And, as an real-world example of something I am pondering this afternoon. It’s about whether / how to write about another macabre recent aviation-world event.

—This is the one that got a lot of attention especially in the DC area. A woman who was prominent in the tech-policy world died earlier this month, in what appeared to be an inflight-turbulence event. It was on a day that was exceptionally windy, and when several airliners encountered turbulence serious enough to force them to divert flights. Initial reports all said that this death was from turbulence. (In a small private jet.)

—But the NTSB just put out a “preliminary report” which, in its reading-between-the-lines way, made clear that this fatal accident had nothing to do with turbulence. The NTSB does not at this stage, in preliminary reports, use terms like “probable cause” or “pilot error,” but it lays out an almost incredible “accident chain” of decisions by the flight crew.

I wrote a lot over the past month about incidents of runway incursion, near-catastrophes, whether this showed a system breaking down, etc. I think this case is significant in that vein. And there is a news peg, in the form of an NTSB report that can be decoded for “normal” readers.

But because it’s gruesome, because I don’t want to sound like a mono-maniac cable-news “Peril in the Skies!!!” channel, because one can foresee litigation from this tragedy, I am weighing whether and how to say anything “in public.” My working plan is to do something just in the vein of “How to read an NTSB report,” which, as I say, would decode its language without asserting any conclusions.