Another day, another QF incident
Be thankful it was just a Weather Event and not another Rain Bomb.
(Part of the problem with the English syllabus seems to be that pretty much everything is now a text, and has to be deconstructed. The poor kids are so busy deconstructing Simpsons episodes and the backs of chip packets that they don’t get much of a chance to learn about spelling and punctuation.)
(Part of the problem with the English syllabus seems to be that pretty much everything is now a text, and has to be deconstructed. The poor kids are so busy deconstructing Simpsons episodes and the backs of chip packets that they don’t get much of a chance to learn about spelling and punctuation.)
A train bombs is a colloquialism used to convey the idea that an exceptional, damaging rain event is happening.
Another term in use is "aerial river'.
More exceptional precipitation events are predicted as a result of global warming because a warmer atmosphere carries more energy and water vapour.
Weather event is the general technical term for something exceptional happening. Like an event happening to a plane in flight.
A train bombs is a colloquialism used to convey the idea that an exceptional, damaging rain event is happening.
Another term in use is "aerial river'.
More exceptional precipitation events are predicted as a result of global warming because a warmer atmosphere carries more energy and water vapour.
A train bombs is a colloquialism used to convey the idea that an exceptional, damaging rain event is happening.
Another term in use is "aerial river'.
More exceptional precipitation events are predicted as a result of global warming because a warmer atmosphere carries more energy and water vapour.
Anyway, back on topic, I see Seven News has been reporting those naughty Dash 8s have been dumping fuel again…
The irony indeed, Eclan; from a grammatical perspective, your diatribe is little better than that of AerialPerspective.
When I read Aerial's post I noted a number of the points you mentioned. However I decided that as it was conversational English, as opposed to instructional English, it mattered little. In this case his or her point was well made and, compared to some other posts I've seen grace the pages of PPRuNe, their transgressions were minor.
I get your humour, it certainly raised a chuckle here, but the thrust of various posts relating to education and the confusion that can arise from poor sentence construction should not be lost.
That said I don't especially agree with VHOED191006's inference that comprehension is unimportant. As students we analyse Shakespeare's prose in order to learn the subtleties of the language, and how to interpret what people are saying. To my mind without this we'd be in a worse mess when it comes to deciphering the intent of written instruction, and we might as well give up on funny repartee such as that of twentyelevens, itsnotthatbloodyhard, and yours.
FP.
When I read Aerial's post I noted a number of the points you mentioned. However I decided that as it was conversational English, as opposed to instructional English, it mattered little. In this case his or her point was well made and, compared to some other posts I've seen grace the pages of PPRuNe, their transgressions were minor.
I get your humour, it certainly raised a chuckle here, but the thrust of various posts relating to education and the confusion that can arise from poor sentence construction should not be lost.
That said I don't especially agree with VHOED191006's inference that comprehension is unimportant. As students we analyse Shakespeare's prose in order to learn the subtleties of the language, and how to interpret what people are saying. To my mind without this we'd be in a worse mess when it comes to deciphering the intent of written instruction, and we might as well give up on funny repartee such as that of twentyelevens, itsnotthatbloodyhard, and yours.
FP.
I do a large amount of writing for a living and you can be assured the grammar and spelling are correct at all times as I revise and proof-read. I'm not paid to post on PPRuNe so I don't apply the same rigour to the form of my words, basically, yes, writing conversationally.
Journalists on the other hand are paid to get things right and they are supposed to produce content that at least approximates the truth. Sadly, this is very rarely the case.
I'm not writing a PhD thesis when I type a post on PPRuNe thus it doesn't warrant as much attention.
I can see and comment on someone doing a crappy job of painting a house when they have been paid to do so, I don't need to be a master painter to comment.
Heavy rain = weather event
Just like all those weather events that have been happening forever.
Do we remember the old saying, “you are either part of the solution or part of the problem”? Well it is increasingly obvious that our media are not “helping”. It is in their interest to foment unrest, distrust of the “other” and generally stir up conflict. All fine and understood except it seems to me from what I see on social media people generally believe them, hence the success of click bait posts….”she put bread in this toaster, what happens next has divided the internet”. They must work because they keep doing it. Just like supermarkets selling for $2.99 instead of $3.00.
In case anyone was wondering, yes we are getting dumber. A study in US has shown IQs on average have dropped since the 1970s and a recent school study in Australia shows that literacy and numeracy skills have got worse in the last five years.
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinio...de-ncna1008576
https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbest...h=4bba20f8b103
https://www.theguardian.com/australi...-reports-finds
Just like all those weather events that have been happening forever.
Do we remember the old saying, “you are either part of the solution or part of the problem”? Well it is increasingly obvious that our media are not “helping”. It is in their interest to foment unrest, distrust of the “other” and generally stir up conflict. All fine and understood except it seems to me from what I see on social media people generally believe them, hence the success of click bait posts….”she put bread in this toaster, what happens next has divided the internet”. They must work because they keep doing it. Just like supermarkets selling for $2.99 instead of $3.00.
In case anyone was wondering, yes we are getting dumber. A study in US has shown IQs on average have dropped since the 1970s and a recent school study in Australia shows that literacy and numeracy skills have got worse in the last five years.
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinio...de-ncna1008576
https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbest...h=4bba20f8b103
https://www.theguardian.com/australi...-reports-finds
I do a large amount of writing for a living and you can be assured the grammar and spelling are correct at all times as I revise and proof-read. I'm not paid to post on PPRuNe so I don't apply the same rigour to the form of my words, basically, yes, writing conversationally.
I'm not writing a PhD thesis when I type a post on PPRuNe thus it doesn't warrant as much attention.
I can see and comment on someone doing a crappy job of painting a house when they have been paid to do so, I don't need to be a master painter to comment.
I'm not writing a PhD thesis when I type a post on PPRuNe thus it doesn't warrant as much attention.
I can see and comment on someone doing a crappy job of painting a house when they have been paid to do so, I don't need to be a master painter to comment.
What, by the way, do you write? Do you have anything published we might peruse?
Is that what you were doing? I had to read it a few times to understand it.
No, but if you point out flaws in someone else's paint job while standing beside a crap paint job of your own, expect some people to pick you up on it. Since you claim you write for a living and proof-read your work until it's correct I'd have thought that same "rigour" and discipline would naturally filter through to your posts here, thus my amusement at the irony of your dig at others.
What, by the way, do you write? Do you have anything published we might peruse?
No, but if you point out flaws in someone else's paint job while standing beside a crap paint job of your own, expect some people to pick you up on it. Since you claim you write for a living and proof-read your work until it's correct I'd have thought that same "rigour" and discipline would naturally filter through to your posts here, thus my amusement at the irony of your dig at others.
What, by the way, do you write? Do you have anything published we might peruse?
Now, this thread was about the media largely and its failure. I say again, I'm not paid to post here so I'm not going to waste time making sure everything would pass a writing test at Oxford.
What I DON'T do when I write is add 'event' on the end of everything or replace the perfectly acceptable 'close' when a business is shut down with 'shuttered', the latest favourite media word that emanated from the United States it seems. That's my main problem with the media, aside from accuracy, is that every story starts with 'massive', includes the word 'event', talks about a business being 'shuttered', observes that the populace is 'bracing' or 'reeling', uses 'slam' for any attack by one politician on another, includes the phrase 'it comes after'. Media reporting is nothing more these days than a mindless collection of inaccuracies bound together by weasel words.
As for your pickiness, you're just being obtuse.
I wouldn't criticise someone else's paint job if mine wasn't that good. Of course, I wouldn't have been paid would I whereas the other painter (as with journalists) are paid. Your twisting of my analogy suggests that if you have your car repaired and you pay good money for it that you should just stand by and accept a crap job and pay up. We pay for newspapers and in one way or another, for TV content. It is not unreasonable to expect those people to at least make an attempt at accuracy. Once upon a time, one could read the paper and learn something about grammar and spelling because the better news outlets were paragons of grammatical accuracy. Not anymore.
As Don Watson said: "I don't know how the human race survived for the first 100,000 to 200,000 years. We must have just milled around and bumped into each other endlessly. Thank goodness we are now all 'going forward'". Watson provides some pretty good illustrations of the dire state of communication.
Rear Window

Save
ShareAlan Joyce, the everlasting CEO of Qantas, was moved last week to take up his pen in defence of the airline’s safety record.
This was in response to the Australian media’s scarifying coverage of routine flight turnbacks by Qantas in recent weeks – the frenzy triggered, on January 18, by a single engine failure on a 737 operating between Auckland and Sydney. That aircraft landed without incident yet was over-dramatised by news outlets as akin to Sully landing US1549 on the Hudson. TV networks carried live footage of the landing! Were they hoping for a conflagration?
Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce: Business and economy class passengers represent the same opportunity to gaslight while he’s got both hands in their pockets. James Brickwood
This is a perennial issue for Qantas: the media generating a false sense of an abrupt upsurge in inflight “incidents”, which in actual fact is merely an upsurge in the misreporting of regular operations as incidents.
It flares up every few years – usually, in fairness to the media, after a major safety event – and then peters out. In each recurrence, Qantas has wildly varying degrees of success calming it down. A key difference this time is that the public no longer trusts anything that Joyce or the company says.
Of course, Joyce did not confine his piece in Friday’s Sydney Morning Heraldto an explanation of air turnbacks. He also drifted into another apologia for Qantas’ nightmarish 2022, testing a few fresh lines of self-rationalisation. And boy were they worth the cover price.
On the months-long chaos of lost bags and cancelled flights, Joyce tried this: “Six months ago, a lot of people felt we’d let them down and the figures showed why… It didn’t matter that airlines around the world had the same problems as travel restarted. If your flight to the Gold Coast has just been cancelled, it doesn’t make you feel any better to hear the delays are worse in Amsterdam.”
Here is Joyce conceding that his main soundbite last winter – that Qantas’ shocking unreliability was really only as bad as its international peers – was an incredibly insensitive one and expressing cheap empathy with his customers for how shit it must’ve felt to be offered it. Can they have another $50 voucher with that?
Now that things are peachy on the operational front, Joyce has noticed people “talking to me less about flight delays and more about higher fares. The two are related. In order to make our operations more reliable, we had to reduce our flights to give us more buffer … Less supply and lots of demand meant fares went up.”
Stand and applaud yet another masterclass in blame externalisation, revel in the audacity of Joyce’s attempt to renounce his own agency. The fares just went up. It was outside of my control. Egregious price-gouging just happened.
What actually happened is that Joyce withdrew supply from the market and, as the dominant player, this enabled him to make the choice to increase his airfares by a terrific magnitude – by 40 per cent in economy (and even more in business) on international trunk routes versus 2019.
This, in turn, enabled him to post a record profit of about $1.4 billion for the six months to December 31, which he will announce on February 23. Bear in mind, the company’s standing record annual profit is $1.6 billion.
In a further moment of misguided candour, Joyce added that “we’ve recently seen most of our competitors announce a major ramp up in their capacity – so you can expect to see fares trend down.”
What a delightful slip of the tongue, a pure admission of inordinate market power, saying I screwed you while I could but rest assured my competitors are now forcing me to drop my fares. I’ll no longer be able to extort you once my opposition offers you an alternative.
It’s just fabulous. Which PR mastermind let this paragraph survive the editing process? Indeed, who imagined a PR opus in which Qantas’ reputational problems are juxtaposed with, and therefore subdued by, its commendable safety record?
The whole purpose of spin is to recast the truth, to paint a substitute perspective of the accepted situation. And Qantas went with, “You lost your bag but at least we didn’t kill you. Fares are coming down; until then, bend over”. This was the best they could do.
All suffering is relative. Who’s worse off here: the banker in New York stung $23,000 for the privilege of attending his first meetings in Qantas pyjamas or the labourer stranded in Bali for 10 days in a cockroach-infested donga?
To Alan Joyce, they represent the same opportunity to gaslight while he’s got both hands in their pockets
Alan Joyce’s new material falls flat
Joe AstonColumnistFeb 5, 2023 – 6.15pmSave
ShareAlan Joyce, the everlasting CEO of Qantas, was moved last week to take up his pen in defence of the airline’s safety record.
This was in response to the Australian media’s scarifying coverage of routine flight turnbacks by Qantas in recent weeks – the frenzy triggered, on January 18, by a single engine failure on a 737 operating between Auckland and Sydney. That aircraft landed without incident yet was over-dramatised by news outlets as akin to Sully landing US1549 on the Hudson. TV networks carried live footage of the landing! Were they hoping for a conflagration?
This is a perennial issue for Qantas: the media generating a false sense of an abrupt upsurge in inflight “incidents”, which in actual fact is merely an upsurge in the misreporting of regular operations as incidents.
It flares up every few years – usually, in fairness to the media, after a major safety event – and then peters out. In each recurrence, Qantas has wildly varying degrees of success calming it down. A key difference this time is that the public no longer trusts anything that Joyce or the company says.
Of course, Joyce did not confine his piece in Friday’s Sydney Morning Heraldto an explanation of air turnbacks. He also drifted into another apologia for Qantas’ nightmarish 2022, testing a few fresh lines of self-rationalisation. And boy were they worth the cover price.
On the months-long chaos of lost bags and cancelled flights, Joyce tried this: “Six months ago, a lot of people felt we’d let them down and the figures showed why… It didn’t matter that airlines around the world had the same problems as travel restarted. If your flight to the Gold Coast has just been cancelled, it doesn’t make you feel any better to hear the delays are worse in Amsterdam.”
Here is Joyce conceding that his main soundbite last winter – that Qantas’ shocking unreliability was really only as bad as its international peers – was an incredibly insensitive one and expressing cheap empathy with his customers for how shit it must’ve felt to be offered it. Can they have another $50 voucher with that?
Now that things are peachy on the operational front, Joyce has noticed people “talking to me less about flight delays and more about higher fares. The two are related. In order to make our operations more reliable, we had to reduce our flights to give us more buffer … Less supply and lots of demand meant fares went up.”
Stand and applaud yet another masterclass in blame externalisation, revel in the audacity of Joyce’s attempt to renounce his own agency. The fares just went up. It was outside of my control. Egregious price-gouging just happened.
What actually happened is that Joyce withdrew supply from the market and, as the dominant player, this enabled him to make the choice to increase his airfares by a terrific magnitude – by 40 per cent in economy (and even more in business) on international trunk routes versus 2019.
This, in turn, enabled him to post a record profit of about $1.4 billion for the six months to December 31, which he will announce on February 23. Bear in mind, the company’s standing record annual profit is $1.6 billion.
In a further moment of misguided candour, Joyce added that “we’ve recently seen most of our competitors announce a major ramp up in their capacity – so you can expect to see fares trend down.”
What a delightful slip of the tongue, a pure admission of inordinate market power, saying I screwed you while I could but rest assured my competitors are now forcing me to drop my fares. I’ll no longer be able to extort you once my opposition offers you an alternative.
It’s just fabulous. Which PR mastermind let this paragraph survive the editing process? Indeed, who imagined a PR opus in which Qantas’ reputational problems are juxtaposed with, and therefore subdued by, its commendable safety record?
The whole purpose of spin is to recast the truth, to paint a substitute perspective of the accepted situation. And Qantas went with, “You lost your bag but at least we didn’t kill you. Fares are coming down; until then, bend over”. This was the best they could do.
All suffering is relative. Who’s worse off here: the banker in New York stung $23,000 for the privilege of attending his first meetings in Qantas pyjamas or the labourer stranded in Bali for 10 days in a cockroach-infested donga?
To Alan Joyce, they represent the same opportunity to gaslight while he’s got both hands in their pockets
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The Leonardo da Vinci-Fiumicino re-fueler told me a rumor that the ATSB may be releasing a report on a recent significant incident the media has not reported on yet... might be the real reason the pr group is in overdrive.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-02-...back/101961738
Not sure if this would be a QF incident, or an Alliance on?
Not sure if this would be a QF incident, or an Alliance on?
Good decision by the crew to circle “in the air”. Burning off fuel is much slower if you circle on the ground and can defeat the purpose of burning off fuel.
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ABC News at it's best " "The issue was that the undercarriage after take-off did not automatically retract, and so they had to manually retract the undercarriage," he said. "
I'm eagerly awaiting that expert " GTs " story of what really happened.
I'm eagerly awaiting that expert " GTs " story of what really happened.
Which one?
"I definitely think the delay in telling people what was going on created an element of stress."