<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by Dromomaniac:
Gotta love this air traffic exchange, between Air Force 1 and a British Airways jumbo:
As Air Force One headed under a false call sign for its unannounced landing in Iraq on Thursday, the Boeing 747 passed within sight of a British Airways pilot who radioed, "Did I just see Air Force One?"
"Gulfstream 5," replied Bush's pilot, Col. Mark Tillman. As one of Bush's aides recounted, the British Airways pilot seemed to sense that he was in on a secret and replied archly, "Oh."</font>
Such a fascinating little story (well at least to me). Reuters has a followup story.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp..._iraq_pilot_dc
According to the article BA is sticking to its version of what happened. Well, more precisely what didnt happen. BA denies the event ever took place. Here is a quite from the article.
""We have spoken to the British Airways captains who were in the area at the time and neither made comments to Air Force One nor did they hear any other aircraft make the statement over the radio," Verrier said in response to a question from Reuters.
The White House had no immediate comment on the discrepancy."
Seems like either 1) BA has a lying pilot (probably complete aircrew), or 2) it has lost track of some of its planes and it was another BA pilot 3) Air Force 1 had the conversation but doesnt know what planes it was near at the time (pretty disturbing and the most unlikely of all in my opinion) or 4) the White House Communications office made this up. More of interest is the absolute willingness of the media (except Reuters) to completely accept this story. As other articles said it added to suspense in the secret mission.