Don’t water down emergency situations

We seem to be in one of those periods when the cosmos conspires to remind us that flying is not a natural thing.

Early Sunday there was the so-called “hard landing” of an Air Canada Airbus 320 in Halifax. Everyone survived, which was pretty lucky considering it came down 1,100 feet short and snagged a power line and a navigational antenna.

Safety investigators always come across as so calm, so matter-of-fact. A landing gear coming off is described as “considerable damage.”

“An engine did attach from the aircraft,” a spokesperson said.

The engine came off. Although as I understand they’re designed to do that in a crash. Anything else?

“The nose cone was broken off,” the spokesperson continued.

I just don’t know if I could muster that level of calm during an emergency situation like that. And yet you listen to the passengers who choose to talk to reporters:

“It was a plane crash,” one passenger told reporters.

Passengers are almost as calm as the public officials.

“A big piece of steal or something came up through the floor under my seat,” another passenger said.

He sounds remarkably relaxed for a guy who was almost speared by the runway antenna.

“Everyone just started to say, ‘Get out, get out, get out,’ and we popped the doors because we were in the exit row, and everyone just started to run out,” a passenger said.

Next time I fly I want that woman in my exit row.

But calm though they may have been, they did draw the line. They were not about to accept the official description of what they’d been through.

“This wasn’t a hard landing … we crash landed,” passengers said.

Exactly. I think to most people, a “hard landing” doesn’t mean losing the main landing gear, an engine, and the nose cone. A “hard landing” is when a piece of luggage falls out of the overhead bin.