Monday 21 February 2011

Analysis, what analysis? No presenting all sides with Saj Ahmad

Saj Ahmad tries to portray himself as presenting praise and criticism of his subject matter. He labours under illusions that his readers fall for this pretence.

In fact, Ahmad not only isn't presenting objective analysis, but rather he routinely insert gratuitous and unnecessary cheap shots at programmes he doesn't like.

For example, his recent posting about the Boeing 747-8I roll-out. In his headlines, and right up front, he takes shots at the A380. This is completely unneeded but consistent with his well-known and long-running dislike for the A380, but rather the focusing on the 747-8I rollout, he inserts the babble about the A380.

Ahmad has often pointed out that Emirates Airlines is the largest customer for the A380 with something like 90 total orders now, out of about 300 total. In this, he is correct. But so what? Ahmad fails to acknowledge, or perhaps he does not know, or perhaps he does know but doesn't care, that the Emirates business plan expansion is built around the A380 as the key. Unless Ahmad believes that Emirates is going to go out of business, the airline is going to take all the airplanes.

He also picks on the A350 constantly. Another recent post does nothing but run down the airplane, including the claim that an A350 customer believes Airbus should drop the model. But in typical Ahmad fashion, he makes this sweeping statement with absolutely no supporting evidence and for all anyone knows he is making this up. If this were true statement, Ahmad should quote the airline and source so that readers could judge for themselves.

But Ahmad is famous for his anonymous statements. Long-time readers will see that about the only people he quotes directly as having talked to him are his buddies at Boeing. Quotes from Airbus, Bombardier, Pratt & Whitney, airlines and others are not identified as having been in an interview with him, but rather these are quotes in news articles readily available on the Internet. He weaves these quotes into his posts for credibility (and positions them as if he sourced them), but it there is no evidence to indicate he actually did any research to get them.

So as you read his writings, read them carefully to understand where he is--and is not--getting information contained in the posts. And then judge the credibility accordingly.

2 comments:

  1. Having spent several years reading Saj's comments I know exactly what you are talking about and could not agree more. In the fleetbuzz beginning he was the active moderator who constantly published articles from other sites as base for threads. Without failure it was Boeing is doing it right and the "jobs program" Airbus can't get anything right.

    There were several embarrassing statements with probably the worst after the Russian bank bought a couple of percent of EADS and he claimed EADS was forced to take money from the Russians to survive. Completely ignoring the money went to the people actually selling the shares on the stock exchange. He had several posts with those comments and got a couple more haters to join before that thing was stopped after questioning how the money actually got to EADS :)

    Don't want to make this too long so will just say that I look forward to see what happens next. May be nothing as both fleetbuzzeditorial and fleetbuzz are down.

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  2. Thank you for the information.

    Fact Checker.

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