Mr. Bloomberg, an experienced pilot, found himself under fire after he was discovered flying his private helicopter where he was not supposed to.An amateur video, filmed by an annoyed Manhattanite and broadcast Tuesday on WABC-TV, showed the mayor landing and taking off several times over the weekend from the East 34th Street helipad, where trips on Saturday and Sunday have been expressly banned for more than a decade.
The mayor's spokesman said other mayors had used the helipad on weekends, so there should be no problem with Bloomberg doing so, even if it is closed.
But those mayors were using police helicopters and flying on "official" city business.
Bloomberg, on the other hand, was flying a helicopter he owns and was most expressly not flying it on city business, though he won't say where he was going with it:
The mayor’s office would not say where Mr. Bloomberg had been traveling last weekend, or why his helicopter apparently took off from or landed at the 34th Street helipad eight times in two days. The mayor had no official events scheduled for the weekend, but he did attend the wedding of the City Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn, on Saturday evening in Manhattan’s meatpacking district.
Mr. Bloomberg was accompanied on at least one flight by his companion, Diana L. Taylor, and the couple’s two yellow Labradors, Bonnie and Clyde.
His dogs are named Bonnie and Clyde?
That's more information than I wanted to know about him.
At any rate, this is just another example of there being two sets of rules in this city - one for Bloomberg and his friends and cronies, one for everybody else:
Gale Brewer, a council member who has worked for years to reduce helicopter flights in and around Manhattan, said Mr. Bloomberg had rarely been supportive of those efforts. She said she was disappointed to hear about his weekend flights.
“You have to follow the rules,” she said. “When you read that the mayor takes off at times that are restricted, I think it’s shocking.”
Dr. Ron Sticco, 50, a physician whose footage of Mr. Bloomberg’s flights, taken from his high-rise apartment overlooking the helipad, led to the report on WABC, said Wednesday that the mayor did not understand the disturbances that his flights had caused.
“There are times it’s so noisy I have to go in my bathroom to talk on the telephone,” Dr. Sticco said in an interview. “I don’t doubt the mayor has essential business to perform. But, going back to Fiorello La Guardia, they didn’t need the perpetual use of a heliport to govern the city.”
Some critics viewed the mayor’s copter trips as evidence of his disconnect from the average New Yorker. But Kenneth Sherrill, a professor of political science at Hunter College, said something else was afoot.
“This is, on a very trivial matter, about the arrogance of power,” Dr. Sherrill said. “It’s the type of thing you do when you stop thinking about the political and public consequences of what you’re doing.”
But one thing our oligarch does not like is to be publicly humiliated.
If people booed and jeered him wherever he went, treated him with the disdain that he treats rules and regulations, sent his poll numbers back below the Mendoza Line, some of this crap would stop.
I blame this on New Yorkers for putting up with this little arrogant autocrat.
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