Silent Running reports from New Zealand that someone stole a small plane and flew it around Auckland for quite some time threatening to crash it into the Sky Tower, before ditching in the sea. I’d never heard of the Sky Tower, but from SR’s illustration, it looks a lot like Toronto’s CNN CN Tower, and Google tells me that it is the tallest structure in the Southern Hemisphere, 1076 feet, with a restaurant more than half-way up.

I wonder if Prime Minister Helen Clark, while she waited to see what would happen, had any regrets about disarming the Royal New Zealand Air Force: it now consists of transport planes and helicopters. One of the seventeen A-4K Skyhawks that were retired in 2001 might have come in handy in this situation. Of course, it’s possible that the arrival of a fighter jet would have induced the man to go ahead and crash into the tower while he still had the chance, and shooting him down would quite likely have killed some on the ground. But it would have been nice to have the choice, instead of just waiting helplessly to see whether he would go through with his threats. It would have been a pity to lose the Sky Tower because Helen Clark couldn’t conceive of any reason for New Zealand to have an Air Force worthy of the name.