in everything from helicopters and Twin Otters to 747s, I'll testify to the fact that you can get some really hellacious thunderstorms there. Certainly storms that I would not like to be taking off in, in any sort of plane.

How can a jet engine being shutdown by 'hail ingestion' ?

Is it reversible? Do you just wait for the ice to melt?

Thanks

Patrice Weber

I took off many years ago from Prescott Arizona in my single engine Mooney. There was a thunderstorm over mountains about 10 miles away, but at the airport it was bright and sunny. I was doing a downwind departure so as we flew parallel to the runway the plane started descending rapidly, even with full power on. Prescott had a flight service station at the time and the guy on duty saw me descending at a high angle of attack. He courteously waited until we started ascending again to call me on the radio and dryly note that I looked like I might have been having a little trouble. Downbursts are pretty serious stuff and can turn into severe wind shear as they fan out on the ground.

It seems to me that Patrick Smith failed to mention another possibility in his "perfect-stormishness" list.

It may be Kenya Airway's policy, totally unwritten of course, that, when in doubt, the pilots/airplane should take off. The weather be damned. Connecting flights are most important. Being on time is most important.

I have a lot of sympathy with your experience with reporters. A number of years ago I had a job that involved getting interviewed by reporters on a semi-regular basis. I several times had the experience of talking with a reporter for an hour or more, during that time saying one ill-advised statement of a few sentences that cast my organization in an unfavorable light, and having that be one of the two quotes they used. The lesson that I took from that is that your should never talk to a reporter in anything other than bland generalizations, because they generally seem more interested in being senesational than truthful.

These days I am a scientist and don't talk to reporters anymore. The thing that is disturbing to me is that on the rare occassions when a news story impinges on my area of expertise, it is almost invariably deeply wrong both in details and in the big picture. Other people have told me the same thing. So, it makes me wonder - is anything that the news media tells us accurate?

Why is it that we never read "...and the reporter, I felt, on balance, represented what I had to say very well"?

Because it almost never happens.

Journalists are taught from literally Day One to "seek the heart of the story" to "look for the conflict" to "find the angle".

But heart, conflict and angle are three concepts that should be removed completely from any technical article, like for example an early "we don't know yet" piece about an airline going down.

And yet we have the stomach-churning imagery of thunderstorms flipping airlines over, the crew "pressing on" when others chose not to fly, etc.

100% heart, conflict and angle, as usual, meaning 0% facts.

The funny (as in deeply blackly ironic) thing is that good writing has many more tools available to it, and that the heart-conflict-angle triumvirate is really only applicable to brand new journalists dealing with human interest stories (the kind that brand new journalists are given to cover).

Move outside the mainstream press bubble (where every story is rewritten as "human interest") and you can actually find good writing. You may need to pick up a trade publication, or one of those non-advertising supported journals, but good reportage is out there.

Just don't ever expect to find it coming off the wire.

…slow. Both the Bluegrass Comair, and the Midway Southwest accident investigations are still out standing. To be fair, in both cases, there were early promulgation of advice from NTSB and early action by FAA based upon lessons learned from those two accidents. Never-the-less we still wait for the final issuance of the official reports detailing the “probable cause”.

But at least in the US we have an investigation process. What about in Cameroon where it took two days just to locate where the plane went down (just three and a half miles from the airport!)? Mr. Smith states with some confidence that “Eventually we’ll know what happened”. Even with NTSB’s assistance, I have to wonder if we really ever will know.

National Geographic Channel. This show demonstrates the many factors that cause fatal disasters. They first describe how a disaster happened, then go into detail about all of the factors that resulted in that disaster. Plane crashes, train crashes, weather related deaths, explosions... they cover it all. It's quite fascinating to see how many different things contribute to seemingly incomprehensible disasters. I highly recommend it to anybody who has ever shaken their head while watching a news report and asked themselves "how could something like that happen?".

I laughed when reading this.

My husband was the Captain of a 747 that had an "incident" that made the international news.

He and the rest of the crew were very cautious when dealing with the press and kept saying "no comment" to all questions. One reporter kept implying in a question (that the reporter kept shouting repeatedly) that the government (not U.S.) had forced the plane to return. My very annoyed husband finally said, "No they didn't."

It was amazing/shocking how that comment got reported and twisted by a few of the reporters.

Bay to breakers race San Francisco, today 5/200/2007

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/object/article?o=5&f=/c/a/2007/05/20/BAGHFPUG5H4.DTL

This is the most interesting lightning strikes airplane story I have read.

"Understand you lost your No. 1 engine?"

"Uh ... we lost our only engine."

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FKE/is_3_47/ai_85481786

Original story can be found at http://www.safetycenter.navy.mil/media/approach

Fortunately, this kind of thing is extremely rare.