Channel 9 are a pack of fucking idiots. While reporting on an aviation incident where a person died, they engaged in reckless behaviour against aviation regulations that could have caused their own incident.
This morning, a man fell from a hot air balloon and died in a northern suburb of Melbourne.
It's a tragedy.
It's under investigation by experts.
It's the responsibility of the pilot in charge to enforce passenger safety processes, so it's natural to wonder how the catastrophe happened.
Beyond that, we should not speculate on what happened.
Approximately an hour after the balloon landed, the Channel 9 helicopter arrived at the balloon's landing zone, and circled there for over an hour. For most of this time, they were at an altitude of just over 1000 feet. That's the legal minimum altitude over unpopulated ground for General Aviation. Over populated ground, the legal minimum altitude is 2000 feet. The helicopter pilot then departed the area and flew north-west to land at the airport. But, for that leg of the trip, they flew at a dangerously low altitude over heavily populated suburbs of Brunswick and Coburg.
Channel 9 has a video on their website with a reporter in the street in Preston. They interviewed a neighbour who said he heard sirens. The rest of their video is shot with a long lens and shows an SES tent from a long distance. There's about 10 seconds of aerial video of a balloon gondola packing-up in Yarra Bend Park. That's all they got but they're milking it hard for the drama and clicks. Stupid ghouls.
This is absolutely pissweak reporting, like something from "Frontline".
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