Headline: British Airways flight crosses Atlantic in less than 5 hours, setting record
In high school, when I was pondering the clichéd question “what do you want to be when you grow up?” at one point I seriously considered aviation, specifically commercial airline piloting.
So, each time I see a headline about an airline, such as the ongoing misadventures of United Airlines, it piques my interest. Sunday, a more positive air-centric headline came across my phone.
When I learned that a flight had travelled across the Atlantic Ocean to London in under 5 hours, it amazed me to learn not only that it had been done, but that it had been done before. Also surprising to me was the fact that, in my personal longest flights (from MSY in New Orleans, which is my home airport, to LAX in Los Angeles) the trips were between four to four-and-a-half hours long, yet the flight reported in this article took just minutes longer than that.
So, because of personal experience and interest, which I propose that I share with many people who have had noteworthy airport or airline experiences, this story hooked me in before I even opened it.
The lead is a basic hard-hitting news lead, but it is presented in a compelling way. By opening with “For the first time in years,” the author makes the reader want to find out when was the last time, and how does this time compare with those.
We also, in the same lead, find out what airline the plane flies for, when it landed, at which airport, from which airport and the time of the flight — all in the course of 30 words.
The most intriguing part of the story comes next. The flight broke the record for the fastest subsonic (slower than the speed of sound) commercial flight between the two cities. It broke the previous record by 17 minutes.
The facts of the story are the most interesting aspects of it, such as it landing 102 minutes ahead of schedule. The story goes on to provide the why by including quotes from a tweet by a CBS meteorologist who predicted this happening.
It would make for a much better quote if the article included an expanded original quote from the meteorologist.
The other quote in the story comes from Flightradar24’s, which tracks flights, communications director. It is a solid quote to explain simply how this was able to happen.
If the author wanted to write an expanded story, they (unnamed) could talk to some aircraft engineers and more meteorologists about what could be done to make transatlantic flights consistently faster, taking into account the weather.
Nonetheless, this short shotgun story does a really good job of cramming a lot of information into a limited space, while doing so in an entertaining way. It was a quick, fun read.