Looks like they hit a flock of geese. I'm watching it in my office right now. Looks like they got everyone off safely. I bet the hudson is a bit nipply this time of year!

props to the pilot, safe emergency landing.

I have never bought in to the "any landing that you walk away from is a good landing" philosophy, but in the case of an airliner making a water landing that you could swim away from, I may subscribe to the adequacy of such returns to earth.

I think it's safe to say that some "pilot shit" was done.

I'm curious how much thrust he had left when he put it in. Did the engines become total wing ornaments with the poultry meal? Or did he have something left? That guy did a great job of flying it all the way in.

I feel bad for birds everywhere, cuz you know Homeland is going after them.

After all this PR, the bad guys will start raising geese and turning them loose at the departure end of airports. What out for cattle trucks.

Bet it smelled like roast duck comin' out of the oven prior to touchdown. Good job to the pilots, kind of a big glider to coax in. Hope the company gives them a raise.

I think it was a tougher deal to do than setting a 182 down on I-80

Tim

dlhanst wrote:...Hope the company gives them a raise.

Probably retire him instead.

Seriously though, It is great to see that they had an old timer in the box office today.

gb

And, don't forget the REST of the crew on that airplane: First Officer and especially the Flight Attendants, who managed to get EVERYone out of that thing safely, and with only minor injuries.

The landing was an absolute piece of work, but getting 150 passengers out of there without badly hurting anyone is almost a miracle.

Good work to the whole crew!

MTV

I don't know how far it was from the runway to where they landed in the river. Either the CFM's were producing some or the pilot was in charge of one lousy glider.

In either case he and the flight crew certainly earned their keep today. Got it down, kept it upright, and got everyone out.

I am not that familiar with the New York area but I seem to remember that there are not a lot of places to put an A320 that would not only killed everyone on board but lots of folks on the ground.

TD

Honorary BCP off-airport award nomination for Captain Sully

Talk about a picture perfect water landing. Airbus makes a fine boat

And I always thought ditching the stinson wouldn't work out so good.

TomD wrote:I don't know how far it was from the runway to where they landed in the river. Either the CFM's were producing some or the pilot was in charge of one lousy glider.

In either case he and the flight crew certainly earned their keep today. Got it down, kept it upright, and got everyone out.

I am not that familiar with the New York area but I seem to remember that there are not a lot of places to put an A320 that would not only killed everyone on board but lots of folks on the ground.

TD

Tom,

Having flown this departure scores of times, I can attest that there is no where to ditch an airliner other than in the water.

It was probably about 15-20 miles of flight..... from departure to the water landing. From all appearances and the pilots ATC comments....both engines were flamed out by the bird strikes. Early "reports" suggest that they hit the birds about 35 seconds after lift off but managed to obtain an altitude of roughly 3,000 ft.

Departing from Orlando Fla. I once hit a flock of sea gulls, destroying the left engine on a B-757. The engine continued to produce "some" thrust for a few seconds..... as we returned for a single engine landing.

Most airliners will glide aprox. 3 miles, without engine thrust, for each thousand feet of altitude. No doubt the captain was flying a glider the last few minutes of the flight. He performed perfectly, as all airline pilots are trained to do, managing to dodge the bridges that cross the Hudson river. Keeping the wings perfectly level and touching down in a proper flare were necessary for a successful ditching.

The flight attendants did a masterful job of evacuating the passengers. What good fortune and excellent response by the ferry boats and their crews. A terrible choice of crash landing/ditching locations quickly became "the perfect place to ditch."

Professional behavior on behalf of all .....into whose hands we often place our lives.

Bob

p.s. The B-767 which tried to ditch in the Canary Islands a few years back, hit the water with the right wing first, causing it to cartwheel amid great loss of life.

His engines were flamed out due to fuel exhaustion. Under those circumstance the B-767 controls recieve their hydrolic power from a small impellor/propellor powered motor/pump which is lowered from the belly, and is powered by the slipstream. Airspeed must be kept at a minimum of 130 kts. or the RAT (ram air turbine)will not provide adequate hydrolic power.

The captain, in this instance, allowed the airspeed to bleed off below 130 knots, as he approached splash down...thus losing control and impacting the water wing low.

Great job by the crew on the Aquabus.

As I recall the 767 ditching that cartwheeled on landing the captain was having a fistfight with the hijacker during the landing. That didn't help matters much. Also, many people died in that crash because the procedure at the time was to inflate one chamber of your vest as you were preparing for the ditching. The result was that when the plane sank the passengers were pinned up at the top of the wreckage (those that were still in the wreckage) and unable to swim against the buoyancy of the life vest. So lots of folks that survived the impact drowned. That crash investigation resulted in the new procedure to only inflate after you exit the aircraft.

The 57-year-old Sullenberger, from Danville, Calif., is a 29-year US Airways veteran and a former U.S. Air Forcer fighter pilot who flew F-4 aircraft. He is president of Safety Reliability Methods, a California safety consulting firm.

I'm thinking his consulting firm is about to receive a spike in business. If US Air is smart they will do no less than make him a national spokesman for aviation safety. But you never know, they may fire him.

Hats off to him. Unless the investigation turns up that it was actually the co-pilot that landed the plane in the water, Mr. Chesley Sullenberger is, in fact, THE man.

Borrowed from another forum. The track isn't perfect but close.

http://www.pilotsofamerica.com/forum/at ... 1232058071

I spoke with a United captain friend of mine earlier today. His observations:

1) Very fortunate that it was only bound to SC. If it had been bound for, say, Phoenix, the additional fuel on board would have caused it to sink a lot faster.

2) Gear and engines are designed to shear at a lower resistance than truly indispensable parts such as wings and empenage. Not sure if the engines stayed with the plane upon ditching, but if it was brought in sufficiently nose-high, they may have.

<on edit> It sounds like both the engines did shear off, so I guess the design engineering worked as intended.

I see a lot of news reports are calling this a CRASH landing. I would like to think they made a very successful emergency landing. If you look the word crash up in the dictionary it doesn't sound like what happened on the Hudson.

Bob