I complained to Jeremy Hermanns about the deletion of my post and asked why he’d done it. Here is his reply (I’ve consolidated it for clarity):

“Your statements literally amazed me. This was a careless accident caused by, and not reported by, a baggage cart operator creasing the planes fuselage. I was unaware a foot long hole tearing open in a fuselage at full altitude while traveling at cruise speed “isn’t that serious.” I hope you got paid a grip of cash to write that article. And, yes I did delete your technical fluffery; next time, try to address the situation at hand, not the imaginative one. Nice try – PR Hack!”

For good measure, he included this postscript:

“Please don’t reply — I probably won’t read it.”

I was not addressing neither the cause of the accident, nor the matter of who was at fault, or why they were at fault. I was addressing only his description of the in-flight events, and the realities of a depressurization. Hermann himself had no idea how the hole was made, or who made it, until well after the aircraft had returned to Seattle.

I’m the PR hack, while Hermanns is the one getting his mug splashed on newspapers and TV shows across America, describing the event as “horrific,” and “unthinkable.”

Again, the dangers of the citizen-as-journalist

Hermanns twice deleted the entire post.

He’s saying some comments aren’t showing up because of server overload. That might explain it if your comments were, as you say, “somewhat lengthy.” Did you try asking him?

Hermanns twice deleted the entire post.

I thought my comments were instructive and helpful, and I certainly have no association with the carrier involved. Yet for some reason he chose to censor them. It’s interesting, because he had no problem leaving up the many rude and offensive comments, but apparently deleted mine because — I can only assume — they didn’t fully jive with his contentions? And we wonder why people scoff at the notion of personal blogs as journalism.

As for Traveller’s comments on the Chalk’s crash: admittedly “catastrophic” is a subjective term, but I was referring to major disasters involving large aircraft. The Chalk’s seaplane was a vintage commuter craft engaged in highly specialized scope of operations. Since 2001, no more than 21 passengers have been killed in any single accident in North America. That’s not to disrespect the unfortunate deaths of those 21 people, but to emphasize the smallness of the totla in proportion to the tens of millions of people who fly every year. I’ll be writing about the Chalks crash *and* the Alaska Airlines depressurization in my column next Friday on Salon.

Best,
Patrick Smith
http://www.askthepilot.com

He’s referring to a major airline crash. That’s not to negate the unfortunate loss of life in the Chalk accident, but the fact remains that a Grumman G-73T Turbine Mallard is not a large airliner.

So I suppose the wing breaking off the Chaulk plane last week, killing all aboard, wasn’t a “catastrophic accident”? So what would you call it, a “boo-boo”?

This is one of those rare instances where the media actually got it right by downplaying the seriousness of the situation.

Hermanns’ account of the incident, which he describes as “horrific,” and “the unthinkable,” is something of a lurid overreaction.

That’s not to say the decompression was a pleasant experience, and I could never blame the majority of passengers for being scared and confused. However, a problem of this nature, from a technical standpoint, isn’t that serious. It was noisy, and no doubt disorienting for many of the plane’s occupants; the need for the crew to initiate a rapid descent was, I’m sure, frightening to those who didn’t understand what was happening. But it was not a life-threatening situation. The plane lost cabin pressure and so the pilots descended as quickly as possible to 10,000 feet. They did nothing heroic or unusual, and will be the first ones to admit it. As professional airline pilots, they did what they’re supposed to do. Any other crew would have done the same thing. The passengers, meanwhile, could breathe using their drop-down masks.

Now, different kinds of in-flight decompressions can result in different situations — some more hazardous than others. Bombs, for example, can cause an entire fuselage to tear apart in fractions of a second. Large-scale structural failure, like the infamous fuselage burst of that Aloha Airlines 737 in 1988, can be similarly disastrous. But those are extremely rare occurrences, and that’s not what happened to Alaska Airlines. The breach was a small one, and once the cabin pressure had escaped, it could be reasonably assumed that the plane was going to stay in one solid piece and fly just fine. Which it did.
Hermanns reminds us that he’s a private pilot, but he also misinterpreted the smell of the activated oxygen canisters as the smell of jet fuel, which he erroneously describes as “Av-gas” and “JP-4≤ (it’s neither), and seems to have been just as needlessly panic-stricken as all those non-pilots around him.

(Not to the guy who doesn’t fly: Approx 17,500 commercial flights arrive and depart safely *each day* in the USA alone. We haven’t had a catastrophic accident since 2001.)

Cheers,

Patrick Smith
http://www.askthepilot.com

Personally, I’ve grown weary of the trite “It was awful”, “Things like that shouldn’t happen to people” comments that litter the local news and add nothing to my understanding of a story.

Regards,
Emily

Here’s the text of a post I just left over at Jeremy Hermann’s place. I plan to incorporate this into my next column for Salon.com as well:

Hermann’s description of the incident is a definite overreaction.

That’s not to say the decompression was a pleasant experience, and I could never blame the majority of passengers for being scared and confused. However, a problem of this nature, from a technical standpoint, isn’t that serious. It was noisy, and no doubt disorienting for many of the plane’s occupants; the need for the crew to initiate a rapid descent was, I’m sure, frightening to those who didn’t understand what was happening. But it was not a life-threatening situation. The plane lost cabin pressure and so the pilots descended as quickly as possible to 10,000 feet. They did nothing heroic or unusual, and will be the first ones to admit it. As professional airline pilots, they did what they’re supposed to do. Any other crew would have done the same thing. The passengers, meanwhile, could breathe using their drop-down masks.

Now, different kinds of in-flight decompressions can result in different situations — some more hazardous than others. Bombs, for example, can cause an entire fuselage to tear apart in fractions of a second. Large-scale structural failure, like the infamous fuselage burst of that Aloha Airlines 737 in 1988, can be similarly disastrous. But those are extremely rare occurrences, and that’s not what happened to Alaska Airlines. The breach was a small one, and once the cabin pressure had escaped, it could be reasonably assumed that the plane was going to stay in one solid piece and fly just fine. Which it did.

Hermann reminds us that he’s a private pilot, but he also misinterpreted the smell of the oxygen generating canisters as jet fuel, and seems to have been just as panic-stricken as all those non-pilots around him.

Best regards,
Patrick Smith

While others want to jump on the “citizen journalism” train – woohoo – the other story here for PR professionals (and bloggers) is that Alaska Airlines employees have gone nasty-comment-happy on Jeremy’s blog.

Will you track, Jeff?

By the way, I am already seeing the negative rants (are rants always negative?) about Alaska as if they deliver uniquely poor service. They don’t. In fact, I often fly them and they offer free craft brew beers to their northwest area flyers. Take that continental!