's just a numbers game. Some very small fraction of people are mentally broken and may develop a psychotic fixation on a particular person. The more publicly known you are, the greater the chances that a crazy person will pick you.
You and I don't need security people because only a few hundred other humans know we exist. The odds of one of them being a murderous psychopath are vanishingly small. Millions of people knew who John Lennon, Ronald Reagan, and Rebecca Schaeffer were, so they rolled the dice enough and lost.
But not one so big that every one of them needs multimillion dollars worth of protecting. A handful absolutely do, the vast majority don't. They will be perfectly fine. They might catch an egg or cake, or in the rare instance a fist: they'll still be fine.
Most politicians do not get secret service protection. Only those in the line of succesion, former presidents and family of the above.
The handful of congresspeople in leadership get special protection from capital police. Most elected congress people only get special protection if there is a specific concern.
Unfortunately, that is increasingly changing. The covid pandemic, for example, has led to a massive increase in threats to everyone advocating for containment measures, and so do the advocates of other political issues impacted by conspiracy myth spreaders and/or the far-right (e.g. 5G rollouts, single-payer healthcare, gun control, immigration).
Having been the target of about five dozen death threats myself as a political commentator/activist here in Germany, I can tell you the political climate drastically devolved over the last seven years, and police is nowhere near the security system it should be. In my case it took over four years until the main perpetrator was identified, arrested and subsequently sentenced to almost six years in prison[1]. And for what it's worth, it's not limited to politicians, journalists and activists - even ordinary doctors can be driven to suicide [2], or YouTube streamers such as the infamous Drachenlord [3].
That's a problem with a different solution, though.
Loads of people in other countries issue the same threats, but because they don't readily have access to ranged weapons, and specifically firearms (and every legal firearm that they do have are registered with the police), those threats are just that: threats.
Of course, we know the problem there, and everyone knows the solution, and everyone knows that solution cannot happen in the US, even if in the past it might have been possible to solve.
So by all means, protect the ones who really need it, but in a lot of cases, the solution to someone whose agenda is so controversial that they need secret service protection during elected visits to adversarial places (rather than being compelled to do so because of the office you hold) is to go "we're not going to protect you for personal activities. If you want to walk into a lion's den, expect lions. If you don't like that, maybe consider that you don't need to rile people up"
> Loads of people in other countries issue the same threats, but because they don't readily have access to ranged weapons, and specifically firearms (and every legal firearm that they do have are registered with the police), those threats are just that: threats.
All my examples were from Germany, a country with very strict gun control. And yet, Drachenlord got haters literally every single day shouting at or vandalizing his property, attacking him physically, swatting him (the first conviction of swatting in Germany was for a Drachenlord hater). LGBT people or people "looking foreign" routinely get beaten up with fists.
Gun control is a relevant issue, yes, but it's only a very small part.
>If you want to walk into a lion's den, expect lions. If you don't like that, maybe consider that you don't need to rile people up
That's pure victim blaming with a healthy dose of "chilling effect" applied and I'm sad to see such a take on this site. Speaking the truth, advocating for democracy must be protected at all costs.
> That's pure victim blaming with a healthy dose of "chilling effect" applied and I'm sad to see such a take on this site. Speaking the truth, advocating for democracy must be protected at all costs.
quite the overreach: by all means, have your opinions and spout them, and by all means, request local police protection because that's what police is for, but if you're so divisive that need the US Secret Service to protect you: maybe you don't. There are very few people who should qualify for that.
Don't pretend I'm saying no one deserves protection, I'm saying almost no one deserves USSS protection.
> and by all means, request local police protection because that's what police is for
Local police in the US has been shown often enough to seriously lack training: 21 weeks on average [1] - that is ridiculous, even traffic cops in Germany have to pass through literally two and a half year of training, and another four years and a strict physical training regime for the high rank allowing them into personal protection details. Not to mention many police departments are already overwhelmed with responsibilities, have massive cultural problems on their own, or actually are underfunded - while ridiculous budgets like NYPD are so widely known they're almost a meme, many smaller PDs (and, associated, fire departments and EMTs) seriously struggle with funding to keep the lights on. Adding the workload required to provide somewhat decent amount of protection for exposed persons would completely bust a lot of them.
> There are very few people who should qualify for that.
IMO, the list is orders of magnitude longer - Members of Congress, members of the government, their publicly known top staff, leaders and deputy leaders of government agencies, on state level at least the governors and their cabinet, and the heads of major parties as well. That's for the US a couple thousand people, protection details shouldn't be that expensive given how large the US federal budget already is. Recent events, not just the events surrounding Jan 6th, but also all the other threats that have happened over the last years (and yes, I include the shooting of Republican Steve Scalise here), warrant it IMO to make sure at least the representatives and the most important people in government get the very best protection there is, independent of the country.
As far as I am aware, the vast majority of politicians in the US do not receive Secret Service protection.
"every one of them needs multimillion dollars worth of protecting" is a straw man. Of course the vast majority of politicians, which includes a lot of city council members of tiny towns and so forth, do not need a 24hr security detail. And they don't have them either.
It happens for the handful, not the majority. Which seems to be what you want, but your tone is frustrated or angry.
In the present time, there is an air defense network around Washington DC. It uses the NASAMs system. Anything that is determined to be a threat can be engaged with surface launched AIM-120C missiles.
That Pentagon shaped pool really caught my eye, then the long covered building, had to look it up. Now I know all about the David Taylor Model Basin and the Naval Surface Warfare Center's Explosive Test Pond.
I have no idea how the Secret Service in particular is doing, but I would kind of expect that any actual anti-aircraft missiles would be owned and operated by some unit of the Army or National Guard or something. They own all of the actual missiles, and repair and maintenance people and gear, and probably training for how to operate it and how to try not to fuck up when you have 15 seconds to determine if an incoming aircraft is hostile and needs to have missiles fired at it.
Also the way they were caught with their pants down on 9/11 kind of suggests that there was no actual military level ordinance readily available around DC at the time. Maybe there is now, but I heard at the time they scrambled some fighter jets with no weapons because there wasn't time to get the weapons out of wherever they were stored and load them up.
The answer is that the people with their finger on the missile trigger knew the aircraft was no threat due to radar and visual interceptions and decided not to launch a dangerous missile into the middle of a huge city full of important officials since moving the President and other important officials to a basement would be sufficient to protect them from a Cessna. Instead, they waited for the plane to come down somewhere (on the lawn, it seems) and arrested the person inside.
> people with their finger on the missile trigger knew the aircraft was no threat due to radar and visual interceptions and decided not to launch a dangerous missile
I don't think we have evidence of this. The simple truth is the U.S. government doesn't fortify against domestic enemies in a systematic way.
> since moving the President and other important officials to a basement would be sufficient to protect them from a Cessna.
I think it's safe to assume that the bunkers under the White House are sufficient protection against as much explosives as a Cessna could possibly carry. The plane itself will do almost no damage, it's a flimsy thing built light out of aluminum and it's not even fast.
Not if you have ample time to move everyone to safety before it arrives. Seems a good trade off to make if you aren't confident what the pilot's intentions are instead of just blowing them out of the sky.
"Landed" is not quite correct for 1994: the guy crashed it. (He had been smoking crack beforehand, as I recall.)
This led the government to close Pennsylvania Avenue NW between 15th and 17th Streets. The reasoning was not apparent, for the pilot had certainly not taken off there--he flew from a field in Maryland.
Pennsylvania Ave was closed to vehicle traffic on May 20, 1995, following the April 19 truck bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, in which 168 people died.
Yes, it seems unlikely. How many civilians would be in danger by the debris raining down on central DC (or the white house itself, if he really was right over it). Not to mention the risk of a missile missing the target and instead exploding somewhere down on the street.
>> book makes it clear that the Secret Service is constantly underfunded
it is critical that we recognize a few truths before we declare something "underfunded"
1. No amount of funding will ever "be enough". Government programs and depts expand to meet their budget + 25-50%... so they are always underfunded, you can increase a budget by 2x, 3x, 5x, and the very next year they will be claiming "we do not have enough money"
2. Where is the money going.... Often in government budgets essentials (like fleet repair) are cut in favor of non-essentials in order to make the budget issue into a "crisis". It is much easier to blackmail the public /congress/ who ever that is controlling the budget with "We have to use our personal cars" instead of "We had to give up our Cappuccino's" . Just because essential services are being cut does not mean nonessential services have. This is seen in local government often when they cut the big 4 (schools, fire, police, roads) first because it is easy to pass a tax increase for those 4 items than any other local service / program.
The less politically interesting government agencies tend to work surprisingly well with minimal budget and no need for games.
The National Transportation Safety Board for example has a 2023 budget request of 129 million. They are simply for too tiny and useful for anyone to really mess with.
The National Weather Service might have 10x the budget still generally gets ignored by politicians as so many companies, people, and government agencies depend on what they provide.
> 1. No amount of funding will ever "be enough". Government programs and depts expand to meet their budget + 25-50%... so they are always underfunded, you can increase a budget by 2x, 3x, 5x, and the very next year they will be claiming "we do not have enough money"
Well, the scope that the general public (or the impact of freshly passed laws) also continuously expands, and payment/contractor/vendor costs rise as well, which explains some of the demand for more funding.
A part of the blame also lies in parliament groups not doing effective auditing and oversight on government agencies, which can differentiate between legitimate growth (for reasons outlined above) and cancerous growth (as described by you).
Looks like they get ~3 billion a year and employ 8000 people. Seems like chump change. They have responsibilities beyond just protecting the president.
Washington National doesn't have any runways that run perpendicular to the Potomac, so if the pilot maintained runway heading on takeoff, he should have already been more or less aligned with the river going north or south. The story says he landed on a 6000 foot runway. There are three runways on the field: 1/19 is 7169 feet, 15/33 is 5204 feet, and 4/22 is 5000 feet. It's possible the runways were configured differently back then, but it's most likely that runway 1/19 was in use because it's the only one over 6000 feet. That runway runs almost due North/South. If the tower operator instructed the pilot to follow the river after departure and intended the pilot to fly south, it's almost certain the pilot took off on runway 19 which is nearly parallel to the river and the pilot would be traveling south. If the pilot found themselves crossing the river, they were not on a runway heading and had already deviated. The pilot could have checked his compass or heading indicator, take into account the runway heading of 190 degrees, and that should have informed him to turn right to return to his original heading. Instead, the pilot turned left which put him in the opposite heading he was assigned.
That does match with the rest of the story. Left turn of of 18/19 to go up river would point him back towards the Whitehouse and Capitol. It does make their mistake a little more egregious though because if they're 'following the river' turning nearly 180 to do that and also not following the flow is much larger change than simply following your current heading and making the small turn to follow the river out to sea. That unexpected and uninstructed turn back towards the WH and Capitol certainly would have raised a lot of eyebrows.
One thing I am having trouble with is picturing where they would have been crossing the river at 1500 feet. The Potomac is basically at the end of the runway he took off from.
On the other hand for the rest of the process small planes aren't that rare in National and there's even a rather scenic approach pattern that actually follows the Potomac into runway 19. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zco3XlYt6Ko
During flight school, one of the first things we learn on a piston-single aircraft is to apply right rudder and maintain runway heading on takeoff. Small single-engine planes have a tendency to yaw left due to effects of torque, slipstream, and p-factor. I'm guessing the pilot drifted left on climbout due to lack of right rudder. He could have turned 90 degrees by the time he leveled out at 1500 feet and been over the river. Sometimes as pilots, the worst thing we can do is react. It's usually best to take a breath, think about your situation, cross-check, decide, and act intentionally. By rolling the dice, the pilot had a 50/50 chance of making the wrong decision. I don't like those odds.
I had the same skeptical reaction to this story. The runways may have changed numbers (I’m not sure how to confirm this), but if they were crossing the river taking off from what is now runway 19, they seriously deviated from their flight plan and deserved the call.
Agreed that the pilot definitely made a huge, and not really reasonable mistake. Even though it was pre-9/11, I'd expect a pilot who was going to fly in/around DC to know there's going to be restricted airspace and to take the time to understand it.
(if link doesn't work, go to the Wikipedia article for Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, and look at the bullets under "Expansion and restrictions")
> The runways may have changed numbers (I’m not sure how to confirm this)
Runways and named by taking the degrees from magnetic north and dropping the last digit. Parallel runways will be designated (for example) 31L(eft) 31C(enter) 31R(right).
Almost certainly he took off northbound, which puts you pretty quickly over DC if you do not turn your plane left to track with the bend in the river just north of the airport.
Another clueless VFR pilot in Washington DC restricted airspace. This reads like pre 9/11 procedures.
Hearing from Oklahoma City FAA 3 weeks later has to be pre-9/11.
Currently, operations to and from Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, DCA, are "limited to DCA Approved Carriers."[1] There's a huge restricted area covering the whole Washington area and special ID and approval procedures. Any aircraft out of place gets an F-16 and a Coast Guard helicopter escort. (Used to be two F-16s, but the Coast Guard is more used to dealing with the lost and clueless.) This has happened hundreds of times, and now the FAA makes anyone who wants to fly anywhere near Washington take a course on how to do it.
The following sounds so stressful, especially considering the 727 was a trijet with a center engine! [1] That must have been a crazy vantage point in that time period.
> Seat belts fastened, I rolled forward made a right turn and taxied to runway 18 and took my place behind a 727, a large commercial airliner. When I looked back I saw another 727 roll onto the taxiway behind me and then as I slowly rolled forward there was another one behind that one. I was about twelth for departure. The radio traffic was constant. Like Jeopardy contestents the one that was quickest on the button got heard and those guys in the big planes were really fast.
Shouldn't the dispatcher have given more precise directions than "follow the river"? If they had said "take a right and follow the river", this wouldn't have been a problem. I suppose they were used to professional pilots knowing what was meant, but they were already working to fit a small plane into a larger system presumably filled with mostly larger jets from commercial airlines that flew in and out of that airport regularly. Although I do agree that the pilot should have had no-fly zones at the top of their mind when flying in or around D.C.
Actually no. The fact that to the left was a restricted airspace (that the pilot must be aware of) disambiguates the instructions already. Obviously the pilot did not do their flight preparation, was it includes being familiar with any airspace restrictions.
Also. I'm looking at a chart of the DC airspace. P-56, the restricted airspace containing the White House, is not on any rivers. If you are following the river (left, right, doesn't matter) then you are not getting into P-56. If you are oscillating around the river then yeah, you are going to have a bad time.
Also, I'm looking at all the runways at this airport. They all have one obvious direction which way you should be following the river. Just from the angle your flightpath would be crossing the river.
If you take off northbound, you only have a few seconds to turn left with the river before you’re over DC and into restricted airspace. If you take off and obliviously fly straight, it’s too late. It’s not a wide river.
Once you’re across the river, turning left is way worse (takes you directly over the federal complex), so ATC told them to turn right to exit the restricted airspace. That would take them around over SE DC.
Yeah. No joke. it is even on the departure chart: "Departing Rwy 1 requires expeditious intercept of outbound course to ensure avoidance of P-56 boundary"
Taking off north-bound (runway 1) wouldn't give you the option of flying up the Anacostia (the right spur that bisects DC when looking at a standard map).
Taking of north-east (runway 4) would give you the option of taking the Potomac (left) or Anacostia (right).
I've never seen runway 4 used. It's usually a north flow using 1.
From the description they took off from 18 (now 19 due to pole drift) it sounds like they might have taken a left basically immediately off the runway which would put them pointed pretty directly at the restricted airspace around the Capital and White House. It is odd they'd be there though considering the story says the check for the river on reaching 1500 which even at best climb would be around two minutes after take off which should be well past the river.
Not a pilot so I don't know if they'd use that language today, but there have been more than a few lessons written in blood over the years regarding ambiguous/unclear ATC communications. For example the worst air disaster ever occurred in part because a controller gave the instruction (paraphrasing), "cleared to beacon after takeoff." It was intended only as instructions to be followed after takeoff, but the pilot interpreted it as, "you are cleared to takeoff, then follow these instructions." The airport was under heavy fog at the time so he couldn't see the plane that was taxiing and hadn't cleared the runway yet. Two 747s collided and nearly 600 people died.
Honestly, I'm surprised by "follow the river" as a flight instruction. That sounds like the directions you'd get from someone that doesn't understand cardinal directions. "Turn right at the gas station, then turn left at the big oak tree" or something.
I have no experience with flying, but I assumed it would be a heading / cardinal direction and not "turn right at [landmark]"
This is a fairly common instruction from a controller in my experience, at least when dealing with small aircraft that they know are flying VFR. Traditional VFR navigation ("pilotage") is mostly based on finding landmarks anyway. Flying in another city with a runway pointed towards a river, "turn after the river," "report crossing the river" are common instructions.
Other landmarks popular with controllers include the freeway, the big Marriot, the Amazon warehouse, etc. It's sort of surprisingly informal when controllers are dealing with local light aircraft pilots. But that's mostly how those pilots are navigating anyway, "follow the freeway until the bridge."
There probably is a certain risk of misunderstanding here, but then pilots are expected to be reasonably familiar with the local area and its procedures, and to ask for vectors when unsure. These days DC is one of those places that it's strongly recommended (required by FARs now, I think?) to take a familiarization course because the airspace issues there are so sensitive. Plus they have the laser gun to minimize the need to send fighters.
Indeed. Popular landmarks used by ATC in the SF Bay Area include a sunken ship in the middle of the bay, a (particularly large) church, a community college, an AT&T telephone office, the KNBR antenna, and major freeways. Among others.
It's different when flying IFR, but pilotage is an important part of VFR navigation.
It's also worth noting there's an IFR visual approach plate for DCA that basically says the same thing - "follow the river":
"follow the river" is more than a single turn; the river winds so it's a sequence of turns. Because of this saying follow the river is much more concise than the specific turns.
It's actually fairly common (in my area, for example, it's common for the controller to tell you to follow the interstate for awhile, and it works especially well at night).
Keep in mind too that just telling someone to fly a certain direction is insufficient - the controller is trying to maintain separation among aircraft, so they need you to follow a particular path through a volume.
Hmm, can someone just paint me that path into Google Maps?
Washington National has no 18, but only a 19, and I guess everyone takes off southwards as directly north is the White House? Also the river is like parallel to the runway and then the natural extension of it, so "follow the river" there is super clear, no turn needed?
Depending on how long ago this happened that could be the same runway. There was an article that made the front page here in the last month or so about how the movement of the magnetic poles requires runway names to be adjusted periodically. This isn't that same article, I didn't feel like digging through my history, but it explains the same topic.
Thanks for all and that link, but yeah I was assuming 18==19 already and meant to understand runway numbers, maybe should have left out that detail.
Actual question still sticks: Takeoff on 18 southwards basically makes you follow the river immediately. Where did this guy encounter his left/right decision, to get back towards white house? he must have made almost a uturn then?
And even assuming the article is a bit inaccurate and he took of northwards (thanks for pointing out the patterns pilots have to fly if doing that @ others): I still cannot imagine how that plane flew and where it matches the description of: "When I reached 1500 feet I looked down. I was crossing the river. It went right and left."
I always find it funny how shortly after CGPGrey posts about a thing (or John Oliver does a segment on LWT), a large number of commenters will speak on it as experts at the next available opportunity. It's obvious how many of us watch the same channels.
You’re correct. I live near DC and travel there for photography (much like the novice pilot in the OP).
If you’re flying near DC, or anywhere really, you should at least have a broad understanding of where you cannot fly. That is your responsibility; nobody in your ear will say “remember, don’t go to the restricted airspace.”
The pilot never claims to be the victim here, either. They screwed up and learned their lesson.
I used to sit nearby on my lunch break, and on a clear day you could watch planes after takeoff clearly follow the course of the river N/NW until completely out of sight, which would probably have been close the DC/Maryland border. They would be going in and out every few minutes and they all took the exact same flight path.
Nah it's pretty common. When I take people around the golden gate bridge ATC tells me "Remain west of the 101 / Keep the 101 off your right at or below 2,000". And then later "Remain north and west of bay bridge".
They probably assumed that a) the pilot knew about the exclusion zone (kind of a big deal!) and b) you follow a river downstream (usually) so their instruction seemed (to them) unambiguous.
Taking off from runway 18 (now 19) you're pointed essentially down river already though. The Potomac is right there at the end of the runway. That's the most confusing part of the story to me is how he was ambiguously crossing the river after taking off basically straight downstream.
Anyone in possession of either a geographic sense of the area (or a VFR sectional) who has departed due south from National and is told to "maintain runway heading and follow the river" would not be confused.
It seems like the FAA guy had at least the core of the right idea that the author wasn't really prepared for flying out of such a busy airport and restricted area. Now afaik access is more restricted and flight plans from people who haven't taken a particular class on flying through Washington National will be denied, but you can still totally fly a small plane into and out of that airport if you really want to.
Interestingly, the US Coast Guards only “no fail” mission is providing rotary wing air intercept capability to the air defense network. In the National Capital Region they have helicopters that get scrambled as part of the air defense response to go intercept air targets that a slow and low. Basically anything that it would be hard for a fighter jet to pull up along side and match airspeed with. The Coast Guard helos don’t have any air to air weapons capability, their main purpose is to prevent false positives. They can get real close and relay information to the air defense folks who have access to weapons systems, and also a helicopter suddenly appearing next to you with a signboard saying that you need to turn immediately is a pretty good indicator to a weekend warrior that they are not supposed to be flying there.
I had a similar experience in 2008. I was an Air Force helicopter pilot stationed at Andrews Air Force Base just outside DC. I got a last-minute assignment to show a new copilot some of our operating sites on the north side of DC. One of those sites was Camp David. I read through the NOTAMS but didn't notice that the large restricted area around Camp David was active that day because the president was there. So we totally busted through the outer restricted area and the Secret Service wanted my head. They launched a helicopter to chase me away, and they almost launched the F-16s at Andrews. I almost lost my wings. It was a bad day.
One of the things that surprised me when I flew (as a passenger) a practice flight on a coworker’s Cessna was the constant radio chat between ground and all the airplanes. There were like 4 planes doing practice runs like us. It was constant chitchat.
I can’t imagine the noise in a big comercial airport.
I am sure there’s many good reasons for that system, figured out by people smarter than me with much more experience.
To me the whole thing felt too … manual. Imagine a bunch of train operators trying to avoid head-on collisions by all of them talking with a single control guy on a shared channel. But the trains move in 3D, one order of magnitude faster, and if they run out of fuel, they explode.
There is a lot more going on than just the radio communications. There are standard published approaches and departures that will generally be flown (once cleared). Flight plans are filed and clearance given before take-off, so ATC knows where everyone is going. At a large controlled airport, ATC is in control, so less needs to be communicated by the pilots. There are not generally aircraft flying circuits which is what required so much coordination in your example. Most aircraft at large airports are required to have ADS-B(1) which is transmitting aircraft position, altitude, heading, speed, et cetera to anyone who has a receiver, particularly ATC and other aircraft. If everything does go bad, large airliners have TCAS(2). There are also lots of different controllers and frequencies to handle different parts of the airspace: approach, departure, tower (take-off and landing). This is just what I can think of off the top of my head.
You can listen to what is actually going on at your favourite airport on www.liveatc.net.
This is partially mitigated by data systems for commercial airliners. They have an in cockpit system that give them takeoff clearance & other details from the relevant air traffic controllers. I think they still verbally acknowledge something on the radio, but it is a brief exchange.
I'll let a professional pilot try and add more detail here as to how it lessens the workload on the radio.
With commercial airlines, there’s 2+ pilots in the cockpit. So, they share flying, radio, etc responsibilities. And ATC splits various phases of flight operations across several radio frequencies (ground, departure, etc).
And once you’ve listened to enough ATC radio, there are patterns and cues. If ATC wants to talk to somebody, they call them by flight number, etc.
But, yeah, listening to a busy airport is confusing for anybody who isn’t an experienced pilot.
Technology has made this problem better: most pilots these days are flying with a GPS enabled moving map. Little airplane icon, big scary boxes around restricted airspace. Yes all this stuff is optional and a good pilot will have other ways of knowing where they are. But in normal operation most pilots have something simple now. That wasn't the case years ago.
> Rust's flight irreparably damaged the reputation of the Soviet military. This enabled Gorbachev to remove many of the strongest opponents to his reforms. Minister of Defence Sergei Sokolov and the head of the Soviet Air Defence Forces Alexander Koldunov were dismissed along with hundreds of other officers. This was the biggest turnover in the Soviet military since Stalin's purges 50 years earlier.
This flight is a whole series of extraordinary coincidences, but the fact that such a ridiculous event essentially cleared the way for Gorbachev to reform the entire Soviet military is astonishing. History is full of strange things.
I have a feeling the person who made the call was trying to intimidate him. I'm fairly sure no jet was being scrambled or anti-air was being aimed for a small plane that made a wrong turn..
I hope they were scrambling jets, that's their job. I'm sure they assumed it was some mistake, but if it isn't, by the time you know for sure it is too late. I'm sure "scrambled" meant "pilots sprinting for their planes" and beginning the process, not that they have pilots sitting in warmed up planes ready to take off for intercept the moment someone crosses the restricted airspace line.
The FAA caller was absolutely trying to convey that he was completely out of his depth, though. As is appropriate.
Scrambling jets to intercept planes that wander into no-fly zones is a regular occurrence at DCA (the military craft usually launch from Andrews AFB, or possibly a local USCG station for rotorcraft).
Not uncommon at other airports where POTUS is a regular, airports with other VIPs (NYC area), major sporting events (no fly around the Super Bowl stadium). DCA has a permanent zone, the others are temporary and communicated via NOTAM.
We don't know what might have been going on at the White House at that particular time though. Was the President having a press conference, for example?
Thanks everyone for reading the story and the investigators for figuring out the real runway!
My grandfather is an amazing man, storyteller, and my personal hero. He was an ad photographer in the mad men era. You can see some of his photographs here: https://condenaststore.com/collections/leonard+nones
> "Airline pilots are the best at what they do and have spent years honing their craft."
And apparently one of those rare and vital skills is filling in the gaps when talking to air traffic controllers who are not competent to communicate life-or-death information.
No the rare and vital skill is to get a map and look at it and figure out which way you are going to go. How come this person didn't know if they have to turn left or right? How come they didn't know from the top of their head the airspace structure around them (including restricted airspaces, especially). This is 101 level stuff.
But at the same time, ATC told him to follow the river, while in its trajectory he was crossing it. Did he do a wrong maneuver that made him go in the wrong direction form the start? Or was ATC that didn't give the information correctly?
The river visual is a published approach for DCA. P-56 (the restricted airspace the pilot almost penetrated) is VERY well known and would top of mind for anyone flying in that airspace - not to mention highlighted on paper charts, EFBs, and panel-mount GPSes.
This is basic preflight planning. The pilot didn't adequately prepare, given the complexity of the airspace they were flying in.
ATC isn't there to micromanage your flight. They don't need to tell you to avoid restricted airspace, it's implied.
If ATC tells you to do something you have to do that (with rare exceptions). Doesn't matter if you want to go some other direction. So even if he wanted to go up the Anacostia, if ATC said go up the Potomac then you go up the Potomac so it doesn't have to do with not knowing where you're going, it's the ambiguity of the instruction.
Could he have guessed that the Anacostia would have been a better decision since the mall is just up the Potomac? Sure, maybe, but the real answer is be rude on the radio if you have to and get that clarification.
> Doesn't matter if you want to go some other direction.
I'm not talking about wanting to go some other direction. I'm talking about the previous departure clearance he received. Those are the "A very busy air traffic controller spit out departure instructions." followed by the "hectic voice said “we have an amendment to your departure are you ready to copy”". Those are telling him which way to go. And they don't just rattle them off and good luck. They wait for the pilot to read them back, and they check that the pilot reads them back correctly.
I bet that he was not cleared for a visual departure out of DCA. So the departure he received must have had a list of nav points. Were they left or right? What restricted airspaces were there in the vicinity he should be aware of?
You know, it is telling that those details are left out. Probably if they were spelled out it would be clearer how big a mistake the pilot did. Very conveniently they are mentioned but not described.
> I bet that he was not cleared for a visual departure out of DCA.
Why not? DCA has a charted, named visual arrival. A visual departure via pilotage is no different, and is very common for VFR flights. (Yes, they would've been given a departure clearance with a route to follow, but "follow the river" is a valid VFR clearance.)
> What restricted airspaces were there in the vicinity he should be aware of?
That's on the chart. ATC doesn't need to (and usually won't) tell you about those. It's expected the pilot has done adequate preflight planning to be aware of them.
You have to do a readback but unless you're familiar with DC geography you might not think to ask which river to follow. You could give the readback correctly and then realize you have follow up questions that can't be addressed conclusively by looking at a map. Correct move by that point was ask for clarification even if it made you sound dumb on the radio.
I wonder if Air Traffic Controller is a misnomer of the same type as "Autopilot". It's a true enough description, but it gives the wrong impression to inexperienced persons.
Pilots are always responsible for flying their aircraft in a safe manner. At the same time, the whole system must allow for pilots to do this. It has been many years since aircraft incidents have been investigated in a monocausal manner; the whole system is examined each time.
ATC expects a high level of professionalism from pilots, especially at a major airport.
Primary ATC is still done that way but at least for the big jets there are other ways they send digital comms to ATC[1]. The main reason is because radios fail and more complex radios fail more easily. A standard Jetliner carries three radios, any of which the pilots can use to contact ATC. The bands are internationally standardized. So it's not just a case of the FAA mandating a change. It would have to be the entire world. So even if the FAA did require digital radios it wouldn't actually change much because both ground and plane would still have to transmit analog backup anyway. That creates more chatter etc.
It's also important to recognize that controllers are human and can only deal with one thing at once. The current system generally speaking gives one human control over one section of airspace.
In this specific case the pilot should have been aware of the restricted airspace and set a flight plan that took them away from it before turning to their destination. There is zero excuses for flying into restricted airspace as there are published maps. The zone around the WH and USC is a permanent zone, so even less of an excuse.
Interesting, that explanation does make sense. It's interesting to think about how the limits of human synchronous focus are involved. That must be such a stressful job! TIL about ACARS.
Airplanes live for decades (probably a fair amount are going to pass the 100 year mark) and so backwards compatibility is a huge issue for adding any tech into the system.
Radio works pretty well and it's flexible. Imagine some asshole is flying a drone around on short final. It's easy enough to say "Hey heads up everyone, there's a DJI buzzing around at 200'", but with a more streamlined system there might not be an easy way to communicate that, and if you have the new system and radios then you still need to commmunicate everything on both while everyone adopts the new system.
Same reason there's party chat in your FPS game - puts a sense to use for a real time information channel. Most of the time voice ATC comms are boring, but when they are not they're super useful.
Set a calendar reminder for the afternoon of July 23, 2023 in UTC-5, and go listen to the audio channel for the north ATC sector for AirVenture arrivals at KOSH. You'll get what I mean.
Put on your systems theory hat when thinking about alternatives.
FWIW, As was discussed in the post, ground/departure channels at a major airport were overwhelmingly busy for a private pilot untrained in that environment. As an occasional private passenger, I'm accustomed to quite low radio traffic because of the routes and airports we use. I've heard radio so quiet that a Controller handed us off to... herself on a different frequency for a different airspace.
I feel it somewhat obvious that humans talking to humans is a good thing for life and death split second stuff, same page there.
But aren't most of the comms really rote and mundane instructions that follow a standard pattern? We trust automated systems to land the plane, [1] why not to tell a plane to say, cross runway 22 and stop at threshold Z?
A human could still give that instruction, but with a button instead of their mouth parts flapping? Then the radio channel would be more open for higher urgency stuff.
People may chime in at any time and the relative priority, timing, volume, etc of calls is unknown in advance. Basically it’s CSMA, implemented via human brain. If it’s good enough for Ethernet, it’s good enough for ATC.
After looking at the map I am a little confused on which river. Sounds like he took off in a NE direction and the ATC's command to "follow the river" meant follow the Anacostia river NE. Maybe the pilot was confused by the Washington Channel and started to follow that when he turned left?
They say they lined up on runway 18 which is now runway 19 so they were flying almost directly south. That doesn't really clear up how they had any ambiguity about what direction they should go to follow the river though because for a decent ways you're already following the river downstream.
In addition to everything else, this pilot may have put himself at considerable risk of running into wake turbulence by following behind a 727. Waiting 3 minutes or more for the vortices to dissipate would not have gone down well in this situation.
The 3 minute delay for wake turbulence is required by ATC procedures (when applicable). It can only be waived by the pilot in specific situations, and only by the pilots request.
It's built into the procedures, expected, and is totally acceptable.
Source: FAA JO 7110.65, Chapter 3, Section 10 ("Arrival Procedures and Separation")
If ground-to-air missiles are ready to protect the White House way back in the ‘70s or ‘80s, then why were none used to defend The Pentagon from the huge aircraft that crashed into it in 2001?
> If ground-to-air missiles are ready to protect the White House way back in the ’70s or ’80s, then why were none used to defend The Pentagon from the huge aircraft that crashed into it in 2001?
The White House is not the Pentagon.
Also, while there have been rumors for decades of White House SAMs for decades (usually MANPADS – but sometimes something more capable), they’ve never been officially acknowledged and, and AFAICT the only thing that has ever become non-speculative public knowledge was an Avenger system that was photographed on a rooftop across the street during an alert in 2019 (by which time it was also known that D.C. had a post- and motivated-by- 9/11 layered air defense system, including NASAMS batteries.
But when this occurred, “before cell phones were invented”, if it wasn’t an embellishment added to the story, it was probably just something that was said to drive in the point “don’t ever make that mistake again”.
The FAA representatives terrible attitude aside, I sense there's something that is being left out. When the author states "I filed a visual flight plan and we were on our way." that would seem to indicate that he looked at a chart, saw the restricted airspace, and planned his takeoff and turn appropriately.
From the information given, I think the FAA rep was a douche but the author clearly did not plan his route properly. Also, this line was very confusing "cell phones had not not yet been invented."
If that's the case I seriously doubt missiles were pointed at anyone. Clearly this is pre-2001, maybe even back to the 80s. While jets may have been scrambled, I am calling BS on that whole part of the conversation.
The timeline, security posture, and even the flight corridors don't add up. Something is fishy...
While this might be true, there were some reports (without government confirmation) that such missiles already deployed before 2001 [1]. The other thing is that it might be only a bluff the FAA officer add fot psychological purpose.
One last guess is that it might be already anti air missile system from a nearby airbase or so ( which I don't have idea about if this was even feasible)
> The FAA representatives terrible attitude aside...
If this pilot did anything like this today, he would be in for a lot more trouble than a tongue-lashing over the phone. I don't know what the range of prescribed sanctions for this sort of infraction were at the time, but I suspect the person handling the case was exercising some discretion in choosing to respond with nothing more than a verbal dope-slap.
The FAA rep is not just dissuading the pilot but any others who may hear about it. Also given the era it was much easier to get away with such bluffs as people couldn’t jump onto the internet to look for corroborating evidence.
I feel like there has to be a lot of stories similar to this where people got really close to getting shot down. Rare but not completely uncommon .. or is this truly a unique story?
I really doubt that he was all that close to being shot down. I actually doubt fighters were scrambled or missiles armed. They might have been if he had entered restricted airspace, but from the story, it sure sounds like he did not. Even if he did enter restricted airspace, the threat would have been assessed, actions taken, and so on. Perhaps, he might have even gotten a fighter escort out of restricted airspace. Shooting down a plane over a populated area is going to be an absolute last resort.
It’s a normal, but infrequent, occurrence in locations where POTUS or other VIPs are frequently located. DC has permanent restrictions. Camp David temporary restrictions when POTUS is in residence. Restrictions are also placed around major sporting events (Super Bowl), though I’m not sure if those are for fear of somebody dive bombing the stadium or for the other reasons (events often have military fly-bys, parachute displays, etc).
I’ve listened to a few intercepts on the radio. They don’t shoot without a good bit of verification. Typically, the lost pilot gets a hint when they see the F-16 fly across their nose, or a USCG helicopter flies alongside, or ATC finally gets through to them.
I have to think that the F-16 flying by the civilian - the pilot is probably having a relatively enjoyable time (as soon as they know it isn't a threat). It's like rolling up beside a toyata camry with a bugatti veyron (insert your choice super car).
Not even close. The last thing a civilian pilot wants is an F-16 rolling up. If that happens, there will almost certainly be a LEO waiting at the nearest airstrip waiting to debrief them. And likely a suspension of their license. Many times worse than the “I have a phone number for you to call” you get from ATC after a “normal” screw up.
