"HERO PILOT saves the day by <professionally executing standard emergency procedures>" does seem to have become a news media trope.
"Military, and then decades of experience" has been mentioned for decades. But my fuzzy impression is it would be emphasized as it related to specific challenges of the event. That threshold seemed to drop over the years. The bizarre "hero" bit seems more recent, and perhaps increasingly common.
Spice for ambulance chasing. At least it raises the societal visibility of female military aviators. And of older women as professionally excellent.
I wonder if one might usefully engineer the addition of tropes to news media playbooks. Like "in an example of industry/profession/class groupthink/filterbubble, X said Y". Or "trade agreement section X came from industry Y because Z" - the TPP now vs TPP under US leadership diff would seemingly make for accessible storytelling, but there's been little.
> the NYT, was much the same.
My lifetime paper, but... the NYT is ok with ambulance chasing. And regrettably ok with sloppy emphasis.
Faced with 9/11, setting the tone for the nation, given a menu of options like "stiff upper lip", "carry on", "spirit of Mumbai", and "back to work", we got... something else. Pulitzer-prize-winning ambulance-chasing death fetish? I've wondered, at the time and since, how might the nation have responded, if offered something very vaguely like <diverse 1/3-immigrant new yorkers>: "We are New York - f'em - we can build 'em up faster than the f'ers can knock 'em down"? Oh well - an alternate timeline.
I wonder if one could get a "carry on" trope going. Instead of "this passenger is taking it in stride - drat - turn off the camera and seek dramatic emotions elsewhere", perhaps a "person demonstrating a stiff upper lip" could become one additional troped story component. Once one exists, it would be easier for it's relative emphasis to increase with time.