Defective Flux Capacitor Causes Crash Landing

FlySince9 said:
The first mistake was installing the dam flux capacitor in the first place... more recent models use a defrasticated nebulizor to do the same job with a less than .1% failure rate when compared to the FC....
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There was an AD requiring them to be replaced with dilithium crystals.
 
Salty said:
Nope. The real jerk was the one that repeated information from a source that was just a guy standing there. How would he know what caused the accident?
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EXACTLY. As long as journalists worry more about getting the juicy details first rather than care about things like accuracy and editing, they deserve all the misinformation they can regurgitate.
 
Kenny Phillips said:
Gonna guess that the term "flux capacitor" was remembered by 90% of the males seeing the film, and 0.1% of the females.
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Not true. Even my wife who grew up very sheltered and misses out on most 1980s movie and music references still got immediately (and thought it was hilarious).
 
FlySince9 said:
The first mistake was installing the dam flux capacitor in the first place... more recent models use a defrasticated nebulizor to do the same job with a less than .1% failure rate when compared to the FC....
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Is that the version that replaces the plutonium with unobtanium?
 
MauleSkinner said:
That’s not true...according to a former coworker who was a journalism major in college.
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I was in journalism for 17 years. Like in any field, you cannot generalize too much. There are excellent reporters and lazy reporters and everything in between. It's just that the journalism fails are more obvious because, by their nature, they're right in your face.

That said, media outlets in general have "cheapened" their product by reducing/eliminating fact checking in the interest of saving both time and money. And the rise of the celebrity journalist has changed the nature of the kinds of personalities drawn to the field.
 

Capacitators were apparently around in the '60s...
 
Their insatiable desire to record the first draft of history before anyone else does causes them to make far more mistakes than they should. It also makes them ripe for a well deserved prank.
 
You guys are so bloody old. Those stupid movies were from the eighties, a decade few of my students will remember. Big surprise it sounded like an airplane part. Who the hell other than us knows what makes airplanes go anyway?

Pretty soon you’re going to be able to tell young people that airplanes have dilithium crystals, warp cores and phasers. They won’t know what the heck you’re talking about. The cultural references are going out of the world.
 
steingar said:
You guys are so bloody old. Those stupid movies were from the eighties, a decade few of my students will remember. Big surprise it sounded like an airplane part. Who the hell other than us knows what makes airplanes go anyway?

Pretty soon you’re going to be able to tell young people that airplanes have dilithium crystals, warp cores and phasers. They won’t know what the heck you’re talking about. The cultural references are going out of the world.
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Maybe we should say that planes are powered by unicorn farts then. ;)

But it’s not just that she didn’t know that a flux capacitor was from an old movie but that she just parroted the info without checking or substantiating anything.
 
Ken Ibold said:
That said, media outlets in general have "cheapened" their product by reducing/eliminating fact checking in the interest of saving both time and money. And the rise of the celebrity journalist has changed the nature of the kinds of personalities drawn to the field.
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This lady was at least given a cameraman. Some of the small local stations expect the on-air talent to run the camera and upload the clips without much production support. What creates the opportunity for this mischief is the damn rush they are all in. No time to at least wait until 5 to publish a story . Everything is 'breaking' and it keeps 'breaking' until the next cat in the tree is found.

We have the opposite problem. We live in a news vacuum. We have a continuous area with a population of 300+ k which is carved up among different larger Nielsen markets. As a result, none of the papers or TV stations has a local office or even a roving producer. The result is that it requires the death of a minimum of three people or one child before it even gets a one paragraph mention. The only source of local news are a couple of locally run websites which are for the most part one-man shops that re-print press releases.
 
Pretty sure most kids nowadays have even seen it, it's a classic and play often enough of TV, I mean star wars predates me and I've seen it a few times
 
Fearless Tower said:
EXACTLY. As long as journalists worry more about getting the juicy details first rather than care about things like accuracy and editing, they deserve all the misinformation they can regurgitate.
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Maybe I was just too young and dumb, or times or have changed, or I'm starting to get old.. or a combination of everything... but growing up my folks had the news on every night from about 5 to 8pm, usually NBC, but sometimes one of the other channels. Anyway... I don't recall all the the aggressive IN YOUR FACE!! glitz that you see now (I think CNN has some sort of countdown every night). It was (or at least felt) mostly like observational reporting of what was seen, and there was care taken to get the story correct.. and if something was unsure then they would not report on it, or there'd be far more caution around it, and legit experts brought in to weigh in on something. I feel like now the news is the highschool gossip group that, like you said, just regurgitates whatever they see and pass it off as news, with each version of the regurgitation getting just a little more extreme (. They'll take a random tweet from someone and pass it off as news "plane engulfed in flames!" is what they'll report because they saw it on a tweet from some dude in 20F when the engine stalled and flamed out on take off

172andyou said:
So she didn't get a movie reference from before she was born. Big deal. The real dick in this scenario was the person who told her that as a joke and let her go on the air with it.
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The news shouldn't be passing off "root cause" type things without some vetting. I get she's a reporter.. but say something like "the pilot reported a mechanical problem on the plane, they're looking into it, will update this story when we have more information" <- because what this reporter did is an innocent example of something far more insidious that is happening with the news currently... the reporting of observational items and passing them off as facts.. imagine how often this happens in more serious affairs... foreign policy, our finances, etc.

Plus.. when a "news" station reports these below, then it is very difficult to take anything they take seriously, or without a tremendous grain of saltupload_2018-8-28_20-9-7.png
 
A few months ago a light twin landed on a city street when its engines both quit. The pilot told a journalist that she had "lost the fuel pump." The broadcaster (a national network) news announcer said that they had contacted Transport Canada to see if the lost pump had been found yet.

Fuel mismanagement, it seemed like. No official report yet.
 
I mean, it’s possible that the jump plane could generate enough gigawatts needed to time travel but who am I to know?
 
Tantalum said:
The news shouldn't be passing off "root cause" type things without some vetting.
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She didn't do that. She said something like "Hazelton said it was a faulty flux capacitator".

She was reporting what Hazelton said.
 
172andyou said:
She was reporting what Hazelton said.
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Well then it's on Hazelton. I mean, would I have done it? Probably not. But I don't think the guy is a jerk or dick, at worst it's harmless fun... in the world of media gaffes it's much better than this

 
172andyou said:
She didn't do that. She said something like "Hazelton said it was a faulty flux capacitator".

She was reporting what Hazelton said.
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My bet is she asked him the cause, and he deferred to the NTSB's upcoming investigation...and she kept asking, so he gave her something just to shut her up.
 
steingar said:
You guys are so bloody old. Those stupid movies were from the eighties, a decade few of my students will remember. Big surprise it sounded like an airplane part. Who the hell other than us knows what makes airplanes go anyway?

Pretty soon you’re going to be able to tell young people that airplanes have dilithium crystals, warp cores and phasers. They won’t know what the heck you’re talking about. The cultural references are going out of the world.
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The fact that it's a cultural reference makes it funnier, but it's kind of beside the point. He could have said the rear confabulator became inverted or even the left aileron got stuck and been equally incredible depending on the circumstance.

But she should have asked at least one follow-up question. "What's that do?" "Powers the time circuits..."
 
Lindberg said:
The fact that it's a cultural reference makes it funnier, but it's kind of beside the point. He could have said the rear confabulator became inverted or even the left aileron got stuck and been equally incredible depending on the circumstance.

But she should have asked at least one follow-up question. "What's that do?" "Powers the time circuits..."
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Exactly. He could have told her the plane’s propwash tank ran dry and she would have fallen for it.
 
Steingar:
Just as a point of reference, I was telling my kids about this story. My two daughters are in their early 20's, and my one daughter's boyfriend (also a 20-something) was there as well. One of my daughters did not get the joke, the other knew "flux capacitor" was a fake part, and the boyfriend said "so he was flying a DeLorean?"
 
I wonder who 'Hazelton' is. I don't think that airport manager drone in the early part of the clip would have pulled that off. He was more concerned with explaining how it wasn't the airports fault.
 
KRyan said:
Steingar:
Just as a point of reference, I was telling my kids about this story. My two daughters are in their early 20's, and my one daughter's boyfriend (also a 20-something) was there as well. One of my daughters did not get the joke, the other knew "flux capacitor" was a fake part, and the boyfriend said "so he was flying a DeLorean?"
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I had a mid-20s staffer who was finishing up a project for a client. She asked when it was due. I said, "It was due last Thursday, so go ask Brian for the keys to the DeLorean." She gave me a blank stare. I said, "You know, DeLorean. Time machine. Back to the Future." Her response, "I don't watch science fiction movies."
 
MauleSkinner said:
My bet is she asked him the cause, and he deferred to the NTSB's upcoming investigation...and she kept asking, so he gave her something just to shut her up.
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Objection your honor, assumes facts not in evidence. :)

I had the unfortunate luck to be involved with the follow-up after a fatal once. I was contacted by several in the media. I told them I didn't have any speculation to voice about the cause. They all left it at that. So, on the basis of my experience, I'd bet the guy was just being a dick.

But it's true that I also didn't get to listen to the exchange between her and Hazelton, so who knows.

Tantalum said:
Well then it's on Hazelton. I mean, would I have done it? Probably not. But I don't think the guy is a jerk or dick, at worst it's harmless fun
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Well, it harmed this poor woman's reputation and, perhaps, her career. I don't think that's a nice thing to do.

When did civility and kindness become such a rare commodity anyway...
 
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