east village idiot

When I started watching the media coverage of the water landing of US Airways Flight 1549 (along with my entire office, dropping productivity by about 99%), I had a kneejerk reaction to the incident:

Ugh, here we go again. A bunch of people are going to say, “I’ll never fly again,” when really, this is exactly a reason why they should fly.

Perhaps to you, the once-a-year traveller, this seems like a mind-boggling reaction. “Why would the fact that a bird took down a plane make me less afraid?”

There’s a simple - and perhaps too simplistic - answer: because the media is feeding into your fear.

The initial TV coverage was panicked. “A plane crashed in the Hudson!” People scurried around my office and checked CNN.com. I went to our lobby, where NY1 was airing, and saw the video of the plane floating in the water. We switched to MSNBC, where an eyewitness said via phone, “I saw the plane go up just briefly and then it came down again.”

I knew exactly what was going on: The plane didn’t “go up.” The pilot had brought the nose up to land the plane safely on water. He followed protocol perfectly for a water landing. At that point, I turned to a co-worker and said, “that was a flawless landing. I guarantee you everyone on that plane is fine.”

I was right. But MSNBC didn’t disseminate the eyewitness’ statement. Instead, it continued to put out misinformation from people who know nothing about aviation: the plane was “still being evacuated” (this was 45 minutes after the incident, and I doubt there was a passenger on that plane even five minutes after the incident), that this was “a crash” (it’s not a crash if the pilot retains some control of the plane. It’s an emergency landing), and most significantly, that they were shocked - SHOCKED, I tell you - that a bird could bring down a plane.

In Media Fantasyland, the headline is: ”OMG, BIRD HITS PLANE, PLANE CRASHES INTO RIVER!”

In Reality World, the headline should be: ”Pilots Land Plane Safely in River After Bird Strike.”

Bird strikes are more common in aviation than one might think, and they’re pretty much completely unavoidable, but usually survivable. A bird hitting a plane at 150 mph has the impact of a half-ton weight being dropped from ten feet off the ground. If it doesn’t hit the fuselage and cause damage, it can get sucked into the engine, causing the engine to flame out and forcing the pilot to restart the engine. Pilots are trained specifically for these situations, which is why the pilot followed procedures and made a near-perfect water landing in the Hudson (knowing he couldn’t get back to LaGuardia or make it all the way to Teterboro). In addition, planes are designed with safety features in mind for water evacuations. There’s an obvious reason that this is part of the pre-flight safety announcement; they are rare, but they are completely survivable if you follow instructions.

How do I know all this? Am I an aviation expert? Am I a licensed pilot? Nope. But neither are any of the anchors of the cable news coverage I watched, and they failed to report this information. I do read Ask The Pilot religiously - and highly recommend it to anyone with apprehensions of flying after an incident like this. My curiosity as a child about airplanes led me to read a couple books about flying, but my experience in aviation ends there. Yet a simple Google search of reputable sources would have provided an amateur with insight that put this incident into perspective. If a measured amount of that perspective was added to the reporting of this story, there’s a chance that some people might not have it in their heads that today’s landing is a reason to avoid flying.

A lot of this is psychological. We are scared to death when we see that a plane lands in the water and everyone survives, but we are numb to the news of a deadly car wreck. Birds have taken down planes before, but it’s far more rare than a drunk driver crashing head-on into another vehicle. Does that keep the same person who’s afraid of flying off the roads? Inexplicably, no.

As of today, the U.S. commercial airline industry has now gone a record 879 days without a fatality. There’s a drunk driving fatality in the United States once every 39 minutes. If every fatal car crash got the national coverage that today’s incident did, there would have to be 500 cable channels to cover them all. Yet Flight 1549 will get far more media attention than a drunk driving crash because it has a compelling and rare visual: a fuselage submerged in the middle of a river. That visual strikes fear into the hearts of armchair air travellers.

While the media might not deliberately be doing it, they’re scaring you. And you’re scaring yourself. Stop worrying about this, and know that pilots are trained to get you where you need to go in a safe and efficient manner. The airlines have control over charging you for a pillow, but they don’t have control over where birds fly. Talk all the trash you want about luggage fees, carry-on limits, and charging for water, but that has no impact on the ability of a veteran pilot to land a plane safely in an emergency. Flying may be annoying, but it’s just as safe right now as it was 24 hours ago.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 16th, 2009 at 10:08 am and is filed under Getting Serious. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.