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My grandfather was almost shot down at the White House (2018)

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Re: My grandfather was almost shot down at the White House (2018)

#91

Post by thrwwy95fab9d1 »

squallgmn wrote: post #84

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 differ…

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.

Re: My grandfather was almost shot down at the White House (2018)

#92

Post by [deleted] »

thepasswordis wrote: post #23
pivo wrote: post #18

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…

>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 a…

[deleted]

Re: My grandfather was almost shot down at the White House (2018)

#93

Post by seunosewa »

nivenkos wrote: post #50
chucksmash wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 o…

Or Olof Palme.

J F Kennedy

Re: My grandfather was almost shot down at the White House (2018)

#94

Post by TheRealPomax »

mschuster91 wrote: post #60
TheRealPomax wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 po…

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"

Re: My grandfather was almost shot down at the White House (2018)

#95

Post by mwint »

mc32 wrote: post #87
hotpotamus wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lik…

'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.

It's that "within reason" that people get hung up on.

Re: My grandfather was almost shot down at the White House (2018)

#96

Post by adolph »

aidenn0 wrote: post #66
phpisthebest wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Assassinating the president has little to do with denying him the power of the presidency, and more to do with what he is a symbol of. Kind of like how 9/11 wasn't about killing some office workers

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.

Re: My grandfather was almost shot down at the White House (2018)

#98

Post by beebmam »

phpisthebest wrote: post #78
pixl97 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So how do you plan to deal with the continuation of government and nuclear weapon problem?

>>how do you plan to deal with the continuation of government Federalism. The Federal Government does far too much and most of its function should be left to State and Local governments. >>and nuclear weapon problem? MAD is a terrible strategy, and I dont think our Nuclear weapons serve the function many believe they do.

If the federal government should be reduced in power, then why should state or local governments have any more power over individuals?

Re: My grandfather was almost shot down at the White House (2018)

#99

Post by marnett »

phpisthebest wrote: post #77
aidenn0 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assassinating the president has little to do with denying him the power of the presidency, and more to do with what he is a symbol of. Kind of like how 9/11 wasn't about killing some office workers

Symbols can be powerful... 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 reas…

I always thought the two WTC towers were more representative of global capitalism, not just good targets for attacking NYC.

Re: My grandfather was almost shot down at the White House (2018)

#100

Post by dbrueck »

itslennysfault wrote: post #43
godshatter wrote: post #25

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 airpor…

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]"

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.

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