On the low side, the American tax payers were just hit with a $235,000 bill.  The actual costs are unknown and will probably remain that way, but the amount of money spent/wasted may be the least to worry about.  What about the fear or panic caused?

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, one of the 747s used by President Obama took a flight to New York to take a photo with the skyline as a backdrop.  Since President Obama was not on the plane it wasn’t really Air Force One, but that is neither here nor there.

When this plane takes a flight, it is accompanied by two fighter jets.  The pictures only show one accompanying the jumbo jet, but they are fighters so the other one could have been a heartbeat away.  It is safe to say that it costs quite a bit to operate fighter planes.  Add that to the bill.

With pilots, crew and fuel, it is probably more expensive to take a flight in one of these jumbo jets.  A Fox news show, which was obviously biased against the President, had the total cost of this flight right around $235,000 including the operating costs of all the planes involved.  Other news outlets have reported a higher cost.  Whether the news show is biased or not, they had a point when discussing how wrong this was during these economic times.

This whole thing could have been accomplished differently for a fraction of the cost.  If we (wrongly) assume that nobody in the Department of Defense has a copy of Photoshop on their computer, a copy could have been purchased for approximately $800.  Add in the hourly salaries of one or two people; for the sake of round numbers, let’s say $1,200.  Actually that salary isn’t a stretch for DC, but that is another subject.  If my math is correct, someone could have created a convincing Photoshop with the same result for at least $233,000 less.  That would have been nice.

President Obama called it a mistake.  Uh, you think?!

The Real Cost

OK, here is the real cost and something that would have really had me upset.  The citizens of New York, some of whom I’m sure were involved with 9/11, didn’t know about this prior to it happening.  Even the people who didn’t go through it before surely know or have heard stories about the horror that occurred that day.  Can you imagine how those people felt when they had to evacuate their building or saw the planes overhead?  Pure fear.

Even Mayor Bloomberg didn’t know this was going to happen and I’m sure he wasn’t happy about it either.

“First thing is I’m annoyed – furious is a better word – that I wasn’t told,” he said. “Why the Defense Department wanted to do a photo op right around the site of the World Trade Center catastrophe defies imagination. Poor judgment would be a nice ways to phrase.”

Bloomberg said federal officials notified the NYPD and another city official, whom he declined to identify, of the flight plan.

“Had I known about it I would have called them right away and asked them not to,” he said. “The good news is it was nothing more than an ill considered, badly conceived, insensitive photo op – with the taxpayers’ money.”

I know President Obama is good with words and this is one time where I think a press conference is called for.  When our government does something like this, ignoring the sensitivities of so many citizens, a public apology is in order.  When people make mistakes that doesn’t mean they are bad people, but that doesn’t mean good people are above eating some crow and saying they are sorry.

If I worked in New York and got scared to death by this “______” (you fill in the blank), I would have jumped in my car and headed straight for Washington DC.

Come on Mr. President, speak on it!