COM Interviewing Experience

Students in the Communication program are often encouraged to get experience interviewing professors and fellow students for class assignments. But rarely do they have an opportunity to act as reporters on the scene of an unplanned event. Thanks to Professor Anthony Brickhouse and his SF 435 Aircraft Crash Survival Analysis and Design class, COM students get that opportunity.

As part of a major project to test the skills of his advanced Safety students, Brickhouse stages a full simulation of an aircraft accident investigation, complete with destroyed airplane and grieving family members. The simulation helps the students prepare for a possible career with the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) which investigates aircraft accidents.

Brickhouse, an assistant professor of the Department of Applied Aviation Sciences, calls his student team the ERTSB, or Embry-Riddle Transportation Safety Board, after the national board. During the first half of the semester, the students learn the techniques and skills they will need to properly assess an accident. Then they experience a “real” one and must put to use all that they have learned.

On the day of the simulation, the students walked up to Spruance Field, equipment in hand, to find the pieces of a Cessna 172 that had been in an actual fatal crash in March 2002. The nose of the plane was crushed, the wings missing entirely, and pieces of equipment were scattered nearby.

To add realism to the scene, Brickhouse and his set-up crew used Spam and fake blood to give the crash a little gore. As distasteful as this may seem, it is necessary to prepare the students to deal with carnage in a real wreck.

Also on the scene lay bright orange notes printed with “clues” like instrument readings for the throttle and fuel tanks, and information about the impact point and skidding distance of the wreck. Because the actual plane was retrieved from a different accident, the instruments could not be adjusted to show these clues.

“They are trying to figure out what happened,” says Brickhouse. The students make use of real-world techniques in recording the clues, such as digital photography and GPS technology for documenting the site, and interviewing “witnesses” for more information.

Brickhouse says the process involves collecting facts first; then the students must document the evidence, which takes two to three days. The rest of the time is spent processing the information and forming a report, which is given at the end of the semester at a staged board meeting. Brickhouse then chooses to accept or reject the students’ findings, a decision which determines their final grades for the course.

“It’s so cool that they can set up this demo and let us experience it,” says Anne-Claire Blondeau, the student Investigator in Charge or IIC. She is a senior from France who has a Safety minor and plans to follow up with a Master in Safety. Her job in the simulation, along with Lindsey Martin, the Assistant IIC, is to “make sure everyone knows what they’re doing and that they do it.” Brickhouse says there is usually only one IIC but he wanted more management for this particular demonstration.

In order to make the simulation as realistic as possible, many other students get involved, including Communication students. In previous semesters, Brickhouse has been making use of Professor Steve Master’s COM 322 Aviation and Aerospace Communication students as representatives of the media who would typically be swarming an accident investigation site.

"My students need to learn how to interact with the media ...and answer certain questions but not others," says Brickhouse.

Real reporters on the scene of an accident sometimes overreact and can be deceptive, asking for off-the-record information, he says. This is how he asks the COM students to act so that his students can learn to deal with it. Official investigators would hope for the media to be respectful and try to stay in the middle ground on accident speculation.

This semester, the COM students who participated were Michael Julian and Bill McDonough. When these pseudo-reporters first showed up, they immediately started trying to find out what happened. They walked right up to the crash to see the details for themselves, but were quickly repelled by Brickhouse’s ERTSB, who must keep others from contaminating or destroying the evidence.

Then the COM students tried to ask questions of those who were ushering them away from the crash site, but all they got was “We are unable to take your questions at the moment. Please wait for the preliminary press conference.”

The ERTSB waited until they had completed their initial findings, which resulted in a very rough idea of the overall causes behind the crash, before they held their preliminary press conference. IIC Blondeau and another student investigator gave the pseudo-reporters the basic details and allowed them to ask questions.

As directed by Brickhouse, the COM students asked somewhat inappropriate or unanswerable questions to force the ERTSB investigators to respond as they would have to in real life.

“Isn’t it dangerous to have the school so close to an airport? Was this a publicity stunt? Were there drugs on board?” These were some of the questions asked by McDonough and Julian.

Although they would not actually be using their notes to write articles for a local newspaper or similar publication, McDonough did take the opportunity to use the simulation in an article for a web magazine assignment for Master’s class. The experience of interviewing the ERTSB was excellent practice for both COM students, despite the fact that the accident was staged.

The student investigators held a similar press conference at the end of the simulation, and they held others throughout the final weeks of the semester as they continued to determine exactly what happened in the crash and why.

Others who were involved in the simulation and the drawn out investigation included students Brickhouse has had in the past, who knew the process and wanted to help set up or play as witnesses, police, medical examiners, or fire and rescue workers. Also, the Riddle Players, ERAU's acting club, helped add to the reality of the simulation by playing distraught family members.

“Just as the investigation is great training for Brickhouse’s class, it is also great training for my students who might be sent out to cover such a disaster in their career,” said Master.

Reporters may have to deal with layers of bureaucracy as they try to get information from people who don’t want to give it, as the COM students did in the simulation. Master said they must have patience, know the right questions to ask and which not to ask, and look for other ways to get that information.