Twitter rumours of dramatic Qantas fire in Melbourne prove to be a faulty indicator light
The last week has seen a series of articles about the power of Twitter in a breaking news event. First came the dramatic scenes in Mumbai, then the more miraculous plane crash on the Hudson.
But Twitter’s tendency to turn a minor drama into a crisis was demonstrated tonight after a routine technical problem at Melbourne airport escalated into what sounded like the beginnings of a full blown disaster by the time it had been retweeted to thousands of people.
An exasperated spokesman for the airport told Mumbrella a few moments ago: “There was no fire. There was a report of a problem, the plane came back under its own power. Operations are normal. it was all over in a few minutes.”
The mini Twitter sensation went viral just after 7pm when user JonoH posted the message at: “Breaking!!! Plane on fire @ melboune airport”. He followed up with: “Qantas 767 on fire @ Melbourne airport… details to come!!!”
His 510 followers quickly started forwarding those messages to their own followers. In minutes the message was in thousands of streams. Services like Tweet Trends, Tweeting Trends, ReTweet Trends and PlsRetweet then picked up the traffic, leading to the information to ripple into a series of new networks. before long, virtually anyone who was looking at Twitter in Australia was seeing the message.
As it went shooting around, there was indeed a minor incident in progress, which followed a report of a fire on a plane on the runway. But the airport spokesman told Mumbrella: “There wasn’t actually a fire. I’m not sure exactly what it was, but there wasn’t a fire.”
The logs of Victoria’s Country Fire Authority would appear to confirm this – they were called out at 7.16pm to an incident at the airport which was recorded as “small” and “safe”.
Meanwhile though JonoH’s updates were still fairly dramatic, although he was no longer using three exclamation marks in each message: “ok it was a Qantas 767.. engine fire (dont know what Pod) its confirmed it was a 767.. awaiting flight details.. all PAX are fine.”
The airport press office, who had already received three media calls when Mumbrella phoned, including from Channel Ten, said: “Unfortunately the Internet is full of gossip.”
But JonoH – whose Twitter profile lists him as Jono Haysom, from Brisbane, “Tech Evangelist, Entrepreneur , Futurist and Telco Business Development Manager who loves wine and travel!” – is still convinced he was onto something, posting a few moments ago: “guys before you jump to conclusions check your facts… it was the Sydney flight… it WAS real.. call QF if you knew anyone on the flight.”
But a few minutes ago he confessed he wasn’t actually at the airport, admitting in a Tweet: “I had a mate scheduled on a Mel-Syd flight who had alerted me 2 the situation. i was not on scene.”
10pm update: A spokesman for Qantas has just told Mumbrella that at about 7pm, as QF455 from Sydney to Melbourne was landing, an indicator light came on to signal a potential engine fire. She said: “As a precaution, the pilot operated the fire extinguisher, but it turned out there was no fire, it was just an indicator.”
She added: “The plane taxied normally and the passengers disembarked normally.”
Meanwhile, you can follow Mumbrella on Twitter at http://twitter.com/mumbrella.
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The social media echo chamber – ctrl c, ctrl v – no source credibility, it can be a big game of ‘chinese whispers.’
One of the downsides of social media but it’s freedom of speech on steroids!
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Wow, @JonoH gets xxxx of the Week from me… I have friends coming back from Melbourne today from OZeWAI. What a dick.
Thanks for debunking.
Cheers, Andrew
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Mumbrealla and the commentors should wait for the official word from QANTAS, so far they have declined to comment. Ofcourse Melbourne Airport would say that the incident is small, they do not want to cause mass chaos. The Rural Fire Service responded to a fire at Melbourne Airport and were there for over 1 hour according to their logs.
I’ll be reading in the morning that @jonoh was right and i hope that you’re just as quite to apoligize to him!
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*cough* apoligiy required *cough*
@jonoh’s claims have just been confirmed by Melbourne’s Courier Mail newspaper – http://www.news.com.au/courier.....public_rss
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Hi Mark,
I’ve just dragged the Qantas spokeman out of what sounded like an extemely good party. (Her comment is now at the end of the story).
It was a faulty fire indicator.
Clearly not a delibarete hoax, but certainly a little overexcited, particularly considering many people who read that sort of message and have no further info may know somebody who is travelling.
Still, all’s well that ends well and all that, eh?
@Mumbrella,
I think we need to trust claims until they are proven incorrect, it would have been good to talk to someone from QANTAS around the time of the incident, but i understand that are not available every second of the day
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Ok… so why is the Courier Mail saying a witness saw flames coming from the wing?
It’s either a faulty indicator, or the plane was on fire. Which one is it?
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Hi Mark
I think it tends to demonstrate one of the inherent drawbacks of Twitter, that everyone wants to be first to be a citizen journalist and break a big story. If it had been (and thank god it wasn’t) a major incident, everyone would have been talking about who Tweeted it first.
It’s a good lesson for all of us to try to be sure of our facts before Tweeting, particularly if you don’t have all the information and what you post could upset people.
But despite the hoo-hah, the main thing to remember is that this outcome of one Tweeter being embarrased at getting carried away is far better than it was looking for an hour or so earlier on this evening.
Cheers,
Tim
@ Mark
Why should we be waiting for an official word from QANTAS? Mumbles said nothing was conclusive and the whole reason I read the interwebs and not the newspaper is for for live updates and some instant gratification.
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This is a classic example of where “citizen journalism” breaks down.
Most journalists can remember the time early in their career when they heard something from a mate that they thought was a huge story, and an older, wiser head made them check it out some more – saving them from a blunder.
The problem is, this sort of incident happens every single day. Whereas a journalist would have checked it out before broadcasting anything, a Twitterer’s first instinct is to tell the world.
Molehills very quickly become mountains.
We’re going to see this happening a lot more.
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nice slander piece – got the page views you were looking for?
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@ jordanrogers
Yeah, Mumbles is clearly making money off this so he’d want as many pageviews as possible. 😐
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This is really abhorrent, verging on character assassination, from what i can see nothing he wrote was “dramatic”. Perhaps your perception of urgency is off kilter rather than superlatives and hyperbole is the issue here. The Courier mail substantiated his claims, albeit about 3 hours after he tweeted it. The issue must have been serious enough to call in the CFS. 3 engines were called to assist (http://www.cfa.vic.gov.au/inci.....ummary.htm). He had the correct airline, the correct eyewitness statement that the Courier Mail cited even down to the aircraft model. none of your claims have been substantiated at all by anything in print.. @mumbrella is one for the scrap heap me thinks… BTW what happened to the older versions of this story where you were spreading misinformation and denying the story?
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You’re missing the point, Ben. Nobody is accusing him of making it up, just of jumping to the wrong conclusion.
But when you write “Breaking!!! Plane on fire at Melbourne Airport” and “Qantas 767 on fire!!!” people think that, you know, you’ve got information that a plane is on fire.
Or get the impression that, you know, you’re actually there, which he later admitted he wasn’t.
And that’s when the message gets retweeted.
If he’d Tweeted “My mate tells me a plane’s fire indicator light is on so they’re sending the CFS as a precaution”, none of last night’s stuff would have happened, and people with loved one’s on flights wouldn’t have panicked.
By the way, I’ve just looked at the Courier Mail story. It doesn’t substantiate his claims. It substantiates that there was a minor incident – the sort of thing that happens every day.
Think before you Tweet, guys!
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Jo, he tweeted that the plane was on fire.. it was extinguished, both mechanically by the pilot flicking the engine extinguisher switch and by the airport firies. The CFS wouldnt have been called otherwise, where is the source of the information above that it was a faulty indicator light?? Its not been reported ANYWHERE its vapor… i.e. not verified. id rather believe jono, his source and the other eyewitnesses who saw it rather than here-say which is unsubstantiated. You sure your a journo? your just as bad a mumedia…
“the sort of thing that happens every day.” People see fires out their wings everyday, where and who do you fly? Ethopian airways? hardly a normal event and thus the fire fighters, the story and the urgency of his text. its NOT a normal event. a 767 WAS on fire so his tweets are correct. why are we still discussing it?
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I’m know nothing about air safety procedures – but as a rule i think if there was a “fire indicator” that went off on a boarded flight – I would imagine CFS would be sent out… the thing about fires is that they can cause damage quickly. Arguing the fact they were sent out is reason enough there was a big incident is leaping to an unsubstantiated conclusion.
The main point from mumbles was that… with all the hype of how great twitter is – its easy to use the “great” examples and forget about the loads of misunderstandings and rumours that generally fly around the net.
Could have been a complete different story if the tweet was – looks like a 767 may be on fire… or there’s a report that… @ben – to me an eyewitness source is still unsubstantiated. Just look up the definition of ‘Human.’
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Check the CFS log that was referred to in the tweets – I read it as them attending an unrelated grass fire that took place on the same day (but not at the same time) as the twitter announcement.
I haven’t seen anything that mentions independent verification that the plane was on fire – only that one passenger reported seeing a fire. Two different things.
It was presented to twitter as a life and death struggle – which there is no evidence to support. Still.
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And check out the official comment from Qantas at the end of the story – THERE. WAS. NO. FIRE.
The firies get called out to stuff all day, everyday. If every little incident got the !!! treatment on Twitter, then it would be impossible to tell what was actually important.
JonoH’s mates seem to think that just because the CFS got called, it was okay to be a drama queen about it.
Next he, sorry – they, will be claiming there’s been a cover-up.
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The Courier mail article rings a bell as that is how it was told to me by mother of man on the Sydney plane, she rang my doorbell Friday about 7pm .. he apparently text-messaged his wife at the time that there was a (we should say reported) fire on the plane but that everyone got off OK. If I get further info like was there visible flame? I will post it.. (I see where official report said fire extinguisher was used ‘as a precaution’)
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It seems that just like traditional media, people online sometimes stretch the story and get it wrong too. What a surprise?
“I’ll be there in a minute, Someone is Wrong on the internet!”
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Pics of the fire.. Faulty Indicator light eh? INCORRECT! where there is smoke theirs fire. Mumbrella Failed and used dodgy PR leads that were polishing up the story.
END
http://www.airliners.net/photo.....0745529/M/
http://www.airliners.net/photo.....0745530/M/
(Mumbrella adds: It has since emerged that these photos were taken in 2004 – more details further down in the comment thread.)
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Hi Ben,
Thanks for posting that link. I’m no expert, but I notice the person who posted this picture describes it as “a smokey (sic) engine”. There does not seem to be a fire, and I wonder if this is what it looks like when a pilot sets off his automatic fire extinguisher?
However, I’m not sure it changes the original issue anyway – how a couple of overly-dramatic (but no doubt sincerely meant) Twitter postings went viral and made a minor incident look like an unfolding tragedy.
Cheers,
Tim
Ben,
You seem very interested, and well informed about all this. Are you really JonoH? Just asking.
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Sorry, who exactly was claiming that one person’s comment on Twitter was “journalism”? It’s just some bloke saying something which he believed at the time but which later turned out to be wrong. It’s a bit rich to set up this incident as intending to be journalism and then criticising it because, oh, it wasn’t journalism after all.
I’m not seeing this as anything more than “Gosh, something said on Twitter turned out to be incorrect.” Just like something said anywhere can turn out to be incorrect. This isn’t exactly a new concept.
What is it about (some) journalists who want to turn Twitter into some sort of news agency, and then whinge that it isn’t? It’s just random people talking.
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Stilgherrian is on the money, I think. More and more, time-poor journalists are seeing the internet as a major resource for research and investigation. It’s well known that they troll forums and post blog comments trying to get interviews. I’ve done it myself (at my editor’s request).
So in this context, of course journalists would see Twitter as a legitimate source – it has broken news stories, and journos want to be right there when shit goes down. The trouble is that Twitter is a vernacular form of publishing that, on the whole, is written by non-journalists. It’s not news; it’s buzz.
A previous commenter wrote “where there’s smoke there’s fire” – well, perhaps we should see Twitter as the smoke, rather than the fire. I’d argue that a good way for journalists to approach Twitter is to use it as a starting point for their regular reporting strategies, rather than treating what’s happening there as the news in and of itself.
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Stilgherrian, I think you’re right – it’s not journalism.
The same goes for many, many such tweets that go viral.
But by the time something has gone three times round the Twitterverse, it’s not the same as a bloke talking in the pub about a story he’s heard from his mate. If something sounds serious and goes viral, it finds something approaching a broadcast audience.
We’re in new territory here – it’s not journalism, but if it gets picked up, it gets treated as far more than one person chatting.
If JonoH’s (doubtless well-meaning) first Tweet had turned out to be the portent of something as major as it sounded, there would have been those in social media cricles who would have claimed it as a triumph of “citizen journalism”.
And that’s the question: at what point does it become citizen journalism? Only if it comes true?
And, Mel, I’d argue that the debate about journalists using Twitter as a news source is a slightly different one. In this particular case, the damage (if there was any) was already done – as people have posted further up here, for those who knew someone on a Qantas flight that night, it gave them an unwanted scare.
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
Tim, this is a lovely topic which I’ll return to in an essay later this week. As I’ve just been saying on Twitter, when our front-bar conversations (“Hey a mate said…”) become visible globally and permanently archived… well, everything changes are we’re all still learning how to live in this world.
As for “citizen journalism”, personally I think hat term is useless. It annoys professional journalists who want to keep the j-word for their methodologies for producing The News (as opposed to small-n news), and it tries to force what’s happening into an old framework which may or may not be relevant.
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Can’t be sure, but it looks to me like the images Ben linked to were posted on the site in 2004 (see dates below photos). How does this help support a story about a supposed fire on a plane in Jan 2009?
Just another example of the vagaries of reporting on the Internet…
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Hi Tim (another Tim…).
Thanks for that – I’ll attempt to contact the photographer and verify that.
Cheers,
Tim – mumbrella
Update: The photographer, Glenn Stewart has replied. He says: “The date of the photos was taken specifically as per the date on the website. I’m extremely accurate with my dates (digital date stamps save the effort of remembering).”
Just to be sure, I emailed him back to double check it couldn’t have been taken on friday night.
He replies: “Certainly not. These were taken December 28th 2004 without a single doubt. There wasn’t a fire in this case either. The smoke was due to additional hydralic fluid leaking onto hot components. The only reason I know this for certain is that I know the Qantas engineer who worked on it later that evening.”
OMG! Are they flames leaping out of the Twitter building. Surely it’s on fire. Maybe it has been hit by an airliner. It could even be a Qantas one (such delicious irony).
Oh … hang on.
Sorry, it was just the lights on one of their routers flickering. My mistake.
Everyone back to work.
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Rubbish, this isn’t about people being unnecessarily scared because of something they read on Twitter. That’s a straw man you’re setting up based on one comment in this thread.
Instead, the way this was rather triumphantly set up as a ‘gotcha’ story tells me that the issue is the extent to which journalists can trust Twitter as a news source.
I mean, why bother to treat a declared non-journalist – I haven’t seen any proof that JonoH even thinks of himself as a “citizen journalist” – to such a public dressing-down unless you’re worried that, one day, you could be the chump who reports one of those tweets as fact?
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He put himself in the spotlight, Mel.
Who put himself in the public eye? The person who sent the message. By the time that’s been read by his followers, retweeted, read by those followers, retweeted again, that’s been read by far more people than are ever going to see it here.
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Hi Mel,
Thanks for your comment. I would go along with much of what Steven says above.
As you may notice, this story was written as the message was still being RT’d. Indeed, at the time I started chasing it, and taking screen grabs, I did so because I was expecting it to be one of the first Australian examples where Twitter was first to break a major story.
But it’s not my role to be a cheer leader for Twitter, or to hide its drawbacks, so when it didn’t turn out that way, I reported what did happen. JonoH’s tweet going viral is what put him in the public domain, not my reporting on it afterwards.
I agree with yours, and Stilgherrian’s point from earlier, regarding “citizen journalism”. It’s an awkward phrase often used to mean eyewitness accounts. If he’d been right, I’m sure there would have been many who would have decribed his actions in that way, even if he didn’t himself.
I’m not sure that Jono H would fall in the eyewitness camp though – he said in a later Tweet that he wasn’t actually there, but was reporting what a friend had told him. “Twitter reporting”? That’s not much better, is it?
Cheers,
Tim – mumbrella