Flight 1549 praise is being over done.

Nobody claimed that to be the case.

I think we have bravado following bravado from billrm
here. Enough said, the pilot, the crew, and passengers got the job done.

See my postings once more on the history of ditching as it had been done. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I needed to touch down with the wings exactly level,” he said. “I needed to touch down with the nose slightly up. I needed to touch down at a " at a descent rate that was survivable. And I needed to touch down just above our minimum flying speed, but not below it. And I needed to make all these things happen simultaneous
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Nickfun do you in fact think that it some secret how to attempt a ditching?

The FAA book for new pilots in fact list all the elements to consider when ditching any aircraft and the manufacture of the plane also add in details such as the ditching switch on that model of airbus.

The good captain did a fine job however I would expect that skill set from any 100 thousands plus hours pilot now flying.

Perhaps you should send a letter of objection to the Guild of Air Pilots and Air Navigators and ask them to withdraw their Master's Medal award. Tell them it is an insult to all other aviators for the crew of that flight to be singled out for praise when all they did was what any other of the thousands of pilots in the New York area might have just as successfully accomplished in the same circumstances. Give them examples of it successfully being done before in the same location in freezing temperatures with no deaths and no major injuries.

Please be sure to share with us their response to you.



By the way, you are correct. There is an additional emotional factor with it having been in New York. The last time airliners were seen by the public flying that low in the heart of the city, it resulted in the 9/11 World Trade Center tragedies. Part of the exuberance is a mass celebration of that not being the case this time.

It doesn't however, alter the "George Bush" you are attempting here.

Heroes are very much in demand today, to give us hope for the future, to give us hope that we will see a better day, to give us hope that their are still people who are smart enough and brave enough to help us to get there.
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Hawkeye yes there is one hell of an emotional demand as shown here to have a hero.

In fact I kind of feel sorry for such people who are claiming here that if any other plane had been hit by birds and had lost their engines that would had been the end for them as only the hero have the skill and ability to ditch a plane in the Hudson and have everyone walk/swim away.

For myself I get more of an emotional boast knowing that there is not one man in a million that could save the day but ten of thousands of well train flight crews that if call upon could have save their planes in a similar manner.

The hero of the Hudson is not going to be flying the plane that will take me from Miami to Detroit in the next few days and then back for example. In fact because of his age he will shortly not be flying at all.

My faith is not in a hero but in the whole system of flight from the design of the planes to the training of the machanics and the flight crews so it does not concern me that he will not be at tehe controls.

You are even more stupid than your posts portray. NOBODY has claimed that no other pilot or crew could have done the same thing. The fact is... THIS pilot and crew did it.

not true, in the first 24 hours there was a lot of reporting that this pilot had been advised by controllers to land at a particular airport. This pilot ignored this advise and then did what he thought was best. There was a tone in the reporting that indicated that background sources had told journalists that they never would have ditch, that that would have done as advised. I can't prove this at the moment but as books come out I am confident that history will record that there is sound reason to believe that most pilots would not have not made the choices that this one did. The fact that he went against conventional wisdom has added to the hero worship edge post event.

The fact is the radio dialogue between the crew and the Departure controllers has been released. The initial report from the crew was of a bird strike, the loss of thrust on both engines and the expressed need to return to return to Laguardia. The controller responded giving runway availability. Quickly the crew responded saying they were "unable to make Laguardia" (understandable in that a gliding 210 degree turn takes lots of altitude that they didn't have) . The controller then responded recommending Teterboro airport and clearing their emergency approach to that field. The crew immediately responded "unable, we're going in to the Hudson". Only the plane's crew know how much thrust and potential energy they had - i.e., just how much gliding distance was available, and that situation was unfolding before their eyes very quickly. The controllers were doing all they could to make alternate airport landing sites available and known to the crew - whether the aircraft could make it to these runways was something they could not know.

The essential point is the crew handled the aircraft well, avoiding a stall or loss of control; and, in a rapidly evolving, dynamic situation, made and executed exactly the right choices at exactly the right moment. Just 20 seconds or so more headed northwest towards Teterboro would have left them overshooting the Hudson and without enough airspeed and altitude to make an S turn back to line up with the river.

I think the crew did a superlative job and deserve the acclaim they have received. Others, unburdened by any relevant knowledge or experience may think otherwise: a small few of them may even be in the grip of enough idiotic and juvenile self importance to actually argue otherwise. They deserve the derision they get.

I think that most pilots gut feeling is that you go for the closest runway, you don't consider ditching in water unless you are over the ocean. Have you seen any computer modeling that suggests that he could not have made it to tetroboro? Now that the guy is a hero nobody is going to claim otherwise, but we still don't know that he made the best call. We do I think know that he made an unpopular call.

Tnx for posting, George.

Shut up and listen to George.

I don't know George, and have no reason to suspect that he is a subject matter expert, so I respectfully decline. Pilots were on cable in the first 24 hours saying that they never would ditch in the water, my suspicions on what the majority of pilots would do has merit until proven otherwise.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_landing


At the above link there are definitions and statistics about aviation water landings since 1950. There are listings of three categories of water ditchings that give the specifics of the incident as well as the number and percentages of casualties. Below is my summary of it. Click the link for the specific details.



One lists survival rates of passenger plane water ditchings and says:

"In all cases where a passenger plane has undergone an intentional water landing or ditching, some or all of the occupants have survived. Examples of water landings in which passengers survived after a planned and intentional water landing after an in-flight emergency are:"

There are 11 such successful ditchings listed dating as far back as 1952. Only 4 of them had a 100% survival rate and that includes flight 1549. Those ditches resulted in 237 deaths.

Another list has the number of planes landing on water for other reasons and says:

"Aircraft also sometimes end up in water by running off the end of runways, landing in water short of the end of a runway, or even forcibly flown into the water during homicidal events. While such incidents are just as rare as water ditching and are not quite water landings, the passengers do find themselves swimming. Twice at LaGuardia Airport, aircraft have rolled into the East River."

There are another 11 such incidents cited since 1968 and only 5 of those state there was a 100% survival rate. Lost lives in those 11 incidents total 205.

Then there is the list of flights that crashed into water and explains the distinction this way:

"There is a distinction between a controlled ditching and simply crashing (not even crash-landing) into the water; the latter is capable of killing everyone upon impact and disintegrating the plane."

There are 7 such events listed. One of them had a 6% survivial rate and another had an 11% survival rate. The others resulted in 100% fatalities or 985 deaths.

According to the data in the lists, in the last 60 years there have been a total of 29 water landings by commercial passenger planes. Nine of them had 100% survival rates and 5 of them had 100% casualties. The others range somewhere in between.

The data speaks for itself. Flight 1549 with 100% survial is indeed a rare event in commercial aviation and the crew and emergency responders earn our praise.

Well, I know George. And I listen to his pov. Not that we never disagree - we often do, but, in this instance, I pay attention to him.

He is a subject matter expert.

You, Hawkeye, are not.

Cute, which urban center would they pick?

versus a nearly certain 100% survival rate if you make a runway.....I think there is good reason to not ditch if there is a reasonable chance of making the runway. How many feet was he at? with glide and the wind conditions would he have been able to get to the runway? If the answer is yes then he made a bad choice. Is this the reason he does not want to play the hero, because even though all lived he screwed up? We need to know these things, honestly, we don't want pilots in the future ditching because they are under the misunderstand that it is the right thing to do....and thus killing people.

So he aims for a runway with no power.

In LA, that covers hundreds of thousands of people. But this is New York that you'll be crashing into in x number of seconds in whatever alternate site.

To me, you have to be kidding.

Butrflynet I know it is pointless to used logic here as we need a hero however the conditions for ditching just happen to be ideal and that is not the case in most ditchings and that fact just might have a little something to do with a 100 percent survive rate instead of the captain being some superior human pilot.

It was a nice flat river landing with the plane being under complete flight control to start with and as a result the plane did not break up on landing, as it would had likely done so in an ocean landing for example or anywhere else where there was not a smooth surface.

The plane was state of the art even with a ditching switch so once landed in one piece it did not sink but floated like a cork and there was enough boat traffic within minutes of the plane to had taken aboard the whole crew and passengers list many times over.

The one or two passengers that somehow got themselves into the cold water was taken care of by rescue drivers that also arrived by helicopters within minutes of the plane ditching.

If the boats and the drivers had not been there the survive rate even in this ditching would not had been 100 percent as at least a few people would had die in the cold water.

All and all the Hudson off New York is one of the best placed in the world to be ditching an aircraft.

meant to nix hawk's post in my view.