NMA also has an artistic recreation of the "dangerously close" "near-miss" of the First Lady's plane with an Air Force tanker. Their version does a better job of rendering the Air Force C-17 than the modified Boeing 737 that carried Mrs. Obama and Mrs. Biden, but it's more or less the scene you would imagine from headlines about a "near-miss":
Full NMA video after the jump.
As to whether I was alone or a crank in viewing the Washington Post's front-page coverage of this episode as scare-mongering -- well, OK, I'm a crank about many things, but I have company in my views this time. The Atlantic's own (Guest Blogger division) Don Brown links to our site but to another more splenetic reaction; Paul Bertorelli, the editorial director of AVweb, concurs; and most of the comments on the AVweb site, from pilots and controllers, are in the spirit of this one: "Horrors! Next we'll hear that the First Lady's motorcade had to stop for a red light; like the rest of us."
Why bother to bring it up again? The real reason is that I love this NMA clip. But there's a larger journalistic purpose: If the "mainstream" press gets us all worked up about things we don't need to be worried about, what's left over for cases that pose a genuine threat? Maybe NMA's next project can be "the boy who cried Wolf."
This article available online at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/04/more-on-the-michelle-obama-close-call-that-wasnt/237684/
