Obama Says NY Plane Scare Won't Happen Again
President Barack Obama said on Tuesday a flight by one of his planes over New York, which caused panic and the evacuation of some office buildings, was a mistake and would not happen again.
"It was a mistake as stated. It was something we found out about along with all of you. It will not happen again," Obama told reporters during a visit to FBI headquarters.
The flight on Monday over lower Manhattan by one of the presidential Boeing 747s for a photo-shoot infuriated New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who demanded an explanation. He criticized it as insensitive and demanded to know why the public had not been informed.
New Yorkers are still sensitive to any incident that evokes the September 11 attacks in 2001 in which hijacked airliners destroyed the twin towers of the World Trade Centre.
Many people panicked and evacuated office buildings when the plane, escorted by an F-16 fighter jet, flew low over lower Manhattan.
Aides said Obama had been furious when he learned of the incident. His chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, communicated that to the director of the White House Military Office, Louis Caldera, who ordered the mission and has apologized.
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs faced a barrage of questions about the incident at a news conference but declined to be drawn on Caldera's future. Obama similarly refused to comment when asked by a reporter whether Caldera was the right man for the job.
Gibbs said the president had directed Jim Messina, the White House deputy chief of staff, to look into how the decision to conduct the flight had been arrived at. The review was expected to take several weeks, he said.
The flyover involved one of the presidential planes, whose call sign is Air Force One when the president is aboard, and an F-16 fighter.
Police said federal authorities had told them not to disclose any information to the public beforehand about the flight, the aim of which was to get a publicity photo of the plane against a backdrop of the Statue of Liberty.
Republican Senator John McCain wrote a letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates demanding that the administration provide some answers. McCain called the mission "a fundamentally unsound exercise in military judgment and may have constituted an inappropriate use of Department of Defense resources."
