FlyCRJ.com

Thanks for coming back! I hope you are finding this information on flying and on the CRJ 200 useful. Be sure to sign up for email updates or my RSS feed.

I respect your email privacy. You can unsubscribe at any time!

What good aviation blogger hasn’t written a few words about the US Airways, Flight 1549?

As my wife and I were talking last night, she thought that I should write a few words about it, but from a different perspective. You see, we both agreed that what happened was both unfortunate…and terrific. Unfortunate because it happened. Nobody I know wants to see an accident happen. Terrific, because nobody was hurt.

You can attribute the success of emergency to a lot of different factors though. Yes, the captain did a great job. Yes, the first officer did a great job. Yes, the flight attendants did a great job! None of those are in question. But a lot of other things also went their way too.

Consider where this accident happened. New York. If ever there was an airline accident to happen this is the place for it to happen. New York is so triggered for things like this that their response to the accident was immediate! There is probably no other airport environment, other than D.C., that could have responded so quickly.

Consider the landing sight. The Hudson River. (You can see the flight track here.) As densely populated as New York is and the direction of flight on that particular day, the route of the flight during the emergency offered just about the most perfect place to land, all things considered. Minimum collateral damage if things go wrong. Easy access to the airplane for rescue. Granted, if the captain hadn’t landed the airplane so skillfully, the results might have been different but he landed the airplane in one piece.

If you remember the United Airlines Flight 232 Sioux City crash back in 1989 which had massive hydraulic failure. They landed near a runway, but things went wrong, and as a result there were massive fatalities. Fortunately though, and maybe a bit ironically, just days before, the airport had run an exercise to in the event of just such an accident which probably saved many lives that day.

What else went right?

Consider the weather. The weather was visual flight rules, i.e., VFR. So the crew could visually see out the cockpit window. As it has been so many times this winter with snow and limited visibility, just because they could see out their window greatly improved their chances of success. Now with this in mind, consider the two points above. Landing site. Location.

Finally…consider the experience of the crew. All were veterans. I think I read that the combined experience of the flight attendants was 54 years. I don’t know much about the captain or the first officer but I do know this…the captain had over 40 years experience flying. If he had just 20 years as a captain, that would mean that he had over 40 simulator rides where he had to deal with emergencies like engine failures, hydraulic failures, etc. He would have landed the airplane single engine each and every time and watched as the first officer landed the airplane single engine. The FAA mandates that we do it and the Airline Transport Pilot (ATP) Practical Test Standards states the requirements of the whole simulator ride. He had a lot of practice in emergencies. I dare to say, he probably didn’t have any water landings.

So, with that in mind, and considering the character and experience of the crew, you probably couldn’t have asked for a better crew and environment conditions to deal with such an emergency. If any one of the above had been different; the results might have been different. Thankfully, they weren’t.

My Thoughts

As my wife was dropping off our daughter at pre-school the other day, several of the moms asked my wife, knowing that her husband was a pilot, what she thought about the accident. She said that she really hadn’t thought about it much except that she knew that what I do can be dangerous but typically no more dangerous than driving down the road, usually. She also said she was extremely happy that there were no fatalities and that she hoped that it never happened again. She explained that if I had been the captain of that airplane, based on what she knows about my training and my personality, she thinks (and hopes) that I would have responded similarly. Who knows? I should hope so, but what it comes down to is that you don’t know EXACTLY how you will respond until it happens. I would never second-guess what the captain did because I was not there. I train for such events but again, until it happens, you don’t know if you will deal with it or cry like a little girl.

This I am pretty sure of this though, Captain Sullenberger was not going to give up. He was going to do whatever he and his crew could do until that last nano second of either successfully landing the airplane and saving his passengers or perish in the effort.

I often think, probably because I’ve been programmed through years of flight training, to consider what I would do if an emergency developed at any point in the flight. I’m sure Captain Sullenberger does as well, as well as his first officer. It’s a habit.

A Few More Thoughts

It has been over a week now since the accident and I’ve waited this long to write about it because I didn’t want to jump to any conclusions. If you notice, none of the crew have made comments or appeared in public (as of this writing) and I think that was the right thing to do.

There were a lot of unknowns that had to be answered first, like:

• What was the actual extent of the damage?
• What did the cockpit voice recorder have to say?
• What did the flight data recorder have to say?
• What did the training records of the flight crew have to say?
• What did the maintenance records of the airplane have to say?
• What was the physical condition of the crew?
• And probably many more…

But as it is developing, it seems that everything is in order, which I’m personally very happy about. Now, we can say that they did their job right! Are they heroes? Yes and no. I would bet that the crew, if you asked them, and when they finally speak, will say that they were just doing their jobs!

OK, now they are heroes!!!

Be safe…

Jeffrey

No related posts.