east village idiot

After the US Airways incident, I wrote about how the media is absolutely awful at covering air disasters, often blowing things out of proportion and sounding less informed than the average frequent flyer. After last night’s disaster, here’s some more examples of idiotic reporting that puts journalism to shame.

A previous flight said they had icing between 3500 and 6000 feet, and the Colgan Air flight went through that, too.

- John Roberts, CNN

No kidding. I thought it was possible to just skip over those flight levels on a descent.

Just before the crash, [Clarence Center resident David] Luce heard the plane and noticed that it sounded a little funny.

“It sounded quite loud, and then the sound stopped,” Luce said. “Then one or two seconds later, there was a thunderous explosion. I thought something hit our house. It shook our whole house.”

- The Buffalo News

Yeah, normally, planes fly over your house at 2,000 feet. When a plane flies directly over your house, it’s GOING TO BE LOUD. (Also, please note that the use of the word “funny” in a news story about an incident where 50 people perish is not particularly sensitive.)

- AP News Graphic via MSNBC.com

The plane did not crash where that little plane graphic is. That little plane graphic is location of the Buffalo airport. The plane crashed in Clarence Center.

NBC News Confirms Plane Crashed on Approach to Airport

- MSNBC lower-third Graphic, 8:12 this morning

NBC confirmed that? Yeah, I could confirm that, too, by listening to the ATC tape, or just looking at a map of where the plane crashed in relation to the airport (not the AP map above, of course). Are you harping on the fact that you confirmed the obvious? Good for you!

Seriously, can the media just have an embargo on reporting anything other than the fact that a plane crashed until THEY ACTUALLY KNOW SOMETHING ABOUT IT? The media can’t even accurately report where a plane crashed anymore, let alone what happened. I asked for responsibility in reporting last time, but obviously, nobody was listening.

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.

Another year, another strike in New York City. Thanks to the greed of organized labor, several major construction projects - the Second Avenue Subway, for one - are stalled because of a drivers’ strike.

I rarely delve into politics on my blog, and I will spare you the rhetoric, but you can probably safely assume that I typically vote with the party that calls itself “the party of organized labor.” Well, my position on organized labor dovetails with that of my political party… strongly. It dates back to my childhood, which proved to me very early that organized labor is unhelpful and unnecessary.

It started in 1992, when the teachers in my hometown spent over a month on the picket lines (those missed days translated to not a single week-long school vacation week during the year) to lobby for higher wages. This sounds very noble, except that they were already some of the highest-paid public school teachers in the nation, and my town just simply did not have the budget to meet their demand for a higher pay increase than the one already offered to them. For the rest of the year, the teachers union declared ”work-to-rule,” meaning that teachers were free to leave as soon as the school day was over. The good ones stayed late to run extra-curricular activities and help students who struggled with their work, but the ones loyal to the union left their students in the lurch. The same thing happened ten years later when their contract ran out again. (That time, the dispute was over paying 5% of their healthcare costs instead of getting them for free. Oh, the horror!)

In 1997, I got my first job, working as a bagger at a local supermarket. It paid a nice, solid minimum wage of $4.75 an hour, and I was lucky if I got more than 12 hours of work each week on the schedule. That work, of course, would include going out into the asphalt parking lot on 100-degree days to gather shopping carts. It was, without a doubt, the most backbreaking labor in the supermarket, but I was getting a weekly paycheck for the first time in my life, and I was proud of my income of about $48 a week after taxes. After a two-month “grace period,” I was informed that weekly UFCW dues would be deducted from my paycheck. Those weekly union dues would cost me more than an hour’s worth of work. What would I get from that union? Absolutely nothing. I was making minimum wage, I was working a few hours a week, and I wasn’t asking for (or being offered) any benefits. Two weeks later, my co-workers and thousands of others across New England went on strike for three days, despite the fact that I never heard a single one complain about their compensation in my two months working there.

Fast forward to today. The Teamsters-backed Construction Drivers are striking over low pay. ANd just how low is that pay?

Mr. Greco, who is also the secretary-treasurer of the Greco Brothers Concrete Corporation, said that under the expired contract, drivers earned $33.11 an hour, rising to $59.01 when health insurance, pension contributions and other benefits are included.

For those as lazy as unionized construction workers who don’t feel like doing the math on this, that’s about $70,000 a year before benefits. With benefits, these guys take in $125,000 a year.

Oh, the horror!

Oh, and that’s before overtime. And since these guys are unionized, you know they’re getting overtime for every second they work beyond 40 hours a week. They’ll get overtime for the time they spend walking to the timeclock from their truck. 

But they’re asking for a raise. Fair enough. Everyone’s entitled to a cost of living adjustment. 3% or so is pretty standard.

He said the union earlier this week demanded raises of $5 an hour in the overall compensation package each year for three years, although the union did not specify how much would go to wages and how much to benefits.

Mr. Greco said that during Monday’s bargaining, Gary La Barbera, Local 282’s president, reduced that demand to $3.50 an hour.

If you’re keeping score at home, they were asking for a $10,000-a-year raise, but now they’ve whittled it down to $7,280-a-year, or six percent.

If I walked into my boss’ office and asked for a $10,000-a-year-raise, he’d laugh in my face. He wouldn’t do that because I’m not a member of a union, though. He’d do that because it’s absurd. These guys should be lucky that they have these jobs. There are thousands of able-bodied people in New York City who would be willing to do this work for half of what these guys make.

Many decades ago, unions were meant to account for slacking labor laws. Now (mandatory vacation time aside), we have some of the best labor laws in the world. Unions were meant to stick up for those downtrodden workers without a voice. Now, those still struggling to get by are bowled over by the hurdles they have to clear to finding good-paying union work. Unions were meant to work for fair wages for underpaid workers. Now, Union workers don’t get fair wages - they get bloated wages that force taxes and consumer prices up.

But in the end, I love a good strike, because it reminds us all why unions are a dying breed in this country: they don’t fight for what’s right anymore.

Last night was the end of a long and painful Democratic Primary season. The candidate I was supporting had now clinched the nomination. Yet now my frustration was just beginning. After seeing Hillary Clinton drag my political party through the mud in the face of her loss, seeing her supporters chant “Denver! Denver!”, seeing this video, and seeing John McCain’s uninspiring speech, my blood was boiling last night. Regardless of your political affiliation, it’s a fact that the 24/7 news cycle has perpetuating the “us against them” philosophy of politics, I’m among many who have walked right into its trap. I tried to go to sleep last night, but I tossed and turned. My chest tightened up. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t stop thinking about politics. I’ve always considered politics to be a passion of mine, but the thought that primary politics would keep me up at night was a 3am wakeup call: this isn’t about passion anymore.

Starting today, I’m going on a media crash diet. I want to see how long I can last without opening up a newspaper, reading a news web site, watching cable news, or visiting a political blog. I just need to get away from it for a while. I can’t let myself get so worked up about things that I have very little control over. I can’t control a person’s thoughts, yet the fact that there are people out there who still believe Obama is a Muslim or that Saddam Hussein is responsible for 9/11 makes me want to scream. I can’t single-handedly overthrow the Burmese Government, yet I get red in the face thinking about it. Maybe there will be gaps in my knowledge of the Presidential Race, but I made my decision about who I’m supporting a long, long time ago. I don’t really even need the media to deliver political information to me. My blood pressure is off the charts, and I’ve been cranky just thinking about what’s going on in the world around me. Maybe this is why I bitch about everything and anything. I think I’m much better off feeling uninformed for a while if it keeps me healthier and happier.

I’ve never known ignorance myself, but they say that ignorance is bliss. I’m willing to learn what it’s like.

I can’t really say that Friday night’s tornado in Greensburg, Kansas affected me personally. I don’t know anyone who lives in that town, and I would imagine that I don’t even know anyone three degrees removed from the disaster.

But last summer, I drove through Greensburg. I remember it vividly. My friend and I were in the midst of a road trip across Missouri, Kansas, and Colorado. We could have stopped for gas in Greensburg - we were overdue and barely made it to Dodge City. We saw the signs for miles around pointing to the main attractions in town: the “World’s Largest Hand-Dug Well” and the “World’s Largest Pallasite metorite“ As we drove down U.S. 54, we saw the stunning - and somewhat out-of-place - Victorian architecture of the homes lining the streets. We should have stopped to see it while we still could, because this is what’s left of Greensburg:

It’s hard enough losing a piece of personal property in a storm. It’s even harder losing an entire home. But I cannot fathom what it’s like to lose your entire town. We can’t imagine - or don’t want to imagine - this scale of destruction if it ever happened in New York City. Greensburg was a town 1,500 residents strong. For we New Yorkers, who are so proud to live in this city of eight million, we forget that small town middle-America can be just as proud of where they’re from. And they can be just as heartbroken when a disaster takes away the things that define where they’re from and who they are.

So please, if you can, help Greensburg by donating to the Midway-Kansas Chapter of the American Red Cross.

And sorry if I made you cry, but sometimes I have to use my blog for good, not just evil.