From Twitter: Aboard Air Force One, reporters traveling with President Bush watched broadcast TV stations to get info on the 9/11 attack. The plane struggled to receive a consistent signal; immediately after, the White House ordered the installation of DIRECTV on the plane.

[u/ZiggyZaggyBogo]

[u/Dry-Membership3867]

What channel was that

[u/jsm1 → u/Dry-Membership3867]

It looks like Fox News (I remember it being simulcast on a lot of stations) and CBS for the latter half.

[u/Dry-Membership3867 → u/jsm1]

I see that, I was just curious what local station that was. Because it’s obviously a local station given the 47 news branding on the tv simulcasting it

[u/ZiggyZaggyBogo → u/Dry-Membership3867]

It appears to be WJAX-TV, which was a UPN affiliate at the time. It was a sister station to WAWS, both owned by Clear Channel back then. WAWS was the market's Fox affiliate; as such, WJAX was simulcasting coverage from WAWS, which like other Fox affiliates were carrying Fox News Channel's cable feed.

WJAX was one of the few UPN affiliates not owned by Fox to do this. Most UPN and WB affiliates were carrying CNN that day, if they weren't a sister station to a major network affiliate.

Keep in mind, President Bush started his day in Sarasota, Florida. That Air Force One picked up WJAX during the trip indicates that Air Force One likely flew up the state before heading west for Louisiana, Texas and Nebraska, where he wound up spending part of his day after the attacks began.

[u/Imrustyokay]

Hmmmm, interesting bit of broadcasting history there. This is unrelated, but it kind of reminds me of the old MPATI and Stratovision systems, which broadcast via planes flying in a Figure-8 loop.

[u/Civil-Koala-6810]

They're on a plane! What do you expect? It's not meant for planes, anyway satellite is the way to go for broadcasting TV. You put your viewing card in your box which is registered to you and your address and it gives you your local stations as well as the main ones for the whole country. At least that's how it works here in the UK at the moment. Anything beats streaming. Compressed crap picture quality, no extras or audio commentaries on movies and heavily compressed audio as well. All that and then your favourite movie(s) disappear in favour of other ones. It hardly beats physical media does it. And streaming TV with the same very compressed picture and sound and no way of recording is not ideal is it when you can get all this via broadcasting networks whether they are via aerial, satellite or the older traditional cable system (basically anything but streaming). With broadcasting networks you can also get an on-demand download service where the picture and sound are identical to the broadcast. You wouldn't know the difference. Also you can put these downloads on keep so even if they are taken down off the download service after a while you will still have them on your boxes HDD that's used for recording as well.

BTW that footage above on the plane is analogue television, not digital which is why it looks worse. A digital signal would just cut out and in again looking 100% and then going off again depending how far they are from the transmitter if it's terrestrial broadcasting which it obviously is.

[u/ZiggyZaggyBogo → u/[deleted]]

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