Very sad.
BTW I emailed the editor about the constant use (by UK press) of the word “plummet” and I hope others do also. It makes private pilots look like complete idiots.
Unfortunately if they are talking of “wreckage” (indicating a high energy impact with the water, not a controlled ditching) sadly the word “plummet” might actually be correct.
RIP. Very sad.
The press do love to over sensationalise any aviation accident. They won’t report on how many people were killed over the weekend on motorbikes etc.
Peter wrote:
BTW I emailed the editor about the constant use (by UK press) of the word “plummet” and I hope others do also
Funny, even as a non-native speaker I took offense reading that word in the article. I looked for any information that would substantiate it later in that article and found none. I was actually going to post a comment but thought this wasn’t too relevant for the forum.
At larger online media, unfortunately it’s often just the headlines that are written by a separate editor, and you can sometimes notice this when the headline clearly contradicts the article because the person who came up with it didn’t bother to read the article, or just had a cursory look and got it wrong. Sometime you can also see that different headlines (and images) are tested and the one with the most clicks (i.e. the most sensationalist one) wins. Myself, I get really annoyed when the article doesn’t substantiate the headline, it is like “false advertising”. Recently, there was a runway overrun in Bergamo, and almost all german speaking media had the headline “plane lands on highway in Bergamo”… argh.
We notice these errors in articles about aviation because we are subject matter experts. What is really scary is that when you transpose this sloppiness to other subjects, like economy or politics, you can really just guess how misinformed we are about large parts of what’s going on in the world.
Rwy20 wrote:
What is really scary is that when you transpose this sloppiness to other subjects, like economy or politics, you can really just guess how misinformed we are about large parts of what’s going on in the world.
Over the course of my life, I have acquired expertise or semi-expertise in a number of quite different subjects. Every time I realised, to my horror, that most of what media says about that subject is wrong…
I’ve read three different versions of that news report.
The first one say that the aircraft was carrying 4 people. It say 2 adults and two children.
The second version didn’t say how many people were on board, but that the aircraft was capable of carrying 4 people.
The third one said that it understood that there was only one person on board.
Indeed, you simply can’t believe what you read in newspapers.
News are: No further searches for missing pilot
