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Comment by dingaling | Hacker News Reader

WW2 era? What a load of rubbish, just because it has a propellor. The basic Tucano first flew in 1980.

By the same yardstick I assume Vice thinks a helicopter is da Vinci era?

The turboprop ( geared propellor driven by a jet engine ) is still the most efficient means of aviation propulsion devised; it surpassed internal-combustion engines in efficiency in the early 1960s, with the Turboméca Astazou, and continued to improve.

Turboprops fall-off in efficiency with altitude and speed, but below around 20,000 ft and 400 kts they're the champions.

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Typically in the news process the copyeditor chooses or edits the title of the piece for brevity and "punch."

By saying "WWII-era," the title very succinctly sums up the idea that "hey, there's this interesting airplane that's been in the works alongside the very expensive F-35, but it's actually much cheaper and much less technologically advanced, but actually much better suited for the war in Afghanistan--and it resembles the types of fighter planes that you've seen in 'Pearl Harbor' and 'Saving Private Ryan'."

The title is meant to convey as much information to the audience (a general, non-technical audience) in as few words as possible, and it mostly does its job.

If you read the article, it's clear that the authors understand the difference.

I think dingaling's point is that the headline is clickbait.

Headlines have been written to grab your immediate attention and want to read further since newspapers have been in print. If that makes it "clickbait", its usually only clickbait when the headline over promises or leads with some climatic note and under delivers, like "That one weird trick to losing weight" turns out its called limiting calorie consumption and exercise or "A guy was walking down the street, you won't believe what happens next", which turns out I do and what happens is only mildly interesting or the buzzfeed "12 things on a list of things on how to do something, 11 of which you already know about and the 12th not being very effective"

The editor was trying to convey as much info within the given length as they could. They didn't realize that it would result in a title that was also clickbait. Remember, never blame malice where stupidity will suffice.

(P.S. Of course it was click bait and purposefully done so, there is an art to creating clickbait headlines that can be defended as not being clickbait.)

Do you actually have a line of communication to the editor or are you guessing?

Direct line of communication. But they could still be lying, so I guess I should say it was a guess.

Actually, I got a psychic to get me direct access to their brain, so I'm sure they aren't lying. But they could be incorrectly remembering it. So we still can't be certain. For it to be 100% not a guess, I'm going to need to get go back in time with my time machine and have the psychic come with me, but he is saying something about how that could cause problems.

So sadly we are stuck just inferring (guessing) with the information given.

> By saying "WWII-era," the title very succinctly sums up the idea that "hey, there's this interesting airplane that's been in the works alongside the very expensive F-35, but it's actually much cheaper and much less technologically advanced, but actually much better suited for the war in Afghanistan--and it resembles the types of fighter planes that you've seen in 'Pearl Harbor' and 'Saving Private Ryan'."

Yes but its inaccurate. Cold war era would get the point across just fine.

I don't think "Cold war era" would get the point across. To me, "Cold war" is associated with expensive high-tech planes like the SR-71 and the B-2. I think most people would think of planes like these when you say "Cold war era".

To say that the plane is "WWII era" when it is not, is simply incorrect. I don't understand how it would be considered acceptable practice to state something that is misleading and untrue for effect. If it is a clear exaggeration then maybe you could argue hyperbole, but I think that this is just a poorly-researched article.

No way can this be considered hyperbole. It's just 100% totally wrong.

It's obviously mostly a linkbait title, but to be fair to it it's a reference to most WWII planes using propellers, as opposed to the jet planes of today. They're not claiming the Tucano was literally designed in the 40s.

The title is claiming exactly that. If it's not what they meant then they should have chosen a better title.

Clickbaits suck, but they work. Up to mods to filter them

The editor was probably confusing the A-29 Super Tucano with the A-29 Hudson, which really was WWII era.

I was wondering the same thing. The first thing I did was look up the Tucano on Wikipedia and I couldn't find anything about WW2.

When I saw the headline picture of A29, it reminded me of P51 Mustang. So maybe the author was thinking somewhere in that area.

Re 1980:

True, that's nearly too young even to properly qualify as space age.

Yeah just check out that picture of the clearly WW2 era all glass cockpit.

It has a freaking digital attitude indicator!

While this plane oviously isn't WW2 era, the glass cockpit says nothing. There are plenty J3 cubs, planes WW2 pilots learned to fly on, still out there today... and many of them have glass cockpits w/ gps and all the goodies. Airframes last a logn time when taken care of, and swapping panels is trivial...

The glass cockpit per se says nothing. All the rest does, though. http://www.aereo.jor.br/wp-content/uploads//2011/06/Cockpit-...

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