Public Service announcement

Ok, to some this may seem obvious, but for the remainder of you folks here's a piece of advice in the form of a short story.

I was at work today and I got a phone call from a concerned citizen regarding a news report about a large military aircraft that had crashed not long before near a small airstrip about 50 miles southwest of my airport. At that time I hadn't heard anything of the sort, but out of sheer curiosity I checked on radar for search aircraft in that vicinity and seeing none in the area I questioned the validity of the report. The women on the phone assured me that it was in fact on the CBC.ca website. So of course I became understandably curious. Not long after this phone call the Jazz Flight coming in from Pearson made his mandatory call and began the approach to the airport. When he was about 15 miles west of the field a dispatcher from Jazz called asking whether the flight was on final yet. Now this is an odd call, and although I had heard about the crash south west of here I thought the two were somehow unrelated. Soon after the Jazz flight landed I got another phone call, this one from the Airport Authority here in Fredericton, also inquiring about a plane crash, as they were beginning to receive calls from the media. At this time I thought it wise to put a call in to my manager and see what he had heard.

Now here's where the fun begins. My manger tells me, smiling the whole time, that he had just got off the phone with the Flight Service Station in Saint John with the same question and this was his reply: It seems there was a C130 Hercules doing Search and Rescue practice near the airstrip in Penfield. While practicing these aircraft sometime drop smoke and flares. This was one of those times. Now someone saw this plane (which they were unable to identify) flying low over the trees, trailing smoke and dropping flares and made the logical conclusion that any aircraft flying that low and smoking will most definitely crash. They called the RCMP and reported a crash, which in and of itself is not a problem as they would have looked into it found no aircraft crash and it would've ended probably there. The problem arose when this caller didn't stop there, they immediately reported a crash to the CBC and a few other places. The CBC went after the story with gusto. Meanwhile the Rescue Coordination Centre in Greenwood, Nova Scotia was alerted, and since they already had a Hercules in the area they retasked it as a full fledged Search and Rescue mission and sent it looking for this downed aircraft. So ironically, the plane that supposedly crashed was now looking for itself. In the meantime word of the crash was spreading. When someone finally realized what had happened the Search was called off, the Herc went on about it's training, and someone at the CBC was WICKED red in the face.

The moral of this story? DON'T ASSUME. As hard as it is to fathom, aircraft can, and often do, fly at low altitude for extended periods of time. This does not mean they are going down. If you see a big flame ball then there's a good chance something is amiss, otherwise you are probably going to make an ass of yourself. I'm not saying don't report it, far from it. Call the authorities, have someone look into it, BUT LEAVE IT AT THAT. Calling the media and air carriers causes much hastle and will more then likely make you look a lot stupider (if that's even possible).

This has been a public service announcement

Cheers