Talk:Eastern Air Lines Flight 212

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[edit] Cockpit voice recorder excerpt

Removal of the following transcript does not change the fact that the crew was discussing inappropriate, non-flight related things less than 5 minutes prior to the crash. Whitewash it away, but it is certainly not original research as someone claims. --Dual Freq 14:36, 27 October 2007 (UTC)

The cockpit voice recorder reveals the level of desultory conversation taking place on the flight deck during the final five minutes of the flight, when all attention should have been focused on making either a safe landing or a safe missed approach. Captain James E. Reeves and First Officer James M. Daniels, Jr. can be clearly heard having this conversation instead:[1]

  • 11:28:37 Captain: "Right. I heard this morning on the news while I was... might stop proceedings against impeachment [of the president]"
  • [sound of altitude warning beep]
  • 11:28:49 Captain: "...because you can't have a pardon for Nixon and the Watergate people. Old Ford's beginning to take some hard knocks..."
  • 11:29:46 First Officer: "We should be taking some definite direction to save the country. Arabs are taking over every damned thing."
  • 11:30:01 First Officer: "...The stock market and the damned Swiss are going to sink our damned money, gold over there..."
  • 11:30:32 Captain: "Yes sir boy. They got the money, don't they? They got so much damned money."
  • 11:30:38 First Officer: "...Yeah, I think, damn if we don't do something by 1980, they'll [presumably "the Arabs"] own the world."
  • 11:30:46 Captain: I'd be willing to go back to one... to one car... a lot of other restrictions if we can get something going."
  • 11:33:58 Sounds of initial impact.[1]
  • Dual, the transcript, and the overall investigation report are a lot longer. Taking any specific item out of those, and thereby emphasizing it, becomes WP:OR, even if it is factually verifiable on its own. This is why we have to be careful in accident reports to try to adhere to the reliable secondary sources, normally the 'probable cause' statements in the report. For example, in this case the futile attempts to visually acquire and rely on the amusement park tower were clearly an important factor, perhaps the dominant one. If we highlight the idle chatter, then we should highlight the tower search, too. And then there are other issues, that are not so clear in the transcript itself. So by taking one aspect, the idle chatter, and highlighting it like that, we are disproportionally putting weight on a single element out of many. Our goal, per WP:NPOV, WP:UNDUE, WP:NOR and WP:SYN is to closely follow the secondary sources in the neutral presentation and properly balanced weighting of the various issues. Thanks, Crum375 15:01, 27 October 2007 (UTC)
The 30 second tower search is highlighted in the article, but the several minutes of non-operational conversation is now described only "as discussing subjects "ranging from politics to used cars"." Which seems to downplay it. The long term legacy of this disaster, besides the deaths involved, is the Sterile cockpit rule and the above excerpted conversation is pretty much the exemplar for why that rule was put in place. At any rate, because of Delta Air Lines Flight 1141, we'll probably never here this type of idle talk or see the transcripts of future flight crew conversations. I think its important to the article, I don't know who picked those particular items, but some quotes of the idle conversation are needed here. --Dual Freq 16:34, 27 October 2007 (UTC)
Recall that our mission here is not to weigh items based on our perceived importance of them, short or long term, but based on their notability and their importance in the reliably published sources. In our case of aviation accidents, we normally have an excellent objective and reliable source, which is the NTSB (or equivalent outside the US). So to decide on relative weights, we look at the NTSB final report for guidance. The 'probable cause' statement should always be the key, because it summarizes the cause of the accident most succinctly, and it should be the skeleton over which we build much of the rest. Of course if there are special circumstances (say a famous person killed), which are described by reliable mainstream media for example, they would also get weight. But the important point is that we must be driven by our sources, weighted by reliability and notability, as per WP:V, WP:N, WP:UNDUE, etc. We should try our best to ignore our own editorializing (even in the form of weighting), since this is not a magazine article but an encyclopedia. I do happen to share your views about the Sterile Cockpit issues, and I wrote this article and the Sterile Cockpit one for these reasons specifically, but our personal views may only be visible through the properly weighted reliable sources, not directly. Crum375 04:42, 30 October 2007 (UTC)