Romney Rumor: Romney Thinks Airplane Windows Should Open

Oh, my, this was popular yesterday.  See, eg, the LA Times:

“I appreciate the fact that she is on the ground, safe and sound. And I don’t think she knows just how worried some of us were,” Romney said. “When you have a fire in an aircraft, there’s no place to go, exactly, there’s no — and you can’t find any oxygen from outside the aircraft to get in the aircraft, because the windows don’t open. I don’t know why they don’t do that. It’s a real problem. So it’s very dangerous. And she was choking and rubbing her eyes. Fortunately, there was enough oxygen for the pilot and copilot to make a safe landing in Denver. But she’s safe and sound.”

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Huffington Post:

Making post-fundraiser comments this weekend, presidential candidate Mitt Romney revealed a tenuous grip on the science of aviation, despite the fact that he and his wife, Ann, have been flying around the country this summer on the campaign trail.

After his wife’s plane was forced to make an emergency landing this weekend,Romney told the Los Angeles Times, he was worried for her safety. The candidate then continued on a bizarre tangent that showed just how little the Republican nominee understands about flight.

“I appreciate the fact that she is on the ground, safe and sound. And I don’t think she knows just how worried some of us were,” Romney told the paper. “When you have a fire in an aircraft, there’s no place to go, exactly.”

HuffPo added an update to the same article:

UPDATE: He was for rolling down airplane windows before he was against it.

Mitt Romney gave the Internet — and Rachel Maddow — a chuckle Monday after post-fundraiser comments that appeared to show the candidate has a tenuous grasp on the physics of flight.

But after Mitt Romney was quoted as saying that airplane windows “don’t open. I don’t know why they don’t do that,” a campaign pool reporter says the candidate was joking.

Ashley Parker, a New York Times reporter who filed on the comments, tells New Yorkmagazine that “it was clear from the context that he was not being serious.”

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Dan Amira at New York magazine did a little fact checking and found (emphasis mine):

The Los Angeles Times story that relayed Romney’s airplane remark to the world was based off a pool report written by the New York Times‘s Ashley Parker. When we asked Parker this morning whether it seemed as if Romney made the mark in jest, she left no doubt. “Romney was joking,” she e-mailed. Parker told us that while the pool report didn’t explicitly indicate that Romney was joking, it was self-evident that he was. “The pool report provided the full transcript of his comments on Ann’s plane scare,” she said, “and it was clear from the context that he was not being serious.”

 

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