AP: Navy pilots “sent” their plane into apartment building
Now sometimes people are just neglectfully stupid. Sometimes they simply suffer from very human faults. And sometimes they print headlines like this:
If you write for a living as an editor or headline monkey and you put that out you’re either a.) grossly incompetent or b.) so filled with anti-military vitriol as to be incapable of doing your job.
Those pilots didn’t eject and therefor “send” their plane into that apartment building. They suffered massive mechanical failure and only through their selfless acts of remaining in their doomed aircraft as long as possible and dumping all excess fuel did more people not die or suffer injury.
” …only through their selfless acts of remaining in their doomed aircraft as long as possible and dumping all excess fuel did more people not die or suffer injury.”
Well, at least they had that in the article, despite the “poor” word choice in the headline…but it’s the WaPo after all.
re #2
Right. Generally different people write the headline than the actual article. It’s an old newspaper era holdover. The person(s) who wrote this particular headline really dicked it up.
It must be exhausting to live a life where every single thing looks like some sort of anti-military, liberal conspiracy. I guess some folks do spend their days dissecting benign headlines, for example, for the slightest bit of evidence that “proves” their entire worldview.
Or perhaps the jaded and biased worldview of the people who write this crap takes about .069 seconds to see, because said writers just can’t help themselves…
@3 Ben, Imagine being exhausted by anti-conservative, anti-patriotic and anti-American vitriol for the past 40 YEARS.
Ben: please consume excrement and afterwards expire.
After fornicating yourself first, of course.
Ben,
Must be exhausting trolling the internet looking for signs of right wing militaristic attempts to control the media. Maybe you could find work as a fact creator for the SPLC.
Well crap, now I’ve got to change my nic just to differentiate from that dude.
The guys done good, at least the very best possible under the circumstances, and so it is being reported by responsible jounalists. The first reports yesterday included how they avoided a school and apologized for landing in the apartment complex.
So sad that anyone must view headlines or “news” stories though any sort of filter.
Poor word choice, just like when news stories say that a vehicle killed a pedestrian. Lazy, but not malign.
Douchebag Ben would rather have the headline read ” Navy pilot’s eject in a failed attempt to murder innocent civilians crowding their air space.”
Some guy on Facebook yesterday really pissed me off. He was asking why the crew didn’t remain with the aircraft all the way in and try and steer it away from the buildings.
As a former Navy aircrew, I told him that the crew WILL remain with the aircraft for as long as humanly possible, and that often, some remain for too long and can’t get out. But I would have no problem pulling the handles and taking that ride. You do everything humanly possible to control the situation, then you get out.
These guys had to make a choice to live or die, and just a few seconds to do it. They made the right choice. By choosing life, they’ll be there to answer questions about what happened, what they saw, and that will possibly save lives in the future.
And you know what? For YEARS the Navy has been warning the community about the potential for such a situation. The local City and County officials were asked to sell that property, and other land in the pattern to the Navy as a safety zone, a buffer zone just in case this sort f an accident occurred.
Now it has, and thank the Lord and all the Gods that no one died. This could have gone down in the nearby shopping mall, or any of the other densely-built areas that the city chose to develop rather than sell away.
I always liked”Train Hits Bus, 25 die”
Headlines written by people who have no idea what it’s like to sit in a cockpit and at that speed and altitude have seconds, or even fractions of a second to react.
Oh, and memo to the AP writers–I don’t care if your plane can fly Mach 2-plus. Once you go below a certain speed where insufficient lift is generated, your aircraft now possesses the aerodynamic characteristics of a brick, and “riding it down” is pretty much pointless.
At least the print edition didn’t have that headline.
Note to self, cancel WAPO, subscribe to Washington Times.
My favorite is 5 minutes after a crash the announcer says,” authorities don’t know what caused the crash.”
But that’s only because the NTSB doesn’t use psychics, I guess.
I really appreciate the nice words from Hondo who told me to eat excrement, fornicate myself, and then die, and from Biermann who called me a douchebag. After 17 years in uniform (and still serving), it’s good to see folks (and possibly fellow service members) disagree without being disagreeable.
On a side note, to see an accident like this without casualties is no small miracle, especially in a densely populated area like Virginia Beach.
On a side note, to see an accident like this without casualties is no small miracle, especially in a densely populated area like Virginia Beach.
Well said Ben. Maybe you should have prefaced it way this instead. Thanks for your service too, bro. Hooah
Look at the bright side, Ben. At least they didn’t tell you to go play in traffic, or die in a fire…
And what streetsweeper said, about your service. Thank you.
I’ll presume you’re telling the truth here about serving, Ben. So I commend you for serving, regardless of duration. And you’re also correct – it was indeed a miracle that there were no deaths due to the accident.
How ever, that doesn’t alter the fact that IMO your comments #3 and #18 above were exceptionally ill-advised – for two different reasons. Or the fact that you should have anticipated a strong negative reaction to your first comment.
First: anyone who reads the site regularly would know that this site’s POV is very obviously both rather conservative and very pro-military. Jonn’s POV in the article above should have been no surprise. Therefore, your comment #3 above was either (1) made without “doing your homework”, or (2) was an intentional attempt to provoke a reaction. If the former, you were simply laughably naive; if the latter, you were being disingenuous. Either is foolish behavior. And this was further compounded by your complaint in comment #18. That complaint either compounds your naivety or shows false outrage regarding something you should have reasonably foreseen.
Second: if you are actually old enough to have served 17 years in the military and have not yet noticed the pronounced anti-military bias in the mainstream media, then I frankly have to wonder about your intellect and/or ability to perceive accurately the world around you. That bias is so obvious that only the willfully blind don’t see it.
Bottom line: if you come into a site such as this and spout off like a denizen of DU – which is exactly how you came across in your comment #3 above – you should expect for regular readers to fire for effect. As any regular reader of TAH knows, we get a few such trolls from time to time – and that type of response to trolls here is routine.
My opinion, of course. “Your mileage may vary.”
In any case, for my unnecessarily harsh comment above you have my apology. This time.
Hondo, I think you’re getting soft in your old age!? : o
Slight correction Hondo, the post above is NSOM’s…
Old Tanker: You sure? On my system, comments #3 and #18 are showing as from “Ben” (I just double-checked).
No, I meant the post at the top of the thread, not the comments.
Jonn’s POV in the article above….
That was NSOM’s POV in the article above…sorry, didn’t mean to nitpick….
Either way, when insulted, most of us tend to insult back, especially if coming from “one of our own.” So, Ben started dishing it out, and fire was returned. Kinda seems like he (or she?) outed himself by acting all superior, then whining when called out.
Oh, well.
Yep,oh well.
It’s the Associated Press so don’t expect anything better from these guys. They try to shape the news, not report it and anytime they can bend something to shade the military in a bad light they will.
Old Tanker: Yer right, amigo – I completely missed that it was one of the relatively few articles here that Jonn didn’t write. Sorry, NSOM.
Hondo,
I’ll take it as the compliment that it is.