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For all the decades that planes have fallen out of the sky, flown into buildings or mountains, collided with each other, hit the ground short of a runway, or run off the end of one, the aftermath has meant picking up physical pieces. Lately, it’s digital pieces, and the people doing the picking up are no longer just the crash investigators or journalists—they are the general public.
The internet changed everything, including the flow of information about airplane crashes. As with C-SPAN broadcasting debates from the floor of the House of Representatives, or X letting politicians address followers directly, this access to information becomes another aspect of disintermediation, the bypassing of news media.
Within hours of the midair collision between a passenger jet and a military helicopter over the Potomac River on January 29, digital flotsam floated across the internet, including video from a surveillance camera at the Kennedy Center, the radar plots of both aircraft, complete with alphanumeric data blocks near each blip, and the audio communication between the helicopter and the tower at Reagan National Airport. Anybody with a smartphone could see and hear it—even if they lacked the context to make sense of the data.
The contrast from my era on the aviation beat, which I covered for twenty years, until 2014, at the New York Times, is stunning. Twenty-five years ago, when the threads in a big screw on an Alaska Airlines MD-83 suddenly stripped away as it was flying over the ocean off the California coast, reporters had to gather many hours later in a government auditorium in Port Hueneme to hear a recording of the pilots telling controllers that they’d lost control of the airplane’s pitch and had descended suddenly. Today, all such transmissions, benignly boring in most cases, are available with a few clicks.
The same is true of what the controllers see on their scopes. What was once a whiz-bang government technology is now mostly in the public domain.
Here’s how it works:
The Federal Aviation Administration’s short-range radars, sweeping the skies twelve or fifteen times a minute, include a device called a beacon interrogator, which sends a continual query: Who is out there? On the plane, a transponder raises its hand, so to speak, and replies with its identity and altitude. The radar knows which way it is pointing when the question was asked and when it was answered, and it knows the speed of the radio waves through the air, so it knows how far away the plane is. But it also knows the angle it was facing when it asked the question, so it knows the direction as well.
Here’s how it becomes disintermediated:
Commercial services go to a nearby rooftop and erect a small antenna, not much bigger than a fire hydrant. The antenna eavesdrops on the conversation between the FAA and the airplanes and produces a shadow radar display.
Hence details that would once have waited for investigators to describe to reporters, and gone from there to the public, now go straight to anybody with a computer tablet. What C-SPAN did on the floor of the House of Representatives is now common in more technical contexts, like plane crashes. Armchair crash detectives are now computer-chair crash detectives.
And entrepreneurs can combine the air traffic control transmissions and the radar track into an understandable package.
The media can at times leverage that data and do a stunning job with it. The Times, for example, did an eye-catching 3D representation of what the helicopter pilots could have seen from their cockpit.
But media coverage is different these days. The Cleveland Plain Dealer had an investigative reporter, Beth Marchak, who broke a major story about ValuJet before misloaded cargo caught fire on its Flight 592 from Miami, crashing into the Everglades and killing all aboard. That was May 1996. Now the Plain Dealer barely manages to cover the statehouse, in Columbus.
The St. Petersburg Times (now the Tampa Bay Times) had an aviation safety reporter, Bill Adair, who chased plane crashes around the country; now it carries stories on aviation safety in Florida that are provided by the Orlando Sentinel. There is nothing wrong with these stories, but this does represent a cutback in journalism’s attention to aviation safety.
USA Today, a newspaper that once seemed to be delivered to almost every hotel in America for guests who arrived there by plane, had the distinction of having a reporter—Alan Levin—who covered nothing but aviation safety. I was not so specialized; my beat was transportation safety, including car airbags and major train derailments. But with cutbacks at Gannett—USA Today’s owner—Levin left for Bloomberg, where his good work disappeared behind a paywall.
Generalists can write very good stories about plane crashes, and good reporters can break news in a variety of fields. But the age of specialists is in decline.
There are other roles for news media. For one thing, even if briefings are livestreamed and data is available almost immediately, it will often take beat reporters to figure out what it means. It will take reporters to evaluate the explanations offered by Trump; for anyone outside of MAGA, the best that can be said about them is that they are prompt.
There will be a big role for reporters in about a year, when the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) releases a report, probably hundreds of pages long, that finds various contributing factors. Reporters will explain it in digestible form.
But the ranks of aviation safety reporters are much depleted, because of the general decline in news media, and the reduced frequency of crashes. And there are hundreds of thousands of aviation professionals or former professionals who can opine, with varying degrees of accuracy.
The availability of information has opened up the floodgates. It first dawned on me that the internet was going to change the discussion of crashes, and in ways that weren’t always good, after the crash of a US Air Force VIP jet in Dubrovnik, Croatia, on April 3, 1996. The airplane was carrying the US commerce secretary, Ronald H. Brown, and a delegation of business executives, who were going to scope out the possibilities for investments that would help rebuild the country as the civil war that destroyed Yugoslavia was winding down.
The plane hit a mountain, killing everyone on board. The Times, where I had by then been covering aviation safety for a few years, paid special attention because it had a reporter on board, Nathaniel C. Nash.
That crash, like most, came after the concatenation of many errors and failures, including a poorly designed approach, and rather primitive radio beacons on the ground near the end of a runway, that gave the cockpit crew only rather stingy information about their plane’s location.
With the internet starting to become popular—the Times had launched its website only months earlier, on January 22, 1996—people with varying levels of aviation expertise set to work constructing alternating theories of what happened. The best, from a conspiracy theorist’s point of view, was that bad guys had set up a “spoof” radio beacon on the mountain to lure the plane into it, and then removed the beacon after the crash. What made it a beautiful theory is that it was plausible and unverifiable, and thus could live forever.
I was pestered by proponents of this theory, but I lost interest when one of them explained that it was part of a larger effort to cripple the economy of the United States by killing the commerce secretary. If one had to rank the government officials whose demise could hurt the economy, the commerce secretary would not be at the top of the list. What the early internet had done was establish gathering places where like-minded individuals could construct deeper and deeper rabbit holes to jump down.
To be sure, there are plus sides. When US Airways Flight 1549 went down in the Hudson River on January 15, 2009, all 155 people on board survived, and several of the passengers immediately posted images of their ordeal on social media. City Room, the Times’ local news blog from 2007 to 2015, pulled together reader-submitted images of the crash that had been posted by the survivors. (The deft actions of the plane’s captain, Chesley B. Sullenberger III, and crew were dramatized in Clint Eastwood’s 2016 film Sully.)
Readers’ filling in the blanks is one side of the coin. The other is the internet’s abhorrence of a vacuum. And the crash investigation system is set up to be a vacuum. The NTSB invites almost everybody with expertise—the Federal Aviation Administration, the manufacturers of the aircraft, the unions representing the pilots and the air traffic controllers, the airlines (and, in the case of the DC crash, the Army)—to participate, but it swears them to secrecy for the duration of the investigation, which can easily take a year. The aim is to squelch speculation.
One party apparently not covered by the vow of secrecy is the president, who in the hours after the Washington collision solved it twice, once referring to the helicopter’s altitude, which may turn out to be a factor, as well as blaming the race or gender or physical ability of the professionals involved. This, like the plot to cripple the United States by killing the commerce secretary, is unlikely.
His comments won’t influence the NTSB when it sits down to determine the probable cause of the accident. But the NTSB, an independent agency, is supposed to arrive at authoritative conclusions that build public confidence in the system. A comment from the president about the role of race, gender, or physical ability will not contribute to a sense that competent professionals have gotten to the bottom of the question and made the recommendations needed to reduce the chance of a repetition.
And in the old days that interval while the investigators did their painstaking work was mostly dead time, although sometimes one of the parties—the FAA or an airline—would announce immediate changes in response to interim findings. Now there is some continued discussion, based on the public data.
That discussion is unlikely to turn up insights that the investigators and the parties don’t raise, but it does provide grist for the internet’s rumor mill.
The theory that the Dubrovnik crash was engineered by foreign adversaries did not catch on, thankfully. Appropriate reforms resulted, including equipping old Air Force planes with better navigation equipment. But with the wider availability of raw data these days, the public may draw conclusions early on that aren’t actually supported by the detailed work of the crash investigators. And by the time the final report comes out, conclusions based on amateur interpretations of partial data may have taken hold in the public mind.
In that category is the crash of American Airlines 587 shortly after takeoff from Kennedy International Airport on Nov. 12, 2001, shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Public attention quickly focused on the vertical tail of the plane, an Airbus 300, because it had been ripped off. Airbus used a carbon composite for that part, not aluminum. Even so, the slow, thorough investigation showed that it had performed as expected, but had been ripped off because of errors by the pilot, who was trained on a simulator that encouraged overuse of the rudder.
Inaccurate interpretations of facts that are available early would be in tune with the two great themes of information in our time: disintermediation and distrust of official experts. Not all these changes are negative, of course. Media is ever more visual, and so is information on crashes. It was once hard to imagine that a plane crash would be captured on video. Now it’s hard to imagine that it wouldn’t be. You can almost hear the football announcer saying, “Let’s go to the instant replay.” Some of the video is worth well more than a thousand words. But with much of it, we still need qualified experts—and time to ferret out all the details—to break down the tape.
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