Intresting that 911 calls were relesed so soon, It would take months for air crashes to do the same. We see wreckage on the Cacades where life was lost we almost never see airline wreckage on the news where life was lost. I say that airlines have better PR and attorneys and that Airlines spend more $$$$$ on TV and Print so if someone saw the carnage after a airline wreck no body would fly again.
Many times airline wreckage is in remote difficult or impossible to access locations. In some cases no wreckage is found (MH370). In other cases where wreckage is found, the remains are of such small pieces as to be unrecognizable.
We are accustomed to air line crashes - but since ‘trains don’t run anymore’; when there is a incident it is news, especially in the local area of the incident.
I would hardly say that airline incidents get to fly “under the radar.” Serious aircraft incidents are usually catastrophic, taking out all the occupants of the aircraft and sometimes people on the ground. And they are all over the news, for at least one news cycle. A major crash may carry over for several days.
It’s been in the news within the past few days that the airline industry has had a very good year, incident-wise.
General aviation incidents usually only garner local coverage, as do minor derailments. If a derailment doesn’t affect the community, it may not be news at all.
Curiously, two movies making the rounds of the premium channels right now are “Sully” and “Unstoppable.” One is more or less factual, the other is “based on a true story.” One is air, one is rail.
Plane accidents usually don’t have 911 calls as people’s phones are supposed to be off or on airplane mode.
The Cascades wreck occured during a slow news week, so it got a lot more coverage than it otherwise might have.
There’s one thing media coverage of train and plane crashes has in common, those doing the reporting do a pretty good job of showcasing their ignorance regarding both modes of transportation.
I used to read a lot of aviation mags like “Flying”, “Plane and Pilot”, and “Sport Aviation.” Their mutterings over media ignorance matched perfectly with what you’d read here from our frequent posters.
IIRC, the tapes were released pretty quickly after the Asiana Flight 214 incident in SFO.
BINGO!
Airline fatalities, in the US at least, are so rare anymore it’s difficult to gauge media reaction.
There seems to be a fair amount of media coverage over bus plunges like the one in Peru recently. Only buses plunge, for some reason. Newspaper editors must like that phrase.
Plus it was a pretty spectacular event, with cars dangling over the highway, with high death toll. I don’t see any undue media bias.
I worked for 36 years in a large financial based industry (not transportation) and can tell you that the ignorance was pretty nearly total about that as well, by general as well as so called “business news reporters.” And it was as bad for “favorable” stories as it was for negative or damaging stories, which of course they liked to write much more. Even when they were spoon fed with a PR release it would often be utterly botched by the time it saw print. And the corrections would be botched too.
There is a temptation for us to feel that rail or transport is uniquely mis-handled by the media. I suspect it is handled no better and no worse than just about any other serious topic.
Dave Nelson
Foresic Files on HLN about Sunset Limited Amtrak going off bridge into Bayou
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3512380/plotsummary?ref_=tt_ov_pl
Trust me, the media doesn’t do much better with the fire service…
Some larger fire departments even go so far as to run “mini-academies” so the press (and political leaders) can find out exactly what the whole business is about.
A local TV reporter was in our building doing some story or other, and I asked him about some other current local issue, and he told me, “Oh I don’t know anything about it, I just report.” Another local news anchor did a story about some nature area and identified some spokespeople as from the “Autobahn Society”. It isn’t just rail troubles.
The last death on a US commercial airliner was 9 years ago. That might account for never seeing any coverage in the news. Nothing has happened to cover.
Things got so slow in the world of airliner crashes, they started to breathlessly report close calls. They may have coined the term near-miss at this time. Well, I hope they miss, that’s what they are supposed to do everyday everytime.
2017 air travel was fatality-free, so it’s not a bias, just literally nothing to report. Rail wasn’t so lucky in 2017.
If a train derailment blocks a street crossing, then it’s news.
Need to qualify that as US air travel. There have been numerous accidents that resulted in death among many foreign carriers - including some that service the US but the flights that had incidents didn’t originate or terminate in the US on those incidents.
I’m an expat retired in Italy but still get a lot of US news, notably CNN, Fox and dozens of others. BUT, on the History channel there is an ongoing series about airplane crashes that we’ve been watching once or twice a week for several years now. I guess there’s been a LOT of plane wrecks to have a series like that, but only one or two one spots on railroad wrecks. A lot of the show is involved in finding the cause of the crash, something that can take a lot of detective work on plane crashes which makes it interesting, while railroad wrecks are more or less straight forward and fairly simple in comparison. You can’t put together a one hour show about a train going 80 into a 30 MPH curve. Five or 10 minutes maybe, but not an hour.
By the time you put together information about the line upgrade, why it was chosen, etc, the events leading up to the crash, and then a detailed review of where the cars went, where the casualties were located, etc, it would be easy to fill up an hour. If you want to add dramatizations, you might make it to two.
They’ve done hour long shows about planes that crashed because they ran out of fuel.