Sadly, uninformed comment by TV reporters on aviation incidents is not exactly a rarity. How many reports do you see inaccurately speculating on the cause of crashes, or talking about the pilot of a crashed aircraft steering it away from housing or a school when a) no one could see what he was doing in the cockpit; and b) the aircraft was out of control at that point, hence the outcome?
But even so the BBC Breakfast programme's coverage of this incident plumbed new depths for me.
It involves what's known in aviation as a "ground loop" by a Boeing Stearman bi-plane on landing at Ronald Reagan Airport in Washington. As you can see from the pictures, the aircraft flipped end-over-end to land upside down, and the eyewitness reports make it clear that this started with the nose of the aircraft going down.
The BBC Breakfast news presenter speculated that this was caused by a crosswind landing which went wrong.
Now I don't have a tailwheel rating (aircraft from the era of the Stearman had their third wheel at the rear of the aircraft, not under the nose like most modern aircraft) but I have flown a Pitts Special biplane and know enough about the laws of physics to know that this explanation is more than unlikely (another clue might be that the winds at the time were described as 'light'). Aircraft need to keep their centre of gravity between their undercarriage when they are on the ground (and within certain limits when they are in the air), otherwise they are not going to remain the right way up. With a tailwheel aircraft one of the risks on landing is that when the pilot applies the brakes (and he has to in order to stop the aircraft's ground run) it will shift the centre of gravity forward of the main undercarriage which can lead to an incident like the one at Ronald Reagan Airport, although sometimes it just results in a less spectacular prop strike in which the propeller touches the ground rather than the full ground level aerobatics. It is a sufficiently regularly encountered risk to have a mock term devised for it: ground looping - as if the pilot was trying to execute an aerobatic manoeuvre at ground level.
And there are plenty of incidents which can be referred to in order to assess the probable causes. Here, a report of one from the UK's Air Accidents Investigation Branch in which a Hawker Hurricane (also a tailwheel aircraft although it's a monoplane) touched its propeller down on landing at the former WW2 fighter base at North Weald in Essex last year.
The accident is at least partly attributed to a fault in the aircraft brakes.
I suppose it’s too much to expect any accuracy from "news" reporting any more. My view is that the proliferation of "news" channels with 24 reporting hasn't raised the standard. Instead of spending our TV licence fee on having glam presenters sitting on a sofa interviewing "experts" about whether some children who play truant from school are actually suffering from "school phobia" (I kid you not - this was on the same BBC Breakfast show today), perhaps they could spend a small fraction of the amount that costs to get a member of staff to do some research on aviation accidents and incidents so that they have some chance of reporting accurately.
By the way, Martin Shaw the TV actor owns a Boeing Stream (registration G-BAVO).
So if I were running the BBC news and I wanted to report on this incident, I'd probably have interviewed him about the incident as he's a well known TV character actor. And the same relatively lowly-paid (relative to the woefully misinformed presenter that is) researcher could easily have found that Martin Shaw has this aircraft from the CAA database.
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