I apologize for the headline, but it’s a fairly common trait among aviation people to be a little callous about airline crashes. I admit that I’d be far less so if I were personally involved, and I hope no one is deeply offended.

Last month, a Turkish airlines 737-800 crashed on approach to Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport. The cause of the crash, until recently, was somewhat puzzling. Reuters reported on Wednesday that Dutch investigators have now determined the cause of the crash.

As the aircraft passed through 2,000 feet on an approach flown by the autopilot, there was an apparent malfunction of one of the aircraft’s two radio altimeters, which judge its height above ground. The left instrument indicated -8 feet (8 feet below ground) and happened to also be the instrument the autopilot was using.

This erroneous signal caused the autopilot to reduce power to idle and begin a flare, believing that it was at touchdown when in reality it was still nearly two thousand feet in the air. The plane assumed an extreme nose-up attitude, stalled, and struck the ground tail first. The rest of the aircraft then pancaked into the ground, killing 9 of the 134 souls on board and seriously injuring 28 more.

Why didn’t the crew cross-check their altimeters during the approach? Why didn’t they notice the throttles being retarded to idle at altitude? All of the flight crew were among the dead, so we will perhaps never know. The aircraft’s flight data recorder, which contained data from the plane’s last eight flights, showed that the same altimeter had malfunctioned on two previous approaches and that the crew had successfully recovered in each instance.

I know that it’s very, very wrong to find humor in a situation like this, but I was unable to prevent the image from entering my head. I was always a big fan of the sitcom, “WKRP in Cincinnati,” because in my radio career I met at least one of every character created for that show. The show’s most famous and highest-rated episode featured a Thanksgiving promotion that went horribly wrong, and when I saw this Turkish 737 smashed on the ground on national TV, in my mind’s eyes and ears stood Arthur Carlson in tattered clothes, breathlessly saying,

“As God is my witness, I thought Turkish could fly.”