For much of the 1990’s, I lived on the 25th floor of a downtown Boston high-rise. I loved it there. One of my neighbors was Boston Celtics star Rick Fox, and he was often visited by his then-girlfriend Vanessa Williams. To put it mildly, they were a handsome couple. Eat your heart out, John Hinderaker – I actually shared several elevator rides with a former Miss America. Like I said, I loved it there.
The one thing I didn’t like was the airplanes. Boston has a tiny downtown when compared to something like Manhattan’s Midtown. We have a collection of at most a couple of dozen high rises that are clustered within a circle of a ¼ mile radius.
It always struck me as strange that small airplanes were allowed to fly so close to the skyscrapers. It also amazed me how close the jumbo-jets taking off from Boston’s nearby Logan Airport used to come to the high-rises. It didn’t require an inordinate amount of imagination to picture a relatively small amount of human error creating an enormous catastrophe.
I FIGURED THAT 9/11 would cause a change in our habits in that regard. Since I’ve long since moved out of Boston’s downtown, I don’t know what the situation there is regarding small aircraft buzzing by the high-rises, but I assume it’s much the same as Midtown Manhattan’s. Which is to say, it’s completely unacceptable.
One of the tropes that came out of the endless 9/11 Commission hearings was that 9/11 was enabled by a failure of our collective imagination. Well, imagine this: Imagine if yesterday’s tragedy wasn’t the result of pilot error, but was instead the deliberate actions of a terrorist. And imagine that he had packed his airplane with TNT. And targeted the Chrysler building. There would have been no warning, and thousands of deaths.
What’s it going to take? What’s it going to take for local governments to harden their targets and take appropriate precautions? What’s it going to take for the Department of Transportation to begin behaving with the seriousness of purpose that the times require?
Although I ask the preceding questions rhetorically, there is an easily-found answer to those questions. And it’s appalling.
UPDATE: Several emailers and commenters have let me know that I'm all wet on this one, that a small plane couldn't do anything like the damage that I'm suggesting. My apologies. I try to refrain from alarmism, and in this post I did a piss-poor job of that. For those reading this post for the first time, I would encourage you to focus mostly on the fact that I shared several elevator rides with Vanessa Williams and forget most of what followed. Although I never summoned the nerve to talk to her, I got the definite impression that she thought I was cute.
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