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WASHINGTON (AFP) –
April 28 (Bloomberg)
-- President Barack Obama ordered a review of a
publicity-photo shoot with one of the planes
that serves as Air Force One that cost taxpayers
$328,835 and caused a furor in New York City.
Obama said he wasn’t
informed in advance of yesterday’s low-altitude
flight over New York Harbor, which rattled
windows in New York’s financial district and
prompted some office workers to flee buildings
in fear it was a terrorist attack.
“It was a mistake,”
Obama said today before a meeting at FBI
headquarters in Washington. “It will not happen
again.”
The incident
continued to reverberate in New York and
Washington today with two senators demanding an
accounting of how the flight was approved, its
cost and procedures aimed at avoiding a repeat.
“The supposed
mission represents a fundamentally unsound
exercise in military judgment and may have
constituted an inappropriate use of Department
of Defense resources,” Senator John McCain of
Arizona wrote in a letter to Defense Secretary
Robert Gates.
McCain, the senior Republican on the Armed
Services Committee, asked Gates to provide a
description of the mission, who ultimately
approved it and an estimate of how much it cost.
The flight by the
VC-25, a modified Boeing Co. 747, and two F-16
fighter jets cost $328,835, Air Force
spokeswoman Vicki Stein said.
Three-Hour Mission
That includes $300,658 for the larger plane,
which flew a three-hour mission, and about
$28,178 for the F-16 jets, which flew 1.8 hours
each, Stein said in an e-mailed statement.
The total includes
fuel used in flight, fuel used to power ground
equipment used to prepare the aircraft, and
ground maintenance, Stein said.
White House press
secretary Robert Gibbs said yesterday’s flyover
was “two training missions that became in the
end a picture mission” and only Air Force
personnel were aboard.
Obama has directed
Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina to review “how
the decision was made to conduct the flight,”
Gibbs said at the daily White House briefing.
Democratic Senator
Charles Schumer of New York said in a statement
that he asked Transportation Secretary Ray
LaHood, whose department oversee the
Federal Aviation Administration,
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to create an
“ironclad procedure” to inform the public about
such flights at least 48 hours in advance.
Anticipating
Concern
"Somewhere along the line, someone at
the FAA should have had the foresight to realize
that New Yorkers would see this stunt and think
back to 9-11," McCain, who ran against Obama in
the 2008 presidential election, also said that
the disruption and panic caused by the flight
should have been foreseeable. He wrote that the
apology and acceptance of responsibility from
Louis Caldera, director of the White House
Military Office, “rings hollow.”
Obama today ignored
questions from reporters about whether Caldera
should keep his job. Caldera yesterday took
responsibility for authorizing a photo shoot
involving the specially equipped 747 aircraft
and a fighter jet escort that frightened Wall
Street workers. The plane flew as low as 1,000
feet (305 meters).
In a statement
yesterday evening, Caldera apologized for “any
distress” it caused. While federal officials
“took the proper steps to notify state and local
authorities in New York and New Jersey, it’s
clear that the mission created confusion and
disruption,” he said.
Caldera, 53, a
graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West
Point and a lawyer, was secretary of the Army
during the Clinton administration and previously
was a state legislator in California.
‘Furious’ Reaction
New York Mayor
Michael Bloomberg said yesterday that he was
“furious” when he was told about the flight.
Obama also was “furious” about the incident and
the confusion it caused, Gibbs told reporters.
Gibbs said the White
House review of the incident probably wouldn’t
take more than a couple of weeks. “And the
president will look at that review and take any
appropriate steps after that,” Gibbs said.
Paul Browne, deputy
New York City police commissioner, said
yesterday that the department was told by the
FAA not to inform the public about what it
thought would be a higher flyover by two F-16s
and an Air Force VC-25 aircraft. The VC-25, a
military version of the 747, is used as Air
Force One when the president flies on it.
The planes flew past
the Statue of Liberty and the financial district
near the World Trade Center site that was hit in
the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The aircraft
were on a “photo mission,” Jim Peters, an FAA
spokesman, said yesterday. The mayor is founder
and majority owner of Bloomberg News parent
Bloomberg LP. |
