Here are various wire service photos taken from Air Force One, showing what Bush was able to see.
"It's devastating," Bush told aides as he flew over New Orleans. "It's got to be doubly devastating on the ground."
Peter Baker writes in The Washington Post: "After a month-long retreat at his Texas ranch, Bush returned to Washington on Wednesday in crisis-management mode, where his administration is likely to remain indefinitely. With his poll numbers at an all-time low, Bush faces one of the stiffest leadership tests since Sept. 11, 2001, with continued violence in Iraq, gasoline prices topping $3 a gallon in many places and now what he called 'one of the worst natural disasters in our nation's history.' . . .
"While critics accused Bush of being slow to recognize the horrible scale of the damage wrought by Hurricane Katrina on Monday, he moved Wednesday to reassert his public leadership role and reassure the American people that he is in charge. After his 35-minute flyover along the Gulf Coast, he raced back to Washington, met his disaster relief team in the White House and strode into the Rose Garden to address the nation. . . .
"But in a capital suffused with anger and partisan division, it did not take long for Bush's leadership on Katrina to come under question. Noting that it took Bush two days to cut short his vacation and return to Washington, Democrats painted the president as dithering while New Orleans drowned."
Richard W. Stevenson writes in the New York Times: "The Bush administration stepped up the federal response on Wednesday to the devastation from Hurricane Katrina, deploying thousands more National Guard and active-duty troops to the Gulf Coast to help with rescue and relief missions, authorizing the release of oil from the nation's strategic reserve to blunt the economic effects of the storm and dispatching food, water and medical supplies to the region. . . .
"But with the situation in the region chaotic and still evolving, it was unclear how quickly and fully the plan would address the needs of the hundreds of thousands of people displaced by the storm and the ensuing flooding, or whether it would prove sufficiently large and well executed to deal with the long-term challenges the disaster presents."
David E. Sanger writes in the New York Times: "Not since he sat in a Florida classroom as the World Trade Center burned a thousand miles away has President Bush faced a test quite like the one he returned to Washington to confront this afternoon.
"After initially stumbling through that disorienting day almost exactly four years ago, Mr. Bush entered what many of his aides believe were the finest hours of his presidency. But unlike 2001, when Mr. Bush was freshly elected and there was little question that the response would include a military strike, Mr. Bush confronts this disaster with his political capital depleted by the war in Iraq.
"Even before Hurricane Katrina, governors were beginning to question whether National Guard units stretched to the breaking point by service in Iraq would be available for domestic emergencies. Those concerns have now been amplified by scenes of looting and disorder. There is also the added question of whether the Department of Homeland Security, designed primarily to fight terrorism, can cope with what Mr. Bush called Wednesday 'one of the worst natural disasters in our country's history.' "
Mary Curtius and Edwin Chen write in the Los Angeles Times: "Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast this week just as President Bush's public approval rating hit an all-time low. How he handles the aftermath of the monster storm could, in the short term, burnish the president's leadership image at a time when some problems uppermost in voters' minds -- including violence in Iraq and high gasoline prices -- seem unsolvable.
"But public impatience with the pace of recovery or painful economic fallout from the storm that spreads across the country also loom as potential political menace."
