Talk:Eastern Air Lines Flight 512

Readable newspaper citations (not NY Times subscriber-only)

This article is on my watchlist, so the recent activity caught my eye. I noticed that all of the citations, other than the CAB accident report, are subscriber-only NY Times links. At the moment I can't read any of them because I've already reached my NY Times free article limit; what that limit is, and how often it's reset, I don't know. As a friendly suggestion, Google Books advanced search ( https://books.google.com/advanced_book_search?hl=en ) can find dozens of relevant newspaper articles that are fully-readable to anyone. For this crash, this link would accomplish this...

https://www.google.com/search?tbo=p&tbm=bks&q=eastern+%22new+york%22+crash&tbs=,bkt:s,cdr:1,cd_min:Nov+1_2+1962,cd_max:Dec+31_2+1963&num=100

Yes, I know it's a lot more work to dig out the nuggets of information this way. I speak from experience. When I got a GA years ago for United Airlines Flight 736 I didn't even have a copy of the official CAB report to work with; it was missing from all the government archives for unknown reasons, and when I last checked, it STILL is. So, with no report, I simply had no option but to dive into a lot of online newspaper and magazine articles, and I found a treasure trove of information via court cases at openjurist.org and other similar sites.

The CAB report finally surfaced online years later. but it was buried in a compendium of other CAB reports that a fellow wikipedian stumbled upon at Google books. He put the compendium link on the talk page (I had asked for help finding the report there), and I extracted the report I needed. I then posted it online in a page-by-page format that doesn't require any PDF download to read. Also, the page number can be addressed directly in a url. I've slowly been incorporating the report contents into the United Airlines Flight 736 article over time.

Today I've uploaded the Eastern Flight 512 accident report into the page-accessible format, in case anyone working on the article finds it useful to assist readers desiring quick access to specific page numbers via cites...

https://archive.org/details/cab-aar-1962-11-30-eastern-512/mode/2up

To access page 15 directly, for example, use:

https://archive.org/details/cab-aar-1962-11-30-eastern-512/page/n15/mode/2up

It's not necessary, of course, to incorporate any of this into the article, but I figured it can't hurt to mention alternate ways of providing sources that any article reader can verify for themselves, without subscriptions or downloads. Thanks for taking the time to read this. Regards, Itsfullofstars (talk) 05:33, 20 July 2021 (UTC)

Yes, it's a challenge. My county library system gives out free one-day NY Times subscriptions through its website to cardholders, so it's easily accessible to me. But we run into the same thing with the other articles of incidents from this era; if I source the newspapers through newspapers.com, for example they're easily readable to readers who have subscriptions to that site, but not so accessible to people who don't. I tend to think of having the online access as more of a bonus anyway. It's just digitized versions of the print newspapers, many of which can be read at a decently-supplied local library on microfiche/microfilm. Whenever possible, I try to use major newspapers that are more likely to be available through multiple sources. Thanks for the feedback. RecycledPixels (talk) 05:42, 20 July 2021 (UTC)

Also, regarding the accident report... when you use the link provided in the article, it takes you to a page that has an OCR version of the accident report, but there's a little Adobe PDF icon at the top of the window (not terribly obvious, I kept missing it when I was looking at it earlier today) that loads the digitized scans of the original pages, with page numbers. But the site doesn't let me link the PDF version directly. RecycledPixels (talk) 05:56, 20 July 2021 (UTC)