Mea Culpa: Round we go again

Susanna Richards takes a trip through last week’s errors and omissions

A Southwest 737 flying in what looks to me like a straight line (Getty)

Obviously here at The Independent we do not rest, but at Christmas there may be slightly fewer of us not resting than usual, and concomitantly, slightly more might go wrong. Thus I was braced for a winter storm of letters this week, and have not been disappointed, though I suppose it means there is more to write about.

Our coverage of the terrible weather in North America has been both compelling and frightening to read, but in our eagerness to convey vividly the events of the past week, we have been a little careless in other respects. Henry Peacock noted a series of errors in one report, including the part where we mentioned Southwest Airlines’ unique business strategy “in which staff and aircraft rotate fly continually between smaller regional airports”.

The image of a plane going round in circles while its crew perform pirouettes in the aisle is wonderful, but that isn’t what it means. In aviation, rotation is a thing, and not just in the context of taking off. Basically, it describes the logistics of operating a fleet of aircraft between different bases. I suspect we intended to use one word or the other and left them both in by mistake, but in these instances it is usually best to use a familiar term; we don’t want our readers to have to go and look things up. Thus “fly” would have covered it.