VIDEO – A320 Germanwings crash: 2nd black box found from French Alps site https://t.co/Rk8v4qdnHO pic.twitter.com/ccVLJu3ehp
— FRANCE 24 English (@France24_en) April 2, 2015
With French media reporting apparent location of the second “black box” from the GermanWings flight that crashed in the French alps last week, I thought I’d share some reporting you’ll be interested in — if you haven’t seen it already.
During MATS last week, as news of the awful apparent mass murder-suicide got around the news networks, the conversations from TV talking heads I managed to find time to hear struck some familiar chords. By the end of the week, TV commentators were chattering on about pilot medical certification, which requires more frequent physicals than what most truckers are used to (every six months, as a general rule).
What happens for pilots, though, does in some ways resemble the nature of driver medical certification, particularly when explained frankly — chiefly the often “adversarial” nature of the process, to use one pilot’s words to describe required physicals when the very ability to work is on the line.
That brings me to James Fallows’ couple stories’ worth of dissections of a variety of related issues via pilot commentaries, published in the Atlantic within the past week or so. Comparisons between U.S. trucking and international air travel are of course far from exact. Nonetheless, here’s a couple excerpts that I think will strike some of the same familiar chords for you that they struck in me.
