There is a reason why I’m writing this today.  It’s because a newspaper has printed story about Norwegian Air Shuttle grounding their 787 aircraft.

Except they didn’t.  The detail of the story simply outlines that twice Norwegian has technical problems with their brand new 787s causing them to cancel a flight.

This happens like . . . with absolute certainty with new airliners entering an airline fleet.

The aircraft weren’t “grounded”.  Not even briefly.  They went technical forcing a flight cancellation.  That’s it.

Now, it is common for media to over-blow airline events and I almost always ignore such stories these days because their just silly.  You could devote a whole blog to debunking such things and that’s not how I want to spend my time.

But in this case, I will.  Why?

Because that story was in the New York Times website titled “Airline in Norway Says It Briefly Grounded Dreamliners”.  This story was written by someone named Nicola Clark.  On the New York Times website, it says this about Nicola:

Nicola Clark has reported on French business for the International Herald Tribune since 2001, covering a number of industries, including aviation, banking and media. She received an Aerospace Journalist of the Year award in 2007 from the World Leadership Forum for her writing about the Airbus A380 crisis. After earning a masters degree in international affairs from Columbia University in New York in 1993, she worked for news agencies in New York, Tokyo, London and Paris covering financial markets.

So, here is my deal:  This story was stupid.  It covers an airline having a couple of technical problems with an aircraft which is not news.  This is never news.  This isn’t the news that should be reported.  It sure isn’t the news that should be reported by someone who has evidently been recognized as “Aerospace Journalist of the Year” from something called the World Leadership Forum.

I realize that the title of that story could have easily been done by an editor who is also stupid.  But writing a story about an aircraft having a couple of problems just as every other aircraft experiences from time to time forcing a couple of cancellations is atrocious journalism.

Filed under: Airline News by ajax