Airbus - not much coverage

Another post on Airbus

I gather the world's largest airliner has now taken off for the first time.

Expecting it to happen this morning I went to take a look at the airbus website, which now has the dedicated Maiden Flight section..... with nothing in it. There's a guest book full of appreciative comments from people around the world who saw the live tv of of the first flight, so we know it's happened.... but still no press release (?!).

I went to take a look at the satellite tv news channels. No mention on Sky, Bloomberg, CNN, BBC etc. Finally after 20 mins there's a studio item on BBC News 24 about how big the Airbus is, which mentioned it had flown, but no footage of the flight.

I return to the web and look through the newsfeed aggregators. There's very little news or no news about it. Even on Aviation industry sites. Right now there's no mention of it on Airwise or, AVweb or Air Transport World Online! (to be fair the latter two are US-based and probably not yet had their first cup of coffee)

I expect it'll be covered quite well in the evening news, but I am surprised at how little excitement it seems to have generated so far. That may be because the news in the UK is rather dominated at the moment by the election... but I suspect it may also be because the Airbus Press Office has been treating the first flight as some sort of state secret. In which case they only have themselves to blame for the lack of interest.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Yes, quite poor coverage. I wonder whether we, the public and by default the news media are now too cynical to be inspired by grand projects. This thread is apparent in the embarassing way in which Concorde was retired. Has Humanity's curiosity peaked? Where is our collective spirit of adventure? Part of me wonders whether a moon landing would make it into print these days...

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