A tragedy on Saturday, a man’s body was found inside a South African Airways plane that had landed at Washington Dulles.
A man’s body was found Saturday afternoon inside the landing-gear wheel well of a plane that had landed at a suburban Washington airport, authorities said.
Ground crew assigned to the aircraft — an Airbus A340 operated by South African Airways — discovered the body around 1:30 p.m. in a remote parking area of Dulles International Airport, the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority said in a statement.
Airport police, fire and other personnel went to the scene, joined by FBI agents and U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers.
The location of the flight’s origin was not immediately known.
Obviously the overriding reaction, even without knowing any more of the circumstances, is that this is sad and likely a tragedy not just for the man who passed away but for others as well. Whatever made him take the risks that put him in that position were probably themselves quite serious.
How bad is journalism when the origin of a South African Airways flight which landed at Dulles not known? They fly Johannesburg – Dakar – Washington and back. That’s the only Washington DC service offered by South African Airways. Period.
But.. oh my. The comments in the CNN story really go off the rails.
And it gets more absurd from there, for about the next 800 submissions.
(HT: MSYgirl on Milepoint)
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The inability of journalists to obtain even the most basic facts is yet another indication of the almost total tabloidization of the mainstream media.
CNN — Nuff said.
Just saw a news article about an Olympic athlete “shattering her sprine.” Shattering a spine usually results in parilization, not a cracked vertibrae, which was what happened. The news is getting really bad.
Always tragic when this happens. But can we talk for a minute about the extreme overreaction by authorities when anything abnormal happens? You’ve found a body in a wheel well, it’s obvious within about 10 seconds to anyone with half a brain as to what happened. Why do we always need police, fire, FBI, and a bunch of other agencies to respond? I just think it’s sad commentary on our society that anything out of the ordinary is treated so suspiciously by default, as opposed to just a human tragedy.
yea, what Andrew said.
It’s disturbing that this story’s title is in the form of a joke. It’s a gruesome, tragic event whose seriousness is belied by the title. Merely mentioning the word tragedy a couple times does not compensate for this.
I enjoy reading your blog. I know you are not a “journalist” and I know you rationalize your abundance of grammatical and spelling errors, but really, you should be the last one to comment on journalistic errors. Just in this post of yours alone I had to chuckle when I read this:
“How bad is journalism when the origin of a South African Airways flight which landed at Dulles not known?”
You left out a key word in the sentence.
Don’t judge others too harshly, lest you be held to similar harsh standards yourself!
@Gary – Gemmy & John are on to something. You’re general insensitivity is disturbing and quite off putting.
Recently you got many comments about your experience at the Sheraton Macao and that someone may have even been fired over the incident. Some spoke on your cultural insensitivity and lack of empathy or your lack of decency or your care-free and self righteous attitude toward someone losing their livelihood. It was especially heartless considering the person fired likely had a family and mouths to feed and it was all over a service incident where nothing actually happened.
And in your attempt with this posting to appear more sympathetic, the timing of which is quite convenient after the backlash from your Sheraton posting, you managed to fail at that and put even more people off.
It’s a free country buddy and you can be as dumb as you want but if you are open to a bit of advice, stop remarking on things that remotely have to do with other cultures because you seem to lack any sensitivity or objectivity and also, stop trying to appear as someone who feels sympathy for people who have suffered either from a painful death or from having to get fired because of you, because you are clearly not any good at it.
Jokes on you JERK.
@Scott – I do not know where you draw a conclusion that someone was fired because of my blog post. That’s certainly not in the hotel’s response (and some commenters read the response and thought it was a generic note, a blow off, that the hotel did nothing). And I certainly don’t know where you develop the narrative that the person had a family that’s now unable to eat because of it?