Stupid Media Tricks

“News,” at it is currently conveyed in this media-saturated, ratings-driven culture, apparently is no longer composed of who, what, where, when and why. Along the way, television added another component: drama. “If it bleeds, it leads,” is not a pithy joke, it is a mission statement.

Last night’s unscheduled landing of a JetBlue airliner with malfunctioning front gear provided an opportunity for talking heads and their associates to do their worst. The local television and radio stations interrupted regular programming (no great loss there) for hours as the stricken Airbus circled off the Los Angeles coastline. The dull visuals allowed uninformed anchorpeople too much time to shoot their mouths off. The lust for a spectacular crash was palpable. One local radio host’s insistence on a tragic outcome was utterly revolting. Her voice took on a hard edge as she questioned a pilot, express surprise to the point of outrage that the airplane would not become a Flaming Cartwheel O’ Death. The pilot explained that the worst that would happen is that the nose gear, stuck ninety degrees to the longitudinal axis of the aircraft, would first burn through the tires (“that is the black, rubber part”), and that the wheels (“that’s the metal part” – the pilot clearly understood what he was dealing with) would simply drag down the runway, and that it was highly unlikely that the strut would collapse. Sceptical, and expressing the thought that she needed to explore a “worst case scenario,” she asked about the chances that the wheel might snap off, the nose strut would catch on the runway …

[…in my car, I’m pleading with her not to go there. Please, please don’t say this …]

… and the plane would FLIP OVER?

[Gah! She said it! I actually laughed out loud in my car.]

The pilot did not allow the reverberations of her triumphant, “gotcha” tone fade away before responding, “Zero. Absolutely zero chance.”

That would have been bad enough, but the anchor then challenged the pilot, countering with a curt, petulant “why not?” The pilot patiently explained the physics of the event – all of the energy is horizontal, not vertical, etc. I imagine he was also either stifling laughter or rolling his eyes to the ceiling, or both.

There was misinformation and rampant speculation all over the airwaves and internet in the hour leading up to the landing. CNN’s story said that the Airbus was circling off the California coast to dump fuel, when in fact the airplane did not have that capability. The pilot had to fly for three hours to burn off the fuel; if it could have dumped fuel, it would have landed hours before. I heard second hand that a national anchor stated that the airplane was heading back to Burbank for an emergency landing. I’ve written about SoCal airfields before. There is absolutely no possibility that an airliner would attempt an emergency landing at an airfield whose main runway is among the shortest anywhere in the area, and half the length of the runway eventually used for the landing.

The aviation experts, on the other hand, were uniformly excellent. Characteristic of pilots, they expressed calm and useful information. One grumpy old man pilot gruffly set one set of anchors straight in detail about how straightforward and non-dangerous the landing would be. The anchors thanked him and wished that his words could be conveyed to the passengers. (Little did we know that the passengers could hear some of the commentary.) Another pilot explained how the tires and wheels would scrape away, and that hydraulic fluid would probably catch fire, but that it would not be a major concern. All of the experts stated that the pilot would have been trained for this sort of thing. As it turns out, they were exactly right, and the pilot did a masterful job of bringing the airplane down softly, holding the nose aloft as long as possible, and brought that baby down right on the center line. He also did not order an emergency evacuation, which, as several of the experts pointed out before the landing, would be the likely, and probably only, cause of injury.

What the networks received was a well-packaged, well-timed, flaming-but-safe drama in the air, lovingly lit by the late afternoon Los Angeles sun. They made the most of it.

Don Henley’s scathing critique of the media (Los Angeles news in particular), 25 years old by now, has never stopped being true:

"The bubbleheaded bleach blonde
Comes on at five.
She’ll tell you ‘bout the plane crash
With a gleam in her eye.
It’s interesting when people die.
Give us dirty laundy.”