Bring Back The Car Chases!

That’s enough. Cable news coverage of airplanes with landing gear problems has officially jumped the shark.

September’s JetBlue landing was admittedly pretty exciting. It was “real reality TV,” and it garnered huge ratings on cable. Since then, we’ve seen several similar stories unfold, usually during the daytime, all with safe conclusions.

It was bad last night, when the networks scrapped an hour of primetime for wall-to-wall coverage of a Midwest Express landing. “CNN and Fox carried the images live, while MSNBC had a 5 second delay on the same affiliate coverage CNN was using,” an e-mailer noted. The delay didn’t matter because it was another safe landing. The breaking news barely registered on the Nielsen ratings scale.

This morning, it was a LearJet emergency landing in St. Louis. After another safe landing, CNN anchor Daryn Kagan asked if these emergency landings were a problematic new trend or a common occurance.

“It is common,” correspondent Kathleen Koch said. “And we are picking up on it more and more.” She said her contacts at the FAA “are saying…you guys are calling us all the time on these little things, they happen every day. So I think they have a sense that we may be simply hearing about it more quickly. You know, information is traveling very fast right now, so I think they’d like us all to just tone it down a little bit.”

“Perhaps this is becoming the latest version of the freeway chase,” Kagan mused. To that I say: Bring back the car chases!