Its annoying that the
PR at easyjet didn't research their claim. She's clearly not the youngest Airline Captain. The internet shows that in a fairly quick internet search and so many posts by people on PPRuNe are offering up names airline and dates, to prove it. The CNN article at the beginning doesn't differentiate with her being female it just says "Their employer, the British carrier Easyjet, believes McWilliams has become the world's youngest commercial airline captain" is it wrong that this frustrates me? I always felt accuracy was an important part of aviation, granted maybe not Airline
PR.
Aren't Easyjet going through an industrial troubles with their pilots ATM? These articles may just be an attempt at good
PR to focus attention away from those troubles.
To me this story is more a story about the failure of modern journalism. Any reporter worth their salt could have spent 10 minutes on Google and easily discovered that a 26 year old isn't the world's "youngest commercial airline captain". But in a bid to cut costs newsrooms have been slashed, and resources are limited. Reporters have basically become corporate
PR writers, just rewriting company press releases instead of checking facts and sources (ie real investigative journalism). And in the world of twitter, where people want information instantly, media companies are in a battle to be the first to get the articles published, regardless of accuracy.