Eyes on the sky

The whole aviation world is at your fingertips

Airline headlines around the country in recent months have featured a number of events that have resulted in airliners returning to land. The issues have varied from relatively minor, which involved dumping fuel to attain landing weight, to more serious issues such as an engine failure. Regardless of the nature of the incident, they have brought some interesting observations to the surface. And quickly.

In certain cases, we have been treated to the usual misinformation from the mainstream media that can at times have a good deal of trouble actually naming the aircraft type involved. It is a frequent occurrence and yet one would suspect it to be avoidable, considering that such fact-checking isn’t particularly difficult in this technological age. However, for all of the misinformation that is published in haste, there is an increasing amount of data readily available.