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This news report on the Ryanair plane that suffered a loss of pressure reminded me why I stopped regularly reading news papers. It starts with alarm then sets aside about a third of the report on how the some of the oxygen masks were faulty, this completes the first column in the printed version of the report. Anyone reading the first column and stopping there could get quite scared of flying and perhaps scared of flying with RyanAir in particular*. And should you be in a loss of cabin pressure incident you too will be wondering if you're oxygen mask will work and fill with oxygen. If you keep reading beyond the first column however, you'll get to the bits of how many passengers were injured, what happened to the rest of the passengers and what might have caused the incident. If you keep reading beyond that you'll get to two rather important quotes: "Passengers sometimes misunderstand and expect there's going to be a surge of oxygen, when in actual fact there's simply a steady stream. ... The oxygen masks were working." and even more usefully "These masks never inflate, but they are still working perfectly" The first quote is from the boss of RyanAir and it would be reasonable to think "of course he would say that, he doesn't want to admit any liability". The second quote is from the safety editor at Flight International Magazine who should know what he's talking about. It also tallies with the information I've read on the flight safety cards. Why tuck these quotes away at the end of the article? Why not put them straight after the quotes suggesting there was a problem with the masks? Especially since those earlier quotes give a false impression of how the oxygen masks are meant to work - "Mine wasn't filling up with oxygen and neither was my son's." - and could worry people in future if they are in a similar cabin pressurisation failure. Why make most of the story about the fear and terror rather than what to do if you find yourself in the same situation - one of the things I've always wondered is how hard to pull the oxygen mask towards yourself, the instructions tell you that pulling on the mask will start the flow of oxygen but is that a light pull or a stronger one? I've always feared I'd keep pulling until I pulled the thing out of the ceiling! It was the film Bowling for Columbine when I first came across the idea that the media portray the fear aspect of news stories and it was after that that I found myself reading and watching the news much less often. When I do read the news, and see stories like the one above**, it only serves to put me off more. * Not my favourite airline, it has to be said. ** And there was one the other month that had a headline like "house prices fall 30%" but when you read it what actually happened was that prices that were going up by (I think it was) 12% last year had only gone up by 9% this year, a fall of the rate of increase rather than a fall of house prices. Imagine you put you foot to the floor on the accelerator of your car, then when you hit 40mph you relaxed your foot back one third of the way - would this cause you to worry about how much you were slowing down? I doubt it 'cos the chances are you'd still be accelerating. Post a comment in response: |
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