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AIN Blog: Linguistic Restraint
The Southwest Airlines 737-300 that lost some fuselage skin last month must surely have provided its occupants with some horribly tense minutes, but the ai

The Southwest Airlines 737-300 that lost some fuselage skin last month must surely have provided its occupants with some horribly tense minutes, but the airplane made it safely back to terra firma. 

The general media were all over the story because the incident proved to the millions of people who don’t know airplanes intimately that, by jove, those things are indeed up there only by the grace of God and this one burst. Burst it did, yes, but in many quarters, some of them informed and educated about things aeronautical, the incident was described as a “catastrophic loss of cabin pressure/decompression/structural failure.”

Nigel Moll
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