New Photos Released From Flyover Blunder : The Pentagon also released the flight manifest

By golly, you are a genius.

I was looking for the picture of that plane, but it eluded my feeble google search skills.

HOW did you find it?

That's the bird. AND A TWO SEATER TO BOOT.

So perhaps they needed this particular bird because it is a two seater. The photographer had to sit somewhere.

Are there many two seater birds?

Or was it more important that it had the red tail? 09.12.09 National Taxpayer Protest

Oh. Apparently the D designation MEANS that it is a TWO seater.

So how do they work planes in the AF?

Do pilots fly just any old plane, or

I you know the bird, you know the pilot?

Do pilots fly just any old plane

I'll try to answer your comments from both your posts ... please understand that I am not USAF, current or former, just an enthusiastic hobbyist when it comes to military aviation.

Short answer to the above is "both". Aviation squadrons in the US armed services (regardless of branch) usually have more pilots than they do planes. The planes are "assigned" to pilots in the sense that the senior pilots will have their names stenciled along the canopy rails of certain planes. In the USN planes are generally given three-character numbers. The first number denotes squadron or role within an airwing, second two numbers denote specific aircraft within a squadron. In the USN airwings, 100 series are assigned to the F/A-18F squadron, 200 series to the F/A-18E squadron and 300/400 series to the two F/A-18A or C squadrons and so on. The #00 birds in ALL squadrons are all "assigned" to the Air Wing Commander and carry his name. The #01 birds are assigned to the individual squadron COs and carry his name, the #02 birds assigned to the squadrons' XOs, etc ... in seniority until the squadron runs out of airplanes. Nugget ensign will generally not have their names on specific aircraft, because they are so low in seniority.

However, the individual aircraft DO have specific aircrew (maintainers) assigned to them. Their names (or at least that of the crew chief) are carried either on the rail (starboard side, with the "assigned" pilot's name on the port side), or on the nose gear doors. But there is a lot of variation here.

When it comes time to fly, efforts are sometimes made (especially for ceremonial fly-bys, the CO wanting to fly "his" plane, etc) to match the pilot with "his" plane. Otherwise the pilot just takes whatever plane happens to be next in line to go up. Junior pilots tend not to like to fly the boss's bird tho. Go figure. ;-) So in many respects, the answer is no: just because you know the plane doesn't mean you automatically know the pilot driving it.

Regarding two-seater F-16s, there are a fair number of them. Most in USAF service are assigned as trainers, to the specific training squadrons (big users are the squadrons out at Luke AFB). It is not unusual for line squadrons to be assigned a two-seater or two for on-location training purposes or as a squadron "hack" to take folks on courtesy flights (journalists, non-pilot squadron members who are getting special recognition/kudos, etc). The 187th FW (AL ANG) clearly has a two-seater, per the picture (which I found simply by googling "F-16D" + 187FW using google images.)

I am not sure whether the DC ANG (113FW, 121FS) has any F-16Ds assigned. I haven't been able to find any evidence that they do, so my assumption as the moment is that they do no. It's entirely possible that the AL ANG "Red Tail" just happened to be in town for some reason or another (members of the Tuskegee Airmen are in town regularly for events, particularly at the National Air and Space Museum, and the plane might have been up for a photo op with them) and since it was a "D" and the photographer could sit in the back the DC ANG "borrowed" it for the SAM28000/AF1 photo op. The email chain would seem to indicate that as a definite possibility, particularly the part about the plane needing to go home. As does the fact that, assuming that there were only three planes involved (SAM28000, which is that 747's true identity, "AF1" only being used when the President is on board, the DC ANG F-16C and the AL ANG F-16D) the Red Tail was carrying the photographer and would not be in any of the pictures.

Here's the question I now have though. If the USAF wanted updated, high-res/quality pictures of AF1 flying over the Statue of Liberty, I'm not sure that a photographer sitting in the back of an F-16D is going to be the right way to get that. The canopy of an F-16 is curved and tinted, and there's going to be both distortion and glare trying to shoot through it. I know modern cameras and photo software can mitigate a lot of this, but I still wonder why - given that this was the President's Ride(tm) they weren't using another aircraft type (like the aircraft used for weapons separation trials that have special stabilized cameras shooting through optically flat glass) for the photo ship.

It certainly is suspicious that they have not fully come clean on this.

They are still choosing to ‘hide’ who was involved.

They have only grudgingly released the pictures and the documents.

They did so in a huge ‘document dump’.

They did not readily disclose that the Alabama Tuskegee plane involved.

They are still being coy as to who the pilots were.

The pictures are more suited for ‘action shots’ than for good stills.

The took lots of shots of AF1’s but.

Most of the shots don’t relate to the statue of liberty.

On the second pass, they only took two photo’s of the statue.

On the third pass, they took a lot of photo’s but mostly at a bad angle and a reasonably high bank.

What was their game?

Well, a great banking shot like that would be excellent for the passengers(?) on AF1 to get a great final view of the Statue of Liberty.

Hmmm.

There were Red Tails in Washington talking to the Air Force academny the week before.

Perhaps they were on the plane.

It seems logical.

A fund raiser for them perhaps?

Given the apparent Red Tail connection, perhaps the folks from the movie were also present?