Today’s column from Steve Blow just might lead me to cancel my subscription. It is insultingly idiotic. He’s writing about the Southwest plane that landed at the wrong airport. Blow says we shouldn’t go so hard on the pilots:
It’s pretty easy to poke fun at the Southwest Airlines pilots who managed to land at the wrong airport in Missouri on Sunday evening. …
But rather than ridicule the Southwest pilots, I find myself with a soft spot in my heart for them. Haven’t we all had a bad day at the office? I sure have.
Blow goes on to give some other examples of people having a bad day at the office: Rick Perry’s “oops” moment, Jose Canseco bouncing a fly ball off his head, Leon Lett falling on a ball he should have avoided, Cynthia Izaguirre calling a guy gay when she meant to say blind. Then Blow relates his own worst day at the office. He once wrote a story praising a lady for her hard work running a halfway house — and then it was revealed that she ran a drug-smuggling operation.
Is he serious? Blow has to be trolling people, right? If he’s not trolling people, this column is a fireable offense.
I called a pilot I know to make sure my reaction to this column wasn’t off-base. He doesn’t fly commercially. He’s a pilot for a corporation, flies the executives all over the world. He’s also very handsome, and, once upon a time, he wasn’t a bad defensive soccer player. But that is beside the point. My point is, the runway those Southwest pilots put down on was about half the length of a normal runway for a plane that big. If they’d been heavier, the plane could have rolled off the runway, down an embankment, and onto a highway. In other words, people could have been killed.
Yes, we’ve all had a bad day at the office. But letting a fly ball bounce off your head is not comparable to landing at the wrong airport. Blow’s equating the two events shows a dangerous lack of critical thought. Nor is compromising the safety of a planeload of people kinda like misspeaking on a television broadcast.
I don’t know whether Blow is incompetent or just lazy. Either way, he shouldn’t have access to a computer ever again. This is like when grandpa drives his Olds into a storefront because “the gas pedal got stuck.” It’s time to have that hard conversation. Take his keys away. As for the editor who let this tripe see print, he should be forced to watch Courtney Loves Dallas tonight.
