News

Why the choppers?

January 29, 2010 4:20 pm by Lance Knobel

What’s this about? My Twitter feed has filled in the last few minutes with news that two Cobra AH-1s (not as fully armed as above, I hope) just flew over North Berkeley.

I liked the comment from @woneal:

Two AH-1 Cobra gunships just flew over Berkeley. Shock and awe? Show of force? Us liberal complaining types may want to shut up for a while.

Any reports?

Public domain DoD photo by Staff Sgt Bob Fehringer

5 Comments

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  • carolyn jones

    Maybe they’re looking for Honey, the lost Tilden park goat. One can only hope.

  • Rachel A.

    My son and I heard them, sitting in our car on Shattuck at Rose, and they were really loud. They were heading east toward Tilden …

  • http://basiscraft.com Thomas Lord

    I don’t know why the Berkeley blogs get so excited over this kind of thing. We’ve had periodic military aircraft flight routings over Berkeley for a very long time. It’s a common event. I think the jets are cooler and more interesting than the helicopters but we get both. The Bay Area is a very crowded and tightly controlled airspace. There’s some corridor over Berkeley through which they regularly get routed.

    Unscientifically, I think you *can* note some increase during major deployments elsewhere but I couldn’t prove it. It’s just when big deployments happen I think I’ve seen some larger “cargo” type military craft that I don’t usually see.

    My favorite personal “wow” was the day I heard this very quiet but persistent kind of “zhzhzhzhzhzh” sound and had trouble placing the direction it was coming from until I looked directly overhead and saw the B-2 stealth bomber at noticeably lower altitude than, say, your typical traffic chopper or police chopper. (Admittedly, that was around Fleet Week so I shouldn’t have been so surprised.)

    Another one we sometimes get in SW-berkeley are med-evac choppers making a beeline for a hospital in Oakland.

  • http://bit.ly/6RjLUL James Petersen

    I’ll never forget the image of my old Finnish Grandma Naimi standing on the porch of her College Ave. house back in the ’60′s shaking her fist at a National Guard helicopter that had just gassed her. She was yelling “come back here you g** d*** b********! I’ll teach you something!”

    You don’t suppose Ronald Reagan’s come back to haunt us?

  • Christine

    They flew over my house heading northwest towards Albany. Then, this morning, a flock of honking geese took the exact same route. Just saying …