What were they thinking? WERE they thinking?

We interrupt Blogrolling Week with this breaking Wild Art: Yesterday morning I was walking along the Hudson River waterfront when I saw and heard something that literally took my breath away: a huge passenger jet, flying low along the river, then circling even lower around New York Harbor, then back toward Lower Manhattan. "Nooooooooooooooooo!" I said aloud, only then remembering to breathe again. From where I stood, It appeared the plane was headed straight for the Empire State Building. By the time it turned back toward Manhattan, I had the camera out, and I shot a sequence of 9 photos as the plane passed almost literally through the space once occupied by the upper floors of the World Trade Center. There were no other planes in the sky at the time; two helicopters seemed to approach the jetliner, then back off. I lost sight of it after it circled back toward New Jersey and dropped below the Palisades on its way to Newark. 

All over the New York City metro area, people like me were watching in shock and awe. Thousands of them called 911; all of us couldn't help but think 9/11. The police didn't know what was going on, because no one had bothered to tell them or anybody else. When I got home and saw no black clouds on the horizon, no breaking-news bulletins on CNN, I figured there must be no emergency, and eventually my heartbeat returned to normal. Only this morning did I discover that the plane was a Continental Airlines 777 full of troops returning from Iraq. The troops said they wanted to see the city, so the pilot requested and received permission from air traffic controllers for the low, meandering flight path. New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg was outraged: "You would think that they would have had more sensitivity than that. They should have at least asked for permission or at least given us some notice so that we could have told the public," WABC-TV quotes him as saying. The Federal Aviation Administration has since issued an apology, but only to some of those who were affected: "The FAA regrets any negative effects this flight had on New York Residents."

What about those of us over here in New Jersey? Don't we get an apology, too?

Click on the numbers to see the photos: 1 2 3 4 5 6 (The photo above is #7 in the sequence) 8 9

And on the very same day, the BBC reported that an artist near New York's Ground Zero who depicted a low-flying plane along with a warning on the side of a building was ordered to remove the artwork and apply to make it legal after neighbors complained.

Blogrolling Week will continue tomorrow, news permitting.

Copyleft notice: These photos are free for use by any news organization or individual, online or off, in exchange for the following credit, which includes a link to this site:

Photo by Janet Dagley Dagley, courtesy The Dagley Dagley Daily (the link is http://dagleydagley.blogspot.com)

No other copyright notice may be attached, and no user may sell any of these photos in any form.

All violations will be reported to tomorrow's blogrollee.