Stupid News People

Oh, The Humanity…

I guess that every single person in the entire world saw the live broadcast of the saga of the Gulfstream G500 jet that had landing gear problems out in Oregon on Monday.

The coverage basically drove me crazy so I turned it off and managed to miss the actual footage of the landing until it was re-broadcast on the news later Monday night.

What a total NON-STORY this event was.

Why?

Because anyone that is involved in commercial aviation or that flies light aircraft knows that things like this happen several times a day, every single day of the year.

Back in 1991, when I was learning to fly, I witnessed a similar event, in person, and FOX News and CNN and the balance of the “lamestream” media missed the story in its entirety.

I had already filed my flight plan, done my preflight calculations on the airplane (a 1968 model Cessna 152, tail number 751B), had completed my preflight inspection, untied the airplane from its moorings on the tarmac, and was climbing into the cockpit with my instructor when we heard a grinding sound and turned around to witness a twin engine turboprop Piper sliding down the middle of runway 27R at McCullum airfield.

The airport was closed for the rest of the day since it only had a single runway, and said runway was blocked with the aforementioned Piper. Practically everyone but me went running out to the scene of the crime as I cursed and re-secured my airplane to the tie-downs and wandered back into the pilots lounge.

It seems that the Piper was being piloted by another student that was practicing single engine emergency procedures and that he had failed to remember to put the landing gear down during final approach. He said that he couldn’t think with all of the alarms going off in the cockpit—one of which was a LANDING GEAR ALARM telling him that the gear was still in the UP position. What a crime, tearing the belly off of a perfectly good airplane.

The flight instructor was a bit red-faced also.

Monday I was embarrassed for the FOX News broadcasters because they were forced to talk over the video footage for several hours and their inane babble made virtually no sense most of the time.

They interviewed everyone from the “spokesperson” for Gulfstream, the Chief Gulfstream Test Pilot, to the Janitor in the men’s room in the Savannah, Georgia Gulfstream fabrication facility, and most of the commentary added nothing to the progress of the story.

At one point a female commentator (I forget who) started talking about “foaming” the runway to “grease the airplane’s slide down the pavement.”

Say What?

They used to foam the runway with FIRE RETARDENT FOAM to limit the spread of a jet fuel fire during a runway incident, not to “grease the airplane’s slide” on the concrete. Now they rarely waste the foam on the runway, they wait and spray it on the wreckage once the airframe stops moving—it takes a lot less foam that way.

Then they started worrying about the environmental impact of foaming the runway and the impact of “dumping fuel” on the environment. Funny thing, but didn’t the jet stay airborne for the extra hours in order to BURN THE FUEL rather than dumping it?

I say that the “officials” should say “screw the Snail Darter fish and the Spotted Owls,” the airplane had SEVEN very worried humans on board and foam and jet fuel in the creeks or oceans is the last of their worries.

One commentator also speculated about the availability of the ocean nearby and wondered aloud why they didn’t just ditch a multi-million-dollar airplane in the freezing salt water.

Can you believe the STUPIDITY of that thought process?

These are the people that we rely on to tell us what is going on in the world. If even FOX News can’t do better than this on such a simple NON-STORY, I’m seriously concerned for our ability to survive as a nation on a long term basis.

DON’T LISTEN TO THEM…THEY’RE ALL IDIOTS.