It hasn’t been a very good day for aviation, has it? Between the economic woes of the industry (and the furloughed and unemployed pilots) and the recent airplane crashes, aviation has been in the news for all the wrong reasons.
Every time there is an incident involving aircraft, such as the Hudson River landing or the Turkish Airlines crash just short of Schiphol airport, the flight instructor office at work is abuzz with pilot talk. That was the case this morning as we opened our browsers to news of the FedEx accident in Tokyo and the PC-12 crash in Montana. We quickly narrowed in on the FedEx crash, reading different news accounts and viewing videos.
The office discussion has mostly focused on how ridiculous media coverage is during and after major accidents. We are sick and tired of the so-called aviation experts who get trotted out for interviews on Fox News and CNN (And from China all we see are online videos. I can’t imagine what it is like live!) The reporters should be ashamed for what they are trying to pass off as journalism! They are always uninformed, pushing the “experts” to speculate or make generalizations about things they could not possibly know. Granted, our office talk also involves a lot of speculation, but nobody is speculating about what happened on national television! The news media should report the objective facts and leave the analysis to the investigators and real experts. Sensationalizing and fear-mongering, however, seem to make money.
We also look for errors and inconsistencies in the reporting. CNN and The New York Times have both reported that the accident happened on Narita’s Runway A (Alpha). Aviation nerds will snicker knowingly that letters, A, B, C, etc. are used to refer to taxiways. Runways are named after their position on the magnetic compass. (North-South aligned runways are named 36 and 18, for example.) In this case, the runway would have been either 16R or 34L.
As I mentioned before, we viewed videos of the crashing MD-11 at the Narita airport and I have to admit I wish I had not watched them. They were very disturbing to me. I’ve watched loads of aircrash investigation movies and I teach these kinds of accidents to my students. It is one thing to watch a computer animation, however, and quite another to see a crash actually happening. If you’re going to watch them, proceed with caution.
And now for the introspective bit. I feel differently about the FedEx crash than I have about others. I generally view accidents clinically, thinking how I can apply them to my teaching. With the FedEx crash, I feel more personally involved. Not that I am in the least, but because I have been participating in a Pilot Wive’s website and discussion forum, I know something more about the lives of airline pilots’ wives and I even know a few FedEx wives through the group. In addition, the FedEx crash is something that is happening in my region of the world, and it seems much closer than accidents that happen in North America or Europe. (Although, really, I am nowhere near Narita.)
My thoughts are with the pilots’ families and my condolences go out to the FedEx family. I am a pilot’s wife yet I cannot fathom what it must be like to be in their shoes.
Photo credit: sakura-chihaya on Flickr
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