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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Gasp! I can't breathe! These bogus media stories about airflight are going to make my head explode during landing!
Jun 3, 2005 | Recent media coverage of a series of light-plane accidents has me scratching my head. First, on May 21, a Cessna 172 on a sightseeing flight plummeted onto the beach of New York's Coney Island, killing all four people aboard. Reports cited "an engine problem." One Fox News affiliate spoke of the plane's motor having "stalled out."
Then last weekend, a single-engine plane went down during an air race in Oklahoma. The small craft had "lost power," according to newspaper and television sources.
And on May 31, a privately owned twin-engine turboprop crashed and caught fire at Teterboro Airport in northern New Jersey. More blather about "engine trouble."
Now, although engine problems sometimes precipitate a crash -- usually by distracting an inexperienced pilot who proceeds to turn a difficult situation into a nonsurvivable one -- they do not, by themselves, cause planes to go spinning out of the sky. Perhaps, for instance, that racer in Oklahoma was in the middle of some high-G maneuver when a malfunction caught him by surprise, but whether it's a two-seater or a 747, any airplane is able to glide successfully sans power. Even the heaviest jetliners glide routinely during so-called idle thrust descents, and believe it or not, the glide ratio of a large jet -- altitude lost to horizontal distance traveled -- is usually better than that of your average private model (the one caveat being that it must accomplish this descent at a considerably higher speed).
The Teterboro incident is especially perplexing, as the aircraft had two engines. Multi-engine commercial airliners, as regulars to these pages should know, are certified to climb, avoid obstructions, and otherwise remain aloft following the failure of a powerplant at the worst possible moment. But even a private twin should, at the very least, maintain a stable course should one of its props cease turning. Rest assured there was more to this accident -- and the others too -- than a simple sputtering of cylinders.
So, if nothing else, there you have three potential entries for my ever-expanding media errata log. (This isn't a column about engines, see, it's a column about the articles that follow them.) OK, maybe I'm overanalyzing. If a pilot radios a message saying he's got an engine on the blink, or if witness accounts tell of the same, that's quite a natural thing to report. Nonetheless, the talk of proverbial engine trouble that comes on the heels of so many accidents reinforces the irritating fallacy that a dead engine necessitates a deadly crash.
Which it does not.
Honest to god, I'm not half the neurotic crank I might seem, and it'd be foolish to expect reporters to expertly grasp each and every nuance of a field rich with mysterious procedures and confusing terminology. Still, it's my job to make note of such infractions (and in fact this column was born out of frustrations over media coverage of safety and security issues after Sept. 11). We live in a time when people have diminishing trust in the press, and there's the danger of assumptive extrapolation: If aviation stories are routinely off kilter, why not those covering medicine, politics and so forth?
With that out of the way, let's keep going. Somewhat less offensive, if still inaccurate, was a May 29 Associated Press piece that credited Delta Air Lines for being "the nation's third largest airline." Actually, measured either by raw passenger totals or RPKs (that's revenue passenger kilometers, a standard industry gauge), Delta is the second-largest airline. The Atlantans were previously a third-place finisher but have moved up thanks to United's struggles. Measured by those same criteria, Delta is now first runner-up not only in the United States, but in the world.
Passenger totals for 2004, if you're keeping score, went like this:
1. American Airlines 91.6 million
2. Delta 86.9 million
3. Southwest 81.2 million
4. United 70.8 million
5. Northwest 55.4 million
Granted, that's a petulant quibble, but the Associated Press has been on probation for several months now, and I demand the highest standards from them. You might recall my earlier hissy fits in which the AP was taken to task for, among other errors, misidentifying a regional jet, confusing tailwinds with headwinds, and claiming that more than 300 people were able to fit inside a 737. Over the winter I counted factual errors in five AP stories over barely a month's time. (I've offered my services free of charge as a fact-checker, as most of the mistakes are pretty simple and quickly spotted. No reply yet to my letters.)
Getting off the AP's back for a moment, over at the New York Times on May 31 we discovered an amusing little piece about the troubles at Air Zimbabwe.
"Shunned by Western travelers," Times reporter Michael Wines explains, "Air Zimbabwe has tried to make money by turning east, serving Beijing and Singapore as well as Dubai. But Zimbabwe's poor economy and the airline's generally creaky planes have dissuaded customers."
Well, OK, except a look at the books shows that Air Zimbabwe's 767s are of comparable vintage to those at most other airlines. Creaky? That's open to interpretation, I guess. The carrier's oldest aircraft, a Boeing 737, was constructed in 1986. Those tuned in to this column during the past few weeks know 19 years is relatively fresh for a jetliner, and considerably younger than those DC-9s and DC-10s found at Northwest, for example.
"Not long ago," the piece continues, " [Air Zimbabwe's] in-flight magazine ran an article assuring ticket-holders that rumors that the airline was not safe to fly were unfounded."
Good for the magazine, since Air Zimbabwe hasn't suffered a fatal incident since 1979, when it was still called Air Rhodesia. The article doesn't mention this, leaving open the implication that perhaps those rumors are not so unfounded.
Game for more?
Here's one from the BBC.
"Air passengers risking health," yelps the headline. "More than half of air passengers are starved of oxygen, a study finds."
That certainly sounds alarming, until you click over, read the story, and realize just how misleading and inflammatory it is. And this is the BBC, not Fox News, the New York Post, or one of the U.K. tabloids.
