The National Transportation Safety Board intern who erroneously confirmed the names of the four Asiana Airlines pilots in last week’s fatal crash has reportedly been fired, but the federal government is still recognizing him as a “very intelligent young man.”
After Oakland-based television station KTVU read out the erroneous names of the pilots aboard Flight 214, a blame game quickly ensued. KTVU blamed the NTSB for confirming the names of the pilots — and NTSB blamed the summer intern.
“Earlier today, in response to an inquiry from a media outlet, a summer intern acted outside the scope of his authority when he erroneously confirmed the names of the flight crew on the aircraft,” the agency said in a statement last week.
The official fate of the NTSB summer intern is still unknown, however.
Kelly Nantel, a spokeswoman for NTSB, refused to get into the details concerning the summer intern’s future, but CNN and NBC News both say his internship has come to a screeching halt. CNN cited a “government official with knowledge of the situation” as confirming that his internship with the agency has been terminated.
“I can’t get into details except to say that we are taking appropriate action,” Nantel told POLITICO. “It’s unfortunate because he’s a very intelligent young man who made a very big mistake.”
Despite the intern’s intelligence, Nantel claimed the young man was unaware of where the names came from and that they were fake.
“He should not have even been addressing the [station’s] question in the first place, but he did,” Nantel said in an interview, according to The Washington Post. “He made a very bad mistake and a bad judgment call, but it wasn’t a malicious thing. The news station read off a list of names to him [that] they said sounded right. And they shouldn’t have done that. And he shouldn’t have done that, but he did, and we’ve taken responsibility for it, and we’ve taken action to keep it from happening again.”
Asiana Airlines had considered taking legal action against KTVU and not the NTSB, since it was the station’s report, after all, which supposedly defamed the airline company, but announced Wednesday that it will not go through with it.
While it is still unclear where the offensive fake names originated — or how KTVU’s 120-person newsroom managed to miss the error before going live on the air — there is even more uncertainty surrounding the intern himself.
While the public still doesn’t known just who he is or if he has actually been fired from the NTSB, it can rest assured the federal government thinks he is one “very intelligent young man.”
This piece has been updated to include new information.
