The Dallas Morning News this AM had a front page story of two Texas warriors being brought back to rest in their home state forty-four years after being shot down in their F-4 Phantom over the Ho Chi Minh trail. A great story and it needed a great photo to illustrate it.
The caption reads: "...they flew an F-4 like this one taking off from the USS Saratoga."
Excuse me? That is a photo of a Navy jet. It is a photo of an A-7. It is a photo of a landing, not a take-off.
Maybe it is OK that they at least found a picture of an airplane.
11 comments:
It's probably a file photo they had left over from a story about John McCain taking off in his A-4 from the Forrestal...
You know, an army guy in one of those air force bomber jets on one of those boat thingies.
What do you expect, Ed? The press in this country has, by and large, forgotten about accuracy. This is a common occurrence, something I see nearly every day in the media. It bugs my wife when I point these errors out to her but I can't believe they couldn't get it right somehow.
Accurate Journalism? surely you jest.
That's about the level of competence the press has ALWAYS shown with regards to military aviation.... and military matters in general.
You would, though, think, uh, that that dangly thingy might have tipped them off that the flying machine was not, you know, taking off.
Oops! My bad. Thinking does not much impact the news reporting business these days.
Lack of knowledge on the part of the MSM is not confined to military aviation. Accidents and news involving civil and general aviation are always misreported and sensational. And ignorant. Bad reporting has cast much of GA in a negative light. Many folks now regard light airplanes with fear and suspicion, not recognizing you can do far more damage with a truckload of fertilzer than a plane that holds two or three PAX.
How many layers of fact-checking did that picture get through to be printed.
Just a few minutes of Google-fu would have revealed this might be a A-7A Corsair II of VA-27 Royal Maces returning from an Iron Hand mission and about to trap aboard USS Constellation.
Not the F-4 they were looking for.
At least it was a combat aircraft.
That's an impressive piece of google-fu Anna.
Nzgarry, not really. First is the black cross on the radome, sources say this was used to tell the LSOs this is an A-7 and not an F-8. When the carrier wings had A-6Es and EA-6Bs, the EA-6Bs had a radiation symbol on their radome - again to tell LSOs its a Prowler and not an Intruder. Next on the outboard left station is an AGM-45 Shrike which means an actual Iron Hand mission. The only photograph I could find with the cross on the radome belonged to an A-7A of VA-27 tailcode NK about to launch off CV-64 in 1968. Other A-7As from other squadrons lacked the black cross. In 1970 when the A-7E went to war in VietNam, again no black cross.
So there you go. I ought to get hired by the media.
Anna,
Awesome! Didn't know any of those details. Thanks.
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