Risk Professional: the long tail effect of a single terrorist act

There's an aged view that New Yorkers are excessively neurotic. And it's true that in some districts there does seem to be almost a mass hysteria in the air. But most New Yorkers - the vast majority of them - are not neurotic at all. They are normal people leading normal lives.

One bright morning in late summer almost eight years ago, a group of lunatics hijacked to airliners and flew them, minutes apart, into the towers of the World Trade Centre. The towers fell, their remnants were brought down. Some 3,000 died, some leaping from windows many hundreds of feet high, in one or two cases photographed as they plummeted.

The US media has milked that event for all it's worth. Some years, it has wall-to-wall memorial programming. Many opportunities are taken to refer to it, by its brand name of 9/11 in headlines. And behind the gloss and opportunism there is something real - a desire to remember the dead.

However, yesterday the whole issue came back to haunt New York. And it demonstrates how many people have not come to terms with the attacks that morning.

Someone, somewhere, decided that it would make a nice promotional picture for the President if his aircraft, AirForce One, could be photographed over major American cities, showing how he was "there for" every American. And the first city chosen was New York. How better to show the business world that he is with them than for his aeroplane to fly over Wall Street.

And so it was that a Boeing 747 flew low and slow over Manhattan, an Air Force chase plane in close attendance.

Callers to the emergency service reported a range of things from a caller in Staten Island who thought it was flying so low it was going to land in the water - he was told it was not an emergency until it actually crashed.

"It looks like planes are going in the buildings - everyone is outside. We don't know what's going on, there are no cops here telling us anything." The operator is calm - "There's what?" she asks.

But both President Obama and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg denied they had known anything of the plans.

It fell to Director of the White House Military Office, Louis Caldera, to take responsibility: he issued a statement saying ""Last week, I approved a mission over New York. I take responsibility for that decision. While federal authorities took the proper steps to notify state and local authorities in New York and New Jersey, it's clear that the mission created confusion and disruption. I apologize and take responsibility for any distress that flight caused."

President Obama said "It was a mistake, as was stated. It was something we found out about along with all of you. And it will not happen again."

The flight, by now, had become a "training mission" and the idea of taking photos had been bolted on, said several officials.

No one has explained why flying Air Force One through the Manhattan skyscape with a chase plane in attendance would qualify as training and, if so, training for what.

However, the flight was not a secret. The FAA had been given a flight plan. That was sent to the New York city office - where it did not get the proper attention.

In the past, flights involving military aircraft have been the subject of warnings. This time there was none.

And in the collective conciousness, constantly renewed and relived through media repetition, what seemed to be a civilian airliner making several passes over or close to the site of the only major terrorist attack ever to hit the USA, it brought many to panic and some to terror. For many more it caused distress of one degree or another.

Across the Wall Street district, as the planes flew around, people rushed out of buildings into crowded streets but with no planned exit route, they rushed around bumping into each other.

If nothing else, it showed how ill-prepared New York is for another major incident.

A statement from the police revealed why the flyby was a surprise: ""The flight of a VC-25 aircraft and F-16 fighters this morning was authorized by the FAA for the vicinity of the Statue of Liberty with directives to local authorities not to disclose information about it but to direct any inquiries to the FAA Air Traffic Security Coordinator,"

Scars take a long time to heal, at least if the person keeps picking at them. The effects of this exercise demonstrate that minds behave similarly.