By now you know the story and happy ending to Jet Blue’s scary flight and landing. (The LAT took advantage of the local nature of the story to provide excellent coverage including photos and video of the landing).

What I found most interesting was that passengers were able to watch the drama unfold live on the seatback screens that Jet Blue provides. In fact, according the the Times, some passengers first realized that there was a problem when they saw the very plane they were riding on being shown as a breaking story on MSNBC and CNN:

“My friend said, ‘Hey dude, something’s wrong with our plane. We’re on TV,’ ” recalled Jorge Santiago, 24, of El Monte, saying he woke from his slumber and realized the severity of the situation. “Honest to God, I thought it was a dream.”

I have not seen reports if passengers were on cell phones and or beaming back photos from the plane but I would not be surprised. In fact, given that there were 145 people on board, the most surprising is that none of them was live blogging the event which is something we can no doubt expect down the line.

This raises interesting questions. Were passengers on other Jet Blue flights watching the ordeal? Will Jet Blue’s policy makers allow TVs to again remain on should this ever happen again? Was it beneficial or harmful for people to have that level of coverage? Would MSNBC or CNN have done any differently if they had known that passengers were among those watching the coverage?

One final note, Harold Greene, CBS 2 anchor man, asked everyone to be quiet and say a prayer as the plane was touching down. This didn’t offend me and I believe it was a heartfelt statement from a man who isn’t so jaded or distant as to forget that 145 people’s lives were at immense risk at that point. I only bring it up because I expect that others might take exception to it and I want to preemptively tell those people to give it a rest on this one.

technorati: jet blue

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 22nd, 2005 at 9:37 am by Insider and is filed under Brilliant, but uncategorizable. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.