The deadly crash of three civilian aircraft — >Malaysia Airlines MH17 , >Air Algerie AH5017 and >TransAsia Airways GE222 — marked a black week for civil aviation. The media recognised the importance of these tragedies and did an admirable job in providing as much information as it could to address the anxieties of the families and friends of the people who lost their lives in these disasters. In this hour of grief, a letter from Wing Commander Raju Srinivasan, a winner of Vayu Sena Medal (Gallantry), made me think not about what the media reports but about what it fails to report in a detailed manner.
Writing from Coimbatore, this former Indian Air Force officer asked why the paper did not play up the story of the Air India pilots who manned the AI144 flight, carrying 300 passengers and 15 crew members from Newark to Mumbai, and averted a major accident. His reference was to a Boeing 777 aircraft that took off on July 13, 2014, at its maximum take off weight, as it was fully loaded for a long transcontinental journey.
What happened in the skies in the East Coast of U.S. was an amazing deployment of skills and competence by Captain Gautam Verma and his crew, Second Commander Niranjan Singh and First Officers Pankaj Wadhawan and Shilpika Das. Within minutes of take off, the left engine was on fire. According to Mr. Srinivasan, Engine Failure After Take Off (EFATO) at maximum weight is the worst nightmare for any pilot. He explained the sequence of the events in his letter and listed three major difficulties the Air India pilots had to confront due to high landing weight.
“[The first question is] will the airplane stop within the available runway length [when it is] landing at about 200 Knots (which is 370 km/hr), the minimum speed required at that weight? [The] second is will the landing gear take the load of landing at such a high speed and weight (85 tonnes more than the maximum design landing weight)? And third, they were flying only on one engine, which has its own problems of aircraft handling and control,” he wrote.
Riwo Norbhu, head of Air India operations in New York and a pilot with Air India and the Indian Air Force with over 40 years of experience, said: “The handling skills and cool airmanship displayed by the pilots was the primary reason for this emergency being converted into just an incident, which the Indian media thought was of no consequence. They were not interested in knowing how a major catastrophe was averted and how the lives of 315 people were saved by the professional handling and competent decisions of Air India pilots.”
Parameters to select a news item I do recognise the anguish in the voices of aviation experts like Mr. Srinivasan and Mr. Norbhu. But omissions by the media are not restricted to civil aviation issues alone. The selection and display of a news item is not an easy task. An editor has to adhere to three important parameters to select a news item. First, the process of selection and rejection is determined by the finite space at the disposal of the editor. Second, editors strive for an optimum balance between local, national, regional and international news. The third parameter is adherence to the demands of topicality and the importance of here and now.
It requires the passage of time to understand the implications of some of these actions. For instance, The New Yorker carried an absorbing piece by Jeffrey Frank, where he questioned the findings of the recent poll by Quinnipiac University in which Barack Obama was listed last among all post-war Presidents. Though Mr. Frank finds fault with President Obama’s administration for its “rhetorical wobbling, which opens the door to dangerous miscalculations by its adversaries and by its friends — for instance, insisting, in August 2011, that for “the sake of the Syrian people, the time has come for President Assad to step aside,” or promising, this past March, that Russia would “pay a price” for its annexation of Crimea,” he is of the opinion that history will be kind to the administration for its acts of restraint.
According to Mr. Frank, “Despite those missteps, the Obama administration managed to implicitly ask the right questions before it employed force: If we do that, then what? Will it help or make bad things worse? How does it end?” He concludes that “not a lot gets written about wars unfought and cruise missiles unlaunched.” In Mr. Frank’s point of view, the history unwritten may turn out to be Obama’s great achievement, a legacy likely to leave him with a ranking considerably higher than the latest Quinnipiac poll.
Philip Graham, the legendary publisher of The Washington Post helps us contextualise the overall import of a daily newspaper. He said: “The inescapable hurry of the press inevitably means a certain degree of superficiality. It is neither within our power nor our province to be ultimately profound. We write 365 days a year the first rough draft of history, and that is a very great task.”
readerseditor@thehindu.co.in
