Terrifying 20 seconds for airline passenger

[pilotgallagher01]

I think this is a bit over the top. Yes Severe downshafts, Turbulence e.t.c, Can be scary as I have had experienced them myself on my own. But for a CAA safety investigator assigned, Bloody Hell....

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/aviation/news/ar...jectid=10553481

Thoughts

[greaneyr]

QUOTE (pilotgallagher01 @ Jan 25 2009, 10:30 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I think this is a bit over the top. Yes Severe downshafts, Turbulence e.t.c, Can be scary as I have had experienced them myself on my own. But for a CAA safety investigator assigned, Bloody Hell....

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/aviation/news/ar...jectid=10553481

Thoughts

Yup, I agree, it's OTT. I've been in some pretty severe turbulence on a Q300 flight from Palmerston North to Auckland and also seen columns of water rising from tray tables, but I also know the facts on just how many airliners crash as a result of turbulence. But hey, never let the facts get in the way of a good story, right? The only 'scary' part was listening to screams, but that's just because we're humans and we're conditioned to respond to that noise.

The part that really wound me up about this article was this sentence at the end of it :

"A Mount Cook Airlines ATR72 was forced to make an emergency landing at Wellington in December when an engine was damaged seconds after take-off and the cabin filled with smoke."

What on earth does this have to do with the story they just reported on? Good old media dragging out someone's past to try and create a mood in the public eye that Mount Cook have a poor safety record. I for one don't buy it.

Why didn't they just go all out and say "And, Mount Cook is a subsidiary of Air New Zealand, whose Airbus A320 that was on lease overseas crashed off the coast of France. Air New Zealand also has a poor safety record as a DC-10 crashed when it Mount Erebus a number of years ago killing all passengers on board. NAC, the company from which Air New Zealand was formed, does not have a clean safety record either. A DC3 crashed in the Kaimai ranges killing passengers on board too. BOAC, the even older airline, also had fatal accidents. What we won't tell you was that Erebus was in the 1970s, NAC no longer exists, and nor does BOAC. We're not telling 'lies' per se, we're just omitting facts that give our story less 'sensationalism'".

Please don't get me started on the media.

For those too lazy to find it on the Herald site, here's the link not truncated : http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article....jectid=10553481

[Matthew]

Precisely Richard, you've "hit the nail on the head"

Perfect description of the media