In a very open article about the issue of airline safety, the International Herald Tribute looks at the “Great leaps in safety beyond bounds of media”, pointing out that the media tends to report on the sensational first assumptions of an airplane crash and rarely report on the more accurate findings that come later.
Aviation safety is often covered breathlessly by the news media, sometimes to the point that the aviation industry just shakes its head and rolls its eyes. Too often, the industry cringes at coverage that is also inaccurate.
In fact, many in the industry assume that aviation safety coverage will be inaccurate.
There is another assumption that aviation professionals subscribe to with even more enthusiasm - that the solution to a safety problem will almost always be ignored by the news media. At a minimum, it will be given tiny coverage compared with that of the original crash.
If ever there was a disaster that proves the point, it is the crash of Trans World Airways Flight 800 off the coast of Long Island on July 30, 1996. For those who may have forgotten, the TWA Boeing 747 was climbing after takeoff from Kennedy International Airport on a flight to Paris when a massive explosion ripped off the front half of the plane and the huge aircraft broke into pieces and plunged into the Atlantic Ocean, killing 230 people.
The crash of Flight 800 almost a decade ago still ranks as one of the most inaccurately reported of all aviation crashes, and not just by the news media. The FBI made a number of blunders that it leaked to the news media in an effort to “prove” that terrorists had brought down the plane, something the agency believed for many weeks. That belief persisted although less than two weeks after the crash, professional investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board had discovered evidence that an accidental fuel tank explosion had caused the disaster.
Many months later, everyone except a cottage industry of conspiracy theorists understood that no one had deliberately blown Flight 800 out of the sky.
