kpozin.net Projects & Musings by Konstantin Pozin

Some brilliant folks at the Defense Department and the White House decided to stage a Monday morning photoshoot of one of the Air Force One planes -- at low altitude in downtown NYC, flanked by two F-16s.

The goal was to "was set up to create an iconic shot of Air Force One, similar to one that was taken in recent years over the Grand Canyon" (NY Times).

Let's do some quick math. It costs about $60,000 per hour to operate Air Force One. It costs about $50,000 per hour to operate an F-16. The photoshoot itself took at least half an hour, and flight time between the Andrews Airbase near DC and NYC is also about 30 minutes. $160,000/hr ×1.5 hrs = $240,000. By a conservative estimate, we're looking at a cost of at least a quarter of a million dollars for the operation (to say nothing of the hundreds of thousands in costs to businesses and emergency services during the panic in downtown Manhattan).

This is for a single photoshoot, intended for about one "iconic shot"!

For one or two thousand dollars' worth of labor, the government could have hired a couple of graphic artists, who could have provided them with a whole series of flawless, photorealistic iconic shots in at most a couple of days.

I'd probably have done it for free.