About that White House flyover yesterday, a few thoughts.
But the flyover itself, put on for the visiting president of Poland, had to require planning and coordination beforehand, and lots of it. NOTAMS (notices to airmen)* would have to be published, closing off a corridor of airspace over the Capitol at a particular time (while also impacting airliner traffic in and out of Reagan National Airport), plus scheduling the fighters, separate four-ships of F-35s and F-16s, and pilots to fly them. Hundreds of military and FAA personnel must have been involved in pulling it off.
The missing man part of the F-16 flyover, which you can see at the beginning of the video above, was meant to honor a highly regarded Polish Air Force F-16 pilot who died in an airshow crash last week (I wrote about that in a previous blog post). As a member of the fighter community, I think I can say the USAF personnel involved were happy to participate, and weren’t just following orders from on high.
Another factor to consider: There’s plenty of evidence that Trump wants to emulate other world leaders (Xi, Putin, and Macron, for example) by putting on military power demonstrations for visiting heads of state. Yesterday’s flyover might have been a preview of what’s to come with future high-level visits to the White House.
These two things — a flyover for a visiting head of state and a new push on Trump’s part for displays of military might — might have had nothing to do with upstaging the Epstein survivors’ press conference. Almost certainly, anyone below Oval Office level involved in planning and executing yesterday’s flyover wasn’t thinking about the Epstein survivors at all. The man at the top and his scheming minions? That could well be another story.
*I posted a shorter version of this on social media. A commenter who sounds as if he knows what he’s talking about tells me flyovers east of the Potomac (i.e., like yesterday’s) are unprecedented; also that NOTAMs closing off airspace for military flyovers are normally published three days in advance, but that in this case the NOTAM went out just one day prior. Putting two and two together, this indicates the flyover was added at the last minute, even though Trump and his people knew about the Polish president’s upcoming visit weeks in advance — just as they knew well in advance when and where the Epstein survivors would be speaking. It’s hard not to draw a sinister conclusion.