Here is a link to a news story about a guy in Indiana who made an emergency landing on I-70, after having a problem with (what sounds like) carb icing. Watch the video embedded in the story.
http://www.theindychannel.com/news/15395833/detail.html#
The reporting is actually fairly good compared to others, the only hiccup for me was a strange emphasis on "his only engine". I guess the general public needs to be spoon fed info (to an airplane nut, it is not shocking that this single engine aircraft has only one engine).
The only problem with spoon feeding the non-flying public info is when that information is wrong. Here is a link to an LA Times story about the Corona crash several months ago where two aircraft collided in/around the traffic pattern.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-planes22jan22,1,1200341.story?page=2&track=rss
There is an error in the story that I felt was worth correcting, the part about "A lack of air traffic control is common for small airports like Corona Municipal, which has two runways but no tower." I contacted one of the authors of the story to ask about their math error with respect to the number of runways. The response I got made me wonder what else the "media" is just throwing together as fact. The guy from the newspaper wrote me back to say something to the effect that "Corona has a runway 7 and a runway 25, that's two runways". I gave him a short tutorial on how a runway is numbered, and he wrote back to say that a correction would be issued. Even though this is the year 2008, and the Internet is quite mature as a medium, the LA Times has still not corrected this error in the story. Would it be too difficult to change some HTML? Why is this a big deal you might ask, I think that saying this airport has more runways than it really has is misleading and makes Corona sound like a big airport that is dangerous because it has no control tower.
Am I being too critical? Let me know.
Oh, and I hope the Dad in the first story never treats his daughter to another airplane ride...
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
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2 comments:
I checked the first link, and maybe I missed it, but I don't see a redundant 'his only engine' phrase ("the" engine sufficing). Did they fix the text? On the other hand, when I looked up information on Corona, I can see how to a layman it looks like it has two runways (thanks to your making the point and a quick check, I now know how runways are numbered). An error is an error and should be corrected (or preferably avoided in the first place). But what's with the quotation marks you put around "media"?
This is not, by the way, Marion!
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