Witnesses report
Jeremy Hermanns was on the Alaska Air flight that had a gash in its side and lost pressure. He gook Treo 650 photos of the scene and, thank God, lived to blog about it. Compare his account with the news account. [via Lost Remote]
: UPDATE: Jeremy tracks nasty, anonymous comments on his blog to an Alaska Airways IP address. When will they ever learn, when will they everrrrr learn?
Tags: citizensmedia, journalism, Weblogs
December 28th, 2005 at 1:23 pm
And they still are trying to ban cell phones on airplanes!
A cell phone would be a valuable tool for security in case of a hijack or an unruly passenger.
Could the photos go out to the web?
December 28th, 2005 at 1:44 pm
An interesting and frightening account. The plane dove quickly in order to get to a breathable altitude. This is SOP in a situation like this.
December 28th, 2005 at 1:50 pm
Blogebrity finally earns its citizen-journo cred.
December 28th, 2005 at 1:59 pm
Well this will be interesting. How will Alaska deal with the negative press? How will they deal with the rapid dissemination of the “passenger account” vs. the “official account”?
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!
December 28th, 2005 at 2:32 pm
[...] Jeff Jarvis takes note of the way Hermanns, KGW and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer cover the event. [...]
December 28th, 2005 at 5:16 pm
They should put the baggage carrier on trial for the attempted murder of all the passengers. How infuriating! Its so great to hear a first hand account of the incident rather than regurgitated editorial cruft.
December 28th, 2005 at 5:24 pm
Looks like Alaska was good enough to respond….in Jeremy’s comments section (with some of the nastiest comments he got):
http://jeremyhermanns.org/me/alaska-airlines-comments-on-my-story/
December 28th, 2005 at 7:23 pm
I don’t think Alaska Airlines will suffer to much for this. They currently have a monopoly where I live (Juneau, Alaska), and I imagine they still have a strong following throughout the rest of the state.
December 28th, 2005 at 8:06 pm
[...] 28th, 2005 and is filed under In the News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently notallowed. [...]
December 28th, 2005 at 9:43 pm
The PR Issue Behind Alaska Airlines Decompression
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.
December 28th, 2005 at 11:29 pm
I know of one major European company that actually has a three member department for the sole purpose of posting and countering online comments. They pose as anon posters and blogers for the sole purpose of getting “their” message across.
December 28th, 2005 at 11:35 pm
This is why I don’t fly.
December 29th, 2005 at 7:45 am
Heh. I like the way “Official” news story tries so hard to protect you from finding out actual information about the story.
December 29th, 2005 at 2:30 pm
From Patrick Smith, author of ASK THE PILOT:
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
December 29th, 2005 at 3:55 pm
I understand Mr. Jarvis’s advocacy of the “citizen journalist” but as Mr. Smith has noetically stated above, this incident, as are many eyewitness accounts, was a bunch of hooey. There can be value in it but the very emotions that arise out of one’s personal connection to an event can distort that experience and hamper the accuracy of the telling of the tale. Not to mention a layperson’s misunderstanding of what is actually happening as an event unfolds. (e.g. Mistaking a backfiring engine for a gunshot.) There is value in the accurate reporting of information, and just because a piece is filled with emotion does not automatically make it a better source of information than the staid “traditional journalism.”
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
December 29th, 2005 at 4:09 pm
A Post from Patrick Smith, author of Salon.com’s ASK THE PILOT column:
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
December 29th, 2005 at 7:56 pm
Patrick Smith said
>”Approx 17,500 commercial flights arrive and depart safely
>*each day* in the USA alone. We haven’t had a catastrophic
>accident since 2001.”
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”?
December 29th, 2005 at 9:59 pm
[...] WATCHING THE END: “Jeremy Hermanns was on the Alaska Air flight that had a gash in its side and lost pressure. He gook Treo 650 photos of the scene and, thank God, lived to blog about it” …. (buzzmachine) [...]
December 29th, 2005 at 11:12 pm
[...] The internet being what it is, the story was soon picked up and widely circulated — attracting the attention not only of well wishers, but also a handful of very critical visitors who faulted him for numerous things including the use of a mobile phone in flight. [...]
December 30th, 2005 at 12:16 am
“So I suppose the wing breaking off the Chaulk plane last week, killing all aboard, wasn’t a “catastrophic accidentâ€?”
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.
December 30th, 2005 at 12:48 pm
Yesterday I posted a somewhat lengthy dissection of the Alaska Airlines event on Hermanns’ blog — basically a duplicate of my comments on this page, above.
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
December 30th, 2005 at 1:01 pm
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?
December 30th, 2005 at 1:16 pm
Ah, I see you went ahead and made the same public accusation on his blog. Poor form, I have to say.
December 30th, 2005 at 5:29 pm
Poor form?
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
December 30th, 2005 at 5:40 pm
In that case, my mistake.
December 31st, 2005 at 5:09 pm
Patrick - give it a rest with the constant copying and re-copying of your post, on this site and others, showing the text “… in my column next Friday on Salon.” and “… Patrick Smith, author of Salon.com’s ASK THE PILOT column” as well as your own site’s URL prominently in your comments. A little less blatant self-promotion would be nice. You’re site’s URL showing up in your comment sig is enough, I think. If you are trying to establish your SME status, let your comment do that for you.
January 11th, 2006 at 12:25 am
If anyone was working the P.R. angle, it was Hermanns, with his theatrically mask-strapped mug splashed on newspapers and on “Good Morning America,” describing a loss of cabin pressure as “horrific” and “the unthinkable.” And it’s craftily moderated Web pages like his that make many people scoff at the notion of bloggers as journalists.