A USA Today story, Unfit for flight, published June 18 “gets the general aviation safety record wrong, it ignores efforts by the industry to make general aviation safer, and it violates basic tenets of fairness and accuracy when it comes to good journalism,” officials with the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA) said in response to the article.
According to a post at AOPA.org, USA Today’s three-part report paints GA aircraft as death traps, pilots as “amateur,” and aircraft manufacturers as villains, and pits pilots against manufacturers. AOPA, the General Aviation Manufacturers Association, and Textron had provided information to the reporter, information that was not included in the sensational, one-sided, inaccurate report, according to AOPA officials.
As I was saying, an injury in a 1930s car today without air bags should be compensated by Ford because it does not meet todays standards even if the safety feature was not invented back then or able to be retrofitted. If the ruling had not come down in aviation, then all industries would be a target. Please, all of our large organizations need to serve us by educating the public, not just us.
The only way to fight this sensationalism is for AOPA, GMA, and the NBAA to put together a series of articles providing an accurate picture of GA, its benefits, its real safety, and an educational focus to inform the general public about flight training, how aircraft work, and other little known and understood facets of aviation in general…particularly dispelling the Hollywood created myths. The articles need to be in more than one national news outlet. I am sure that Gulfstream pilots do not like being referred to as amateurs. It is time GA went on the offensive to educate the general public rather than cheering with the choir, and the hype-media be d az mned. If we do not start getting the word out, we will be out. Now to be fair, there have been issues of the type noted in the article, but they should be put in perspective and proper factual context. Wh ed n the author talks about the repose on the law suit issue he definitely skewed the readers thinking. Without that ruling, the next step for the deep pocket chasers might have been to think the could sue Ford because an accident in a 1930s car without airbags