(July 15, 2017 at 6:31 pm)Thumpalumpacus Wrote: And iirc, Delta 191(? Might have that wrong -- D/FW Aug 1985, anyway) got dropped by wind shear on approach from about 500' AGL. Granted those conditions weren't extant here, but at 150 kia, SHTF pretty quickly.
Again, no it doesn't. It just doesn't. If it did, we'd have fatal transport category accidents every other week. The go-around minima for most precision instrument approaches is about 200ft. You fly the approach down to 200ft and if you can't see the runway by then, you pour on the coals and go around. Air crews perform this procedure routinely without incident all the time.
Every accident is the result of a chain of failures and/or poor decisions. Do the right thing at just one of those links in the chain and the accident doesn't happen. This event was most definitely the first link in what could have turned out to be a pretty deadly accident. But several other links (not just one, but several) went exactly right as they're supposed to do. Yes its definitely an event worth of investigation and I'll certainly be curious to see what the investigation reveals. But it absolutely does not warrant the kind of news coverage its received IMO.
The one and only reason this is getting coverage is because its airplanes and airplanes scare the shit out of anyone who isn't intimately familiar with their operations. And scaring the ever living shit out of people is how news organizations manage to stay in business. Don Henley wrote dirty laundry in 1982 so I'm guessing this is hardly new information for most people.
Like I said in an earlier post, within 50 or 100 square miles of just about every person reading this post, there was a car accident today that killed someone. Most of those car accidents won't get reported by any news organization anywhere. Why? Because no one gives a fuck about someone they don't know buying it in a car wreck. But the minute Arlo T Knickerbacker has some engine trouble while puttering around in his Cessna and puts it down in a farm field without a single scratch on himself or the plane just like he was trained to do, it will be the lead story on every news broadcast within 800 miles. If there's video of the landing? Then its the lead story on every news broadcast in the country and several others overseas. No one got hurt. Nothing happened and it will be the lead story guaranteed. Because airplanes frighten people and anything that frightens people will be news no matter what.
