Well, as far as I know that wasn't the real headline, but I think it would have been a better one.
As you might already know, a Boeing 777 crash-landed at Heathrow on Thursday.
Luckily
there was no loss of life, and for this our thanks should go to the
inaptly-named co-pilot Senior First Officer John Coward, who managed to
bring the plane down safely.
Incidentally, some have suggested
that those on the plane were "touched by God", which of course is
nonsense; if God had got involved then He could have simply averted the
engine failure which caused the crash in the first place...but there's
always someone who'll thank God for, essentially,
causing a nasty accident but having the good grace to allow at least a few of those involved to "miraculously survive".To
help us gain a better understanding of what happened, the BBC provided
its website-viewers with what is perhaps the least meaningful
info-graphic ever produced outside of The Onion's offices.
Here it is:
Now,
one of the dangerous things about coming in below the normal landing
trajectory is the risk of hitting buildings or the landing fence
(indeed, the BBC article quotes Mr Coward as saying "I didn't think
we'd clear the fence at first").
Obviously Mr Coward hadn't
seen the BBC's infographic.... if he had, he'd have got the impression
that the fence and nearby buildings weren't a problem. But then, the
BBC graphic features an angle 10-15 times greater than the actual one,
thus giving a somewhat inaccurate appearance of coming down well above
the ground-based obstacles.
Also, if the graphic gives the
suggestion that the engine problem ocurred about 5 plane-lengths away
from the airport (when it was actually 2 miles) and also gives the
impression that 183m is about 3 times longer than 305m. Which, as the
mathematicians amongst you will know, it isn't.
In defence of the
Beeb's graphic, it does point out that it is not to scale, and it does
show what a 3 degree angle really looks like. But with every single
particular of the diagram being wrong, you have to wonder what the
point of it is.
Once we accept that the angles, distances,
heights of buildings and the size of the plane are all wrong relative
to one another, all we can really take from the graphic is that the
plane came down to the ground.
Which to be honest, we could probably have deduced without a picture!
But
anyway, pedantic whinging about the picture aside, the main thing is
that everyone got out alive, the worst injury being a broken leg. And
when you've got a lump of metal weighing half a million pounds coming
down without its engines doing their bit, that's a pretty damn good
result!
Three cheers for the Coward!
