If you ever want to read some great airline conspiracy theories rumors over your smoke break, check out the Professional Pilots rUmor network or PPrUne.
This forum is home to a community of airline enthusiasts and professionals alike and you’ll find a great deal of data about any sort of mishap or news in the aviation world discussed among their threads.
It’s also kind of creepy finding out a pilot’s interpretation of some of the hijinks that the airlines downplay. As metafilter blogs, initial reports of “vibration in the No. 2 engine” by the FAA were later decrypted as “uncontained engine failure” by the community. It’s great that when Dateline NBC and 60 Minutes aren’t out there scaring our pants off, PPrUne can step in and do the job when needed.
I mostly tease. The PPrUne has always been a great resource for me when I need to learn more about the happenings among the airline folk, and I love their members dearly. Make sure you take the posts with a grain of salt though; as the forum title states, it is the Professional Pilots Rumor Network. Think hard about the statistics of airline safety and performance before you fly (pun!) off the handle and put your aluminum helmet on.