What is going on here?

[Happy Monkey]

First, the story was that a British Airways pilot spotted Air Force One on Thanksgiving, and requested confirmation. AF1 responded "Gulfstream 5" in that classic Hollywood tongue-in-cheek/dare you to contradict me style. Cute story to add a little color to Bush's Thanksgiving visit.

But it turned out that no British Airways pilots could seem to remember the exchange.

White House spokesmen replied that they had misspoke. Nobody had contacted AF1 itself, but BA pilots had contacted the tower to get the confirmation, and the tower had replied "Gulfstream 5", based on AF1's security-falsified flight plan.

Apparently there was no evidence of that, so it became a British-based carrier (sorry, not a news link) instead of a British Airways pilot.

Now it is a non-UK airline with a British accent (scroll down about 2/3, or search for "non"). Apparently the mistake was made because there was a BA plane near AF1 for a good portion of the flight, and AF1 assumed it was them. But AF1 travels considerably faster than commercial airlines, which makes that suspect.

What is going on here? It hardly seems worth lying about, so is it just incompetence? One would think that if they could confirm that a "non-UK operator" radioed the control center in Swanwick, England, at "0930 Zulu" time to ask if the aircraft behind it was Air Force One (see last link), they could get the identification of the plane.

Thanks to Atrios for following this story