In downtown Tampa Bay, just a few miles from the luxurious offices of Cyberista, Charles Bishop made his debut on the USAmerikaan psyche. Besides Bishop’s self-inflicted death, nobody was hurt.
Through an act redneck ingenuity, the 15 year old Chuckie hijacked a plane with nobody on it, disobeyed direct orders from avaiation authorities, flew his plane like a maniac and put himself in the history books as the first Mohammed Atta wanna-be.
The fact that the media is trying to pin this on bin Laden is absolutely ridiculous. It is statistically impossible any white kid from St. Petersburg to have any sympathy for the perpetrators of the World Trade Center attacks.
Charles Bishop wanted attention but he didn’t want to hurt anybody else in the process. If he were really sinister, Bishop would have flown into his high school or the Tampa entertainment district of Ybor City. If he had any political motivations, he might have decided to crash into the Air Force Base that he flew over before making Bank of America into the object of his disaffection.
What Bishop did was irrational but the title of stupid belongs solely to the U.S. Military and their NORAD apparatus. The vaunted anti-terrorism plan to intercept threatening aircraft blew down like a house of cards because the person giving orders in Colorado decided to skip the geography class on the day they were talking about Florida.
Tampa is a small and well organized city. Business and government occurs in downtown. Entertainment and drug dealing occur in Ybor City. Military operations occur at MacDill Air Force Base. They are all within a few miles of each other.
When the call came to scramble fighters, the brainiac in charge sent orders to Homestead Air Force Base near Miami. According to an ancient 1997 map of the state of Florida, Tampa and Homestead are 300 miles apart. Flying at Mach 1, or 750 mph, ETA is well over 35 minutes because the fighters must accelerate and decelerate. An airborne soda can, like the one Bishop was flying, went from St. Pete to downtown Tampa in a little over 10 minutes.
That is one hell of a deficit in time and space that no known aerospace technology can overcome. With that in mind, somebody at NORAD needs to lose their job. Tampa area citizens are lucky that Charles Bishop was just a head case and not a real terrorist. The Cessna that Bishop was flying is perfectly capable of carrying explosives.
The Bush Administration likes to talk about how people should be accountable for their actions. Unfortunately, the behavior coming out of the Pentagon is nothing less than ass covering evasion.
The first excuse is at complete odds with every statement that comes out of the Pentagon on a daily basis. The second excuse is either a complete lie or an admission of gross incompetence at the nearby Air Force Base.
As for Charles Bishop, he gets two thumbs-up for going out his way … and doing it alone.
