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Airline safety topped the news agenda as the investigation into last week's fatal crash of Air France Flight 447 continued and the National Transportation Safety Board held hearings into the safe crash landing of USAirways Flight 1549 this January. Even though the Air France accident was not chosen to lead any of the three newscasts it qualified as Story of the Day for the second day in a row. CBS, which elevated the national profile of USAirways' Captain Chesley Sullenberger with its 60 Minutes exclusive, led with the Hudson River ditching. ABC and NBC chose economic stories for their leads: NBC picked Chrysler; ABC the banking industry.

NBC's Tom Costello told us Monday that Air France's pilots were refusing to fly A330s or A340s made by Airbus until their Pitot tubes were replaced. Now ABC's Lisa Stark covers the pilots' campaign. The tubes are the instruments used to monitor airspeed and "malfunctioning sensors can cause jets to fly dangerously fast--or slow." Yet NBC's Costello reminds us in his follow-up that there is no proof that a Pitot malfunction caused the crash. That "remains only a theory."

Meanwhile 41 bodies have now been retrieved from the Atlantic Ocean along with the jetliner's tail, whose appearance suggests that the jetliner disintegrated in midair, CBS' Bob Orr told us: "The jet's tail fin is virtually intact, cleanly sheared near the bolts that connected it to the fuselage--a sign it may have been ripped off by strong aerodynamic forces."


Andrew Tyndall 6/10/09 10:55:11 pm

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