Some commenters and bloggers have seized on certain details of The Plane Was About to Crash. Now Wha

Some commenters travel trailers and bloggers have seized on certain details of The Plane Was About to Crash. Now What? by Noah Gallagher Shannon, which ran on the Lives page in the May 19 issue of the magazine, questioning whether the emergency landing he describes really happened and even whether he was ever on any such flight. But as I just explained to James Fallows at The Atlantic , there is simply no question. Shannon was on Frontier Airlines Flight 727 on June 30, 2011, from Washington to Denver. It was an Airbus A320. The author sat in seat 12A. This flight was diverted to Philadelphia. The F.A.A. reports that the pilot declared an emergency because of a low-hydraulics indicator light and that upon landing, the plane needed to be towed to the gate. Frontier Airlines confirms that an Airbus A320 experienced a maintenance issue on departure from Washington travel trailers DCA. The flight diverted to Philadelphia travel trailers due to easier access. The aircraft and all passengers landed safely.
Did the author’s personal recollection represent an accurate travel trailers picture of what he experienced on that flight? Well, only he can attest to his own experience. But the author said he took notes after the flight and he did provide us with receipts to back up his account. And Shannon s recollection did seem plausible to an aviation specialist the magazine consulted. While some of the author’s language may have been imprecise — he did not, for example, intend the description of the engines as having powered down to a hum to mean they were turned off but rather that they grew quieter — his recollection of his experience was consistent with recollections of passengers in similar situations. Naturally not every detail matches everybody else s experience. Surely even people on that plane would remember travel trailers it differently. The story was about the personal experience of a fearful travel trailers moment. The author did not present himself as an authority in airline technology or emergency procedures. The airline, in fact, did not respond to his request for more information about what happened, he said. He reported only what he heard and felt, which is consistent with the memoir nature travel trailers of the magazine s Lives page.
The basic fact that no one can dispute is that the author of the column was on a flight to Denver that was diverted after the pilot reported a problem. Details like whether the crew followed standard procedure — or varied from it — or whether the lights travel trailers were dimmed or how that looked to him, cannot be credibly contested travel trailers by people who were not on the plane, even if their own experience of an emergency situation might have been different.
Update: Further online debate about this article has focused in particular on two points: what prompted the emergency landing and how long the plane was circling. The writer recalls the flight crew citing a potential landing-gear problem, travel trailers but as I noted above, the F.A.A. reported travel trailers a potential travel trailers problem with hydraulic systems. And while the author believed that the plane circled for two hours, records indicate a shorter time frame, though even those records are unclear: the F.A.A. reported that 55 minutes elapsed between when the pilot reported a problem and when the plane landed; radar data cited by The Atlantic , on the other hand, indicates a total flight travel trailers time of just 42 minutes. The writer relied largely on memory travel trailers to reconstruct the sequence of events – in part because the airline would provide no details. He based his estimate of the time spent circling on the departure time on his flight manifest and when he remembered arriving in Philadelphia.
It may be impossible to resolve some of these discrepancies. The author has said he wished he had been clearer on some points. As editors at the magazine, we wish we had done a better job in two respects. The online headline should have been less dramatic — the plane was never about to crash. That simply represented the author s fear at the time. Also, we should have been clearer in presenting his recollections for what they were — recollections. Additional language would have made clearer to readers what was obvious to us: that this was not an investigation of the details of an aviation incident but a vivid memory of a fearful travel trailers episode and a glimpse at what one person travel trailers was thinking and feeling at such a time.
Bruce Grierson wrote this week s cover story about Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychologist who has conducted experiments that involve manipulating environments to turn back subjects perceptions of their own age. Read more