re: Olympus has fallen Was a good Die Hard-esque film. Go see it

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A plane would never get that close to DC,

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Frank Eugene Corder (May 26, 1956 – September 12, 1994) crashed a stolen Cessna 150 onto the South Lawn of the White House early on September 12, 1994, apparently trying to hit the building; he was killed, and was the sole casualty.

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A general aviation airplane without a flight plan, chugging into restricted airspace, does not take long to stick out from the herd. If the Airvan continues to ignore the fighters in its face, EADS will pass an alert up a chain of command, where unspecified persons will have to decide what to do about it, perhaps within minutes, if the off-course pilot swings west toward the nation’s capital.

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. One of the few detailed studies on the subject, a 2005 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, found 3,400 violations of restricted airspace, or about three a day, in the 39 months following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, which rewrote the rules of U.S. aviation.

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Most violators, of course, respond to a radio warning from Federal Aviation Administration controllers, and if not to that, then to the bright red and green lights used to flood the cockpit of intruders in the vicinity of Washington, and if not that, then to the Coast Guard Dolphin helicopters that sometimes precede the jet fighters. All the same, military aircraft have engaged interlopers “hundreds of times” over American skies since 9/11, says Davi D’Agostino, the GAO’s director of Defense Capabilities and Management. And defenders cite at least three cases last year alone when they feared they would be ordered to apply the ultimate sanction: annihilating a general aviation aircraft to stop it from committing a presumed terrorist act.

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