If anyone has seen flight #MH370, please return it to @cnn.
— Mari de Armas (@MarideAr) March 19, 2014
I must confess, I was one of those people. I was secretly watching CNN’s wall-to-wall coverage of the missing Malaysia Airlines flight. I watched in horror as a the cable news network reported nothing new for hours, but had at least 200 variations of lower-third graphics.
I watched, not because I wanted to witness lowbrow journalism first-hand, but because I have a secret fear of dying in a plane crash. And among the very many doomsday scenarios I have played out in my mind, from dying in a fireball to surviving the water landing, but then being eaten by sharks, none of them included the long, drawn-out suffering of my friends and family because they didn’t know where I was or what exactly happened to me.
But, now that I know that it is possible to lose a plane, it got me thinking – this should not happen to anyone else ever again. The following are just a few easily implementable suggestions:
- Stop putting the Black Box on the plane. Or keep it on the plane, but let it send real time updates while in flight. Maybe by using…wait for it…iCloud. Seems like this could be a marketing partnership made in the heavenly friendly skies. Also, can we stop calling it a black box? It’s orange and cylindrical. It makes me nervous that the masterminds in charge of flying behemoths can’t properly identify colors and shapes.
- Make Nerf airplanes. Light, aerodynamic, colorful and, more importantly, comfortable.
- Passenger parachutes. If you are going to charge us for cookies and baggage, throw in the option to rent a parachute. If the passenger doesn’t use it, it’s a win-win.
- Jealous lovers. Instead of funding an expensive and dangerous federal air marshal program, just assign people with extremely jealous spouses and lovers to take flights around the world. There is no way those suspicious minds are going to let that plane out of their sight.
- Don’t tell them. Let’s never share anything with CNN again.
It’s official @cnn has lost its collective mind. #MH370 #zombieflight pic.twitter.com/gmcTuGzZ8w
— Mari de Armas (@MarideAr) March 21, 2014
Mari de Armas 