Housatonic — Unless you’re able to tune out television “news,” it’s pretty much inevitable not to know a Germanwings plane bound for Dusseldorf from Barcelona with 150 humans on board inexplicably and rapidly lost altitude before smashing into the Alps.
Both CNN and the usually less parochial Al Jazeera touted the accident as breaking news: after an hour or two, CNN continued to deluge us time and time again with the same information about the crash, while Al Jazeera spent a mere three-quarters-of-an-hour flogging the story before finally breaking away from the crash to apprise us of some more “worthy news” about the daily tragedy unfolding day-after-day in the Middle East and Africa.
(We will have to withhold judgment on PBS until we are able to understand how they might cover the story.)
In the interval, we were told Germanwings is a low-budget subsidiary of the major German airline Lufthansa. We found out again, despite having been thoroughly educated in one of the more recent aircraft accidents, what a Pitot tube is.
We learned the Airbus 320 was a global, dependable workhorse of the airline industry around the world and about how this particular plane had been in service since 1991.
There were several moments of footage of sad-faced relatives of the presumed dead filing into the Barcelona airport. What was to be expected? If they had been giving each other fist-bumps as they filed into the terminal, it would’ve been news of the “man-bites-dog” variety.
There was “live” coverage of the airport featuring a rather lifeless, quiet, gray edifice with a gentleman in the yellow sweater walking, it seemed, without a care in the world, across the road from the terminal to the parking lot.
A serious looking air travel expert carefully traced the plane’s course noting each tiny variation in the plane’s height and speed up to the moment of its final fatal dive and consequent disappearance from radar.
The crash occurred in the French Alps, so somber French officials joined those from Spain, whose citizens constituted most of the passengers, and from Germany who had licensed the plane, expressed their sadness and regret even as functionaries of all three nations tried to decide who had jurisdiction over the wreck and who would lead the impending investigation into the crash.
Besides rousing our sympathy for the passengers and their families, of what use to us was all this other “stuff?”
As the anchors and the experts droned on and on with inane commentary, I wondered how many children in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Libya were being rendered homeless?
How many children died of hunger, disease, and exposure while we got to know way too much about the 150 well-fed, adequately clothed, and financially secure people?
How many people were blown to smithereens as “collateral damage” as victims of indiscriminate sectarian violence or from “precisely targeted” Allied airstrikes?
Since their deaths are desperate, quiet, and unsensational, they are easy to ignore. Most every media outlet allows us to avert our eyes, from the very real tragedy of the millions of innocents suffering and dying during the years of senseless sectarian violence.
However, “major rescue efforts” are cranking up to find the wreckage and perhaps give succor to any survivors. They usually label operations of the sort as “recovery” rather than “rescue” since the probability of survivors is pretty much slim to none.
One borderline positive news snippet is France’s leading air traffic controller union SNCTA has called off a strike planned from Wednesday to Friday.
“We are suspending our planned strike as a result of the emotions created in the control rooms by the crash, particularly in Aix-en-Provence,” the union’s spokesman Roger Rousseau told AFP.
But the worst news for many of us investors is stock shares in Airbus and Lufthansa were both down after the tragedy.
