I hope all of my readers appreciate the stunning skill displayed this week by Captain Chesley Sullenberger, pilot of the ill fated US Airways flight 1549 that ditched into the Hudson River earlier this week.
This is the first time in aviation history that a commercial airliner has made a "water landing" and survived in tact. It was a remarkable piece of flying, because Sullenberger needed to put that plane into the water absolutely horizontal from wingtip to wingtip. Just a few degrees out, and one side of the plane would have hit the water before the other, creating draq and torque that would have turned the plane sideways, flipped it over and smashed it into very small pieces. Just look at what happened to Ethiopian Airlines flight 961 which ditched into the Indian Ocean near a beach in Cormoros in 1996, killing 125 of the 175 people on board.
That could easily have been the outcome on the Hudson this week, if not for the exceptional skill of Captain Sullenberger.
Footnote: At the bottom of a report on the crash in the Sydney Morning Herald today were the usual Googleads, this time spruiking "Fear of Flying" courses.
1 comment:
I don't know anything about flying, but that was my thought too. Landing a jet with no engine power completely horizontal like that is amazing! That guy makes Top Gun look like kids' play.
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