Grounds For Comparison — Air France Flight 447

Brazilian officials examining the wreckage of Air France flight 447

The nonstop, highly speculative nature of this coverage is made even more astonishing in considering its incongruence with coverage of the precedent for this disaster. On June 1^st, 2009, Air France flight 447, a 228-passenger Airbus A330, disappeared without trace for seven days, and was eventually determined to have crashed into the Atlantic Ocean. AF447 and MH370 have considerable similarities, including:

• Both the Malaysia Airlines Beoing 777-200 and the Air France Airbus 330 were large, commercial airliners with “outstanding safety records” whose malfunctions were regarded as highly unlikely (The Straight Times, 2014).
• No mayday call was made in either case.
• Both, presumably, crashed into unknown areas of major oceans, creating needle-in-a-haystack search tasks in the Atlantic Ocean (AF447) and the Indian Ocean (MH370).
• These search processes both called for international aid and lasted (or, in the case of MH370, continue to last) for an agonizingly long time. It took seven days for the wreckage of AF447 to be identified conclusively, and the hunt for MH370 has endured for over two months.
• The numbers of passengers lost on both of these large, commercial airliners are also remarkably close: 239 on MH370 and 228 on AF447, including 12 crew members in both cases.
• Few Americans were on either flight, with Air France flight 447 having just two and Malaysia Airlines flight 370 containing three, two of which were children.

After approximately two years of investigation, the final moments of AF447 have been pieced together and are displayed in this timeline (click to enlarge and view details):

The Coverage

Though the cases of AF447 and MH370 have many similarities, they were not covered as similarly as one might expect, differing vastly in both prevalence and content. For example, of all The Situation Room broadcasts made during the seven days before AF447 wreckage was found, only six broadcasts mention this mystery. MH370 was mentioned, considering a daily average, two and a half times more often!

In covering the case of AF447, the content of The Situation Room is also focused on well-evidenced facts concerning the search for wreckage. An example can be seen in the following video, where Blitzer and guest Peter Goelz, former managing director of the National Transportation Safety Board, speak of concrete facts and the difficulty of the search process: