I have had two students quit as a result of the reports and one was far along into a commercial rating. This week, reader Ken Fagerlund wrote this: “While prevention is important it really has put a damper on up and coming pilots in training to see these reports at this frequency. Short of a well-designed psychological survey, there’s no way to measure this, but the rising trend of accident reporting-even as the number of accidents declines-may be taking a wider toll in scaring people away from aviation. I’ve written about this before and although I force myself to take a longer view, I’m susceptible to it, too. This, taken together with the established trend of online and social media sources offering instant analysis before the wreckage cools, creates, I think, a kind of psychosis about true risk and a degree of misplaced fear. (Actually, they vote with their mice, but that sounds perverted and mouses is grammatically flawed.) Readers vote with their keyboards and that drives the editorial decision making. If the accident has video, we’re almost certain to run it because-might as well be honest-videos drive the clicks. We think this because occasionally when we don’t run such a story, we’ll get an email or two asking why not. If it’s a high-profile crash with a large number of fatalities or it makes the network news, we feel compelled to publish a report because our readers expect it, or so we think. The editors around here each have a slightly different take on whether to run an accident story. We don’t report on all the fatal accidents, of which there about 200 a year. We’re not especially consistent about it. If a thing happens, say, 1000 times a year or about three times a day, is it worth reporting as news? That’s the calculus on aviation accidents, which we report on semi-regularly here on AVweb.
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