Mayor Michael Bloomberg may have been in the dark about Air Force One’s controversial flyover in Manhattan, but Coney Island’s rescue unit wasn’t.
The nabe’s Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) was well aware that the President’s plane would fly above Lower Manhattan on April 27.
“The mayor said he didn’t know,” Chuck Reichenthal, CERT member and Community Board 13 district manager, noted at the board’s recent meeting. “But we at the CERT team had notification at 8:30 in the morning so I can’t believe that the rest of the city didn’t know.”
According to a spokesperson for Bloomberg, the mayor’s office had been informed about the flyover but was unable to make the information known to the public.
A statement from the spokesperson to this paper explained, “The FAA sent a notification of the flyover to the Police Department and the mayor’s office. The notification said that the flyover information was ‘for official use only’ and not to be distributed to the public. Had the mayor learned of this restriction, he would have challenged it.”
Coney Island residents say there’s no excuse for keeping important info private − especially since the flyover led New Yorkers to believe another 9⁄11 was underway.
