"A small plane has crashed into San Francisco Bay near the new Bay Bridge construction. There are reports at least two people may have been rescued," screams CBS 5's homepage. (For a live copper at the scene, go here.) According to the Gate, at 2 p.m. a "single-engine plane crashed into water off the Bay Bridge" 500 or so yards from the Emeryville shoreline.......

This past Thursday while we were en route from Denver to SFO, we were thoroughly enjoying the in-flight movie when screams suddenly broke out from the rear kitchen. Since we happened to be sitting in the very last row of the plane, we were especially caught off guard by the commotion and were forced to break focus from No Reservations (which was actually quite charming) to see what was going on. Not three feet from......

-- March, rally, die. [Bluoz, SFGate] -- Zombie, thrill(er), dance. [SFWeekly] -- Mac OS X Leopard...on your PC! [Laughing Squid] -- San Francisco's Visitacion Valley Middle School's principal to receive highest honor available for principals. Okay then. [CBS5] -- Half Moon Bay gang rape sentencing delayed. (Karma's a bitch, boys. Well, for you all it sure will be.) [Examiner] -- 32 Heron Street. Mmm, bricky SOMA goodness. [Curbed SF] -- Plane high dives into the......

This morning at around 11:30 a.m., two people were seen standing on top of a single-engine A35 plane that crashed into SF Bay. The plane went down near (and, thankfully, not into) the San Mateo-Hayward Bridge. As of now the extent of the victims' injuries are unknown, but seeing as how they managed to climb atop the wreckage, we're going to say that they're fine, or at least very, very tough. (Will update with......

-- Gay Geeks Saturday Night Social: "Fucking faggots," you scream? Ah, correction: "fucking nerd faggots," is more like it. Queers (not just Marys) who like to "geek out on the arts or science, study old plane crashes,... the myth of the American cowboy or how to make graphs more efficient for displaying data," this is the night for you. Come! Starts at 8 p.m. at Muddy's Coffeehouse, 1304 Valencia; free. -- Lights Out SF:......

Step right up and see the world's largest passenger jet...in your very own backyard! This story has saturated the news this morning, but these kind of items (along with anti-vertical growth rhetoric) always make us feel as if San Francisco is veering back toward some sort of home-of-the-world's-largest-tomato quaint-ism. Aaanyway, the big ol' plane made its way to SFO to see if the airport could handle such girth, deal with the operations of the......

Photo of a sightseeing helicopter buzzing the Golden Gate Bridge...

Airport news! This morning, SFO crews found a dead body lodged in the wheel well of the nose of a United plane coming in from Shanghai. It might have been a stowaway. A woman was arraigned in Denver yesterday, after getting arrested on Monday for beating her kids on a Frontier Air flight that took off from SFO. Witnesses report that she seemed intoxicated on the flight, was yelling and hitting the kids, and......

While not exactly local news, SFist's sister site, Sampaist, has coverage of last night's extraordinarily fatal plane crash. For those of you concerned about loved ones and/or family down there, or if you just want to know more about the gruesome scene, you can find out more here. Last night’s crash killed all of its 180-plus passengers onboard.......

The Napa Valley-based Coalition for Airline Passengers' Bill of Rights issued a statement where it lauded certain members of congress -- Senators Boxer, Snowe and Lautenberg, as well as Representative Thompson -- for showing "tremendous leadership and a great sense of commitment to passengers' rights." The organization warned, however, that congressional rhetoric is not enough....

Man, we were reading the Chron on the plane out of San Francisco on July 4 for vacation, balling our fists in frustration over missing the stories on Ed Jew's "part-time lover" response to the City Attorney's allegations AND the story about Aaron Peskin's zinger to Dianne Feinstein about her strange letter complaining about Chris Daly. No fair! (but thank you, SFist Jer, for covering it for us while we were gone!) Well, even......

We feel kind of bad posting this, because we really do love Cathay Pacific (comfy seats, good service, decent food, and they also sponsored the Asian-American and the SF Int'l Film Fests), but news is news: they had a plane stuck for seven hours at SFO Tuesday morning. The flight, with 400 passengers aboard, boarded around midnight, and was scheduled to take off for Hong Kong at 1:20 a.m., but ended up sitting on the......

So bloggers might not have been able to turn Snakes on a Plane into the hit they thought it would be but that doesn't mean they don't have any power. Due to fan protests fueled by the blogs, the NFL will let Mike Nolan wear suits on the sidelines for all eight home games next year. ...

--What with all the excitement about the arrest warrant for Ed Jew, we didn't get a chance to tell you about how just about 50 miles away, the Santa Clara DA's office had to drop the charges they brought against the now-former mayor of San Jose. (Overzealous.) --GASP!!! The Oakland Zoo's about to get two pandas!!!! --Sex for grades? --John McCain, Bill Richardson, and Barack Obama were in the area today. --Hybrids aren't clogging......

Flight was already at the top of our list of books to read. Then we read the New York Times review of it this past Sunday and felt a new urgency to go out and buy it. The review was beautifully written, sincere, and completely lacking the typical elitist jargon one usually finds while reading reviews of books in well-known papers. And so on our flight back to San Francisco we read Flight in......

It's "all airlines, all the time" here on SFist. After the lukewarm-to-good news of JetBlue flying out of SFO, we're greeted with some bad news: Frontier Airlines is vacating the premises--no more "commuter flights" to and from LAX....

Update: So hey! We just got this in our inbox. JetBlue is giving away round-trip tickets to the first 150 people who show up in Union Square tomorrow Saturday (we totally thought today was Friday) dressed up as their favorite New York icon and carrying two or more canned goods to give away to a local food bank. Contest starts at 10 a.m., line starts at 7 a.m. SFist will throw in your lunch for......

Here's a roundup of today's news...

An Alaska airlines plane has been evacuated at the Oakland Airport for suspicion of an explosive device on board. It's probably nothing as it's usually nothing but it's still kind of exciting. ...

It's time for SFist Answers......

-Warriors road woes continue as they get rolled by the Milwaukee Bucks, 122-101. Are the nails being placed in the coffin? Tim Kawakami moves past the standard "will the Warriors make the playoffs" story to give the eulogy for another Warriors season that bites the dust. ...

Ahem...... Perhaps you would like a preview of the upcoming season from a totally official source? Well, you’re obviously not going to get that from us, but we are pleased to bring you the very first installment of A’s Anatomy; where the green and gold will be dissected all season, and no one will be spared, even if you’re Billy Beane and his BFF. (Just kidding, Bob Geren; welcome aboard!) ...

Reality TV: Will it never end? Apparently not. And we're sorry, but we just can't get behind this three-seasons-a-year crap. "American Idol" has it right: once a year is all you need. But despite the complaining, we're still hopelessy addicted, and find watching these shows more entertaining when there are locals we can root for and/or mock. For now all we have are two castaways on "Survivor: Fiji Islands," Yau-Man, a 54-year old computer......

So the Chron has this spiffy new feature to their web site in which they play phone calls left by readers about various issues and turn them into podcasts. Some are positive things, some aren't. Recently, a call was posted on the site by somebody who had a problem with an article on drones, the pilotless plane variety. Apparently, in a story, the subhead useed the phrase "pilotless drone" and for those who don't know, a drone plane is pilotless. Using the term "pilotless" with the word "drone" is, of course , redundant. Well, somebody had a huge problem the usage in the subhead and left what can only be described as a long, crazy rant about the subhead. ...

Last week, the Washington "Moonie" Times wrote a story saying that, in effect, that Nancy Pelosi requested that the Air Force provide her flights to and from Washington whenever she actually deigns to come home to the City by the Bay. The story is potentially embarrassing to Pelosi as it plays on the caricature of her being shrewish bitch who requests military planes while our brave sons and daughters are dying to fight the war on terror even though Iraq has nothing to do with it and even Republicans wish the war would end but they're still going to stop non-binding resolutions to stop it. Or something like that. As these things tend to happen, the story got out into the Republican echo chamber and you know what happens whenever that occurs-- the press has to cover it like it's an important story. Also, so called blabber mouths in politics and cable news spout it off like it's the unbridled truth without actually investigating it. ...

It may have been a tough football season, but they were dancing down on The Farm last night.

In fact, they might still be dancing at center court in Maples Pavilion, savoring the Cardinal's 75-68 upset of third-ranked UCLA.

Despite not being ranked, the Cardinal have been lurking in the weeds all season, and Sunday night they reared up and took a bite out of the Bruins. The way that they won it was especially startling: rallying back from a 17-point first-half deficit to cut the lead to seven in the second half, then going on a 15-0 run over the next three and one-half minutes to take the lead for good. They shot 70 percent from the floor in the second half! Stanford coach Trent Johnson showed great coaching chops by moving swingman Lawrence Hill to power forward in the second half to negate UCLA's quickness, and Hill responded with 22 points.

Because we love nothing better than a "We're Mad As Hell And We're Not Going To Take It Anymore" story, we give you this story, about a local Bay Area woman who got stuck on a tarmac for nine and a half hours when her flight got diverted from it's point of destination. The flight she took was supposed to have been from SFO to Dallas (as in Dallas, Texas, not Dulles-- we always get them confused and boy, nothing says "we're an idiot" like getting on the wrong plane) but the flight was diverted to Austin because of tornado warnings in the Dallas area. And so her plane sat. And sat. And sat some more. For nine and a half hours. Finally, they were allowed to fly off and fifty hours after they left, they finally made it to their destination. Let's hope it wasn't for a long weekend. ...

We don't know about you, but it's friggin cold out there. Well, not for some of you. It seems as though places that are supposed to be cold are warm and places that are supposed to be warm are cold. Or maybe that's just us. Either way, we're freezing. Austinist said goodbye to their co-editor (sell-out) and played rumor monger ">on the SXSW lineup. And when dozens of dead birds littered downtown Austin, it's......

So many crime stories of note today that we're running an off-cycle SFist Blotter! A man flying back to his home in Vermont from a trip to San Francisco was repeatedly stung by a scorpion that somehow got on the plane. No, he hasn't seen Snakes on a Plane (someone asked). "I'm pretty selective about what I see," he said. A casual carpool driver from Hercules was carjacked this morning. She picked up the usual......

So it had to happen and it did-- somebody sued the federal government about all those extra security measures going down in the airports. The dude who did it, John Gilmore, did so under the guise that the policy violated his right to be free of unreasonable searches. He lost most of the cases and the Supreme Court, perhaps due to Judge Rehnquist undergoing some sort of bad acid flashback, rejected the case. ...