Flying's gotten safer - and less reported on. Washington crash shows how the aviation beat is fading

Summoned from his couch to cover last week's plane disaster in Washington, CNN's Pete Muntean rushed in for the first of 24 live reports over the next 48 hours. At one point, he used a model airplane and helicopter to demonstrate. At another, he called President Trump “unhinged” for speculating that diversity in hiring contributed to the crash. Even regular viewers may have wondered: Who is Pete Muntean, anyway? As CNN's aviation correspondent and a pilot who has flown near where the collision that killed 67 people took place, Muntean illustrates the changes in what used to be an important specialty in journalism. Precise numbers are hard to come by. But simply by the content out there, there are fewer reporters concentrating solely on what is a complex and technical beat, both because of how the business has changed and the relative safety of flying. “I realized that planes weren't crashing and I needed a new beat,” said Bill Adair, a former reporter who wrote a book, “The Mystery of Flight 427: Inside a Crash Investigation,” about a 1994 plane crash in western Pennsylvania that killed 132 people. “That's a good thing.” Adair switched to politics, and later created the fact-checking website PolitiFact. Story has more.<br/>