If Congress can be panicked into a war out of fear of nonexistent doomsday weapons, TV was there to exaggerate something as simple as an airliner's nose wheel problem.
MSNBC collapsed into a hand-wringing frenzy last Wednesday when a JetBlue Airbus 320 with a twisted nose gear made an emergency landing at Los Angeles International.
News anchor Allison Stewart and reporters Bob Hager, Tom Costello and George Lewis turned what airline pilots consider a solvable problem into a catastrophe-in-the-making with gripping accounts of a potential calamity.
Airline pilots are put through periodic simulated emergencies to guarantee their proficiency—simulated engine fires and failures, landing gear problems, control system failures, instrument and electrical failures, radio outages, decompression at altitude, etc.
Records show European-made Airbus 320s encountered the same problem six previous times—without TV excitement and with safe landings.
With textbook poise, JetBlue's pilot calmly (a) burned off fuel to lighten the jet, (b) before landing at LAX's long runway with ample emergency equipment, while (c) reassuring passengers watching the event on their in-flight seat TV screens that all would be okay.
Composure was not evident at MSNBC as it anguished through the drama. Reporter Hager, a licensed pilot, talked ominously of possible "casualties," of Airbus possibly swerving and tipping on its side on landing (unlikely: the 320's 135-mph landing forward momentum could be controlled by brake and rudder steering), while Lewis and Costello and anchor Stewart wondered about hospitals to handle victims and alluded to an Airbus "gutted by fire" in Toronto.
Oh, my.
Hundreds of air carrier and general aviation aircraft experience landing gear problems every year—landing without gear down, faulty gear warning lights, flat tires, lost wheels—as well as other in-flight mechanical misfortunes that are handled routinely.
(On my FAA flight check in Florida for a multi-engine rating in the early 1960s in an old, underpowered twin-engine Piper Apache, examiner Don Burnside shut down one engine while over the Atlantic Ocean to test my turns and approach to stalls with a dead engine. Then we couldn't restart it. He didn't even notify air traffic control. One engine still dead, we landed.)
After two hours of circling, the JetBlue pilot touched down feather-light on the main gear, gently lowered the disabled nose gear and continued landing on the runway centerline stripe flawlessly while the twisted wheel melted in flames.
If we learned about being suckered by overblown fears of Iraq's weaponry, has MSNBC learned to curb its embellishment of a non-catastrophe?
