The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
NOTE: James Taranto is on vacation. The excerpt below is from the January 16, 2009 BOTW archives.
An Expert Saves the Day
“Luck” is a funny concept. …
And boy, were they lucky!
Which of course they were, even if the rest of us were luckier not to have been so lucky. The Wall Street Journal explains how unlikely it was that everyone survived such a crash:
The pilots of US Airways Flight 1549 achieved one of the rarest and most technically challenging feats in commercial aviation: landing on water without fatalities.
Although commercial jetliners are equipped with life vests and inflatable slides, there have been few successful attempts at water landings during the jet age. Indeed, even though pilots go through the motions of learning to ditch a plane in water, the generally held belief is that such landings would almost certainly result in fatalities.
Capt. Chesley B. Sullenberger III, a veteran US Airways pilot, pulled it off while simultaneously coping with numerous other challenges.
In the minutes after takeoff, the pilot managed to maneuver past the skyscrapers of Manhattan and into the crowded Hudson River, even though the engines were disabled after apparently hitting a flock of geese.
Passengers said the plane was vibrating violently and the cabin began to fill with smoke. To reach its splashdown spot, witnesses said the jet glided over the George Washington Bridge before plopping into the water.
“The fact that passengers were able to walk off that airplane and wait on the wing for rescuers to arrive is remarkable. It’s amazing,” said aviation consultant Tommy McFall, a former airline pilot and retired accident investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board.
The BBC describes the complexity of the maneuver Sullenberger carried off:
Having made a mayday call and alerted the cabin crew, those in the cockpit must ensure the landing gear–wheels and undercarriage–is turned off to aid a smoother landing and prevent warning sirens sounding as the plane nears the ground. The air conditioning would also be turned off to allow cabin pressure to match that outside.
There is an overriding need to slow down the craft. If there is still power to the engines and a wind over 25 knots, a pilot would be expected to fly into the wind to assist slowing. Wing flaps would also be fully extended. If there is time a pilot would be expected to burn as much fuel as possible, reducing the weight of the plane and so increasing buoyancy when it hits the water. On this occasion, however, the engines had already cut out.
As the aircraft nears the water, the pilot must try to continue slowing while, crucially, ensuring it does not “stall.” In avionics the word has a different meaning to that in motoring, for example. Stall is an aerodynamic term which describes when wings lose their lift.
It’s a difficult balancing act.
“You don’t want to hit the water too quickly or the plane will break into pieces,” says first officer Tom Hanks of DHL, who flies Boeing 757s for the courier company.
Sullenberger seems to be an unusually good pilot, as well as an expert on air safety. In addition to flying for USAir, he is founder of a company called Safety Reliability Methods, which “was created to apply the latest advances in safety and high performance and high reliability processes to organizations in a variety of fields. Many of these advances have their genesis in the ultra-safe world of commercial aviation.”
His bio on the SRM Web site notes that he “has served as an instructor and Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA) safety chairman, accident investigator and national technical committee member,” that he “has participated in several USAF and National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) accident investigations,” and that “his ALPA safety work led to the development of a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Advisory Circular.”
What would we do without experts? A hundred fifty-four passengers and crew would have died. For Sullenberger, it wasn’t luck, it was skill.
And let’s hear three cheers for the military-industrial compex. As news of the crash was coming in–after we knew the water landing had succceeded but before we knew anything about Sullenberger–a savvy colleague emailed, “I wonder if the pilot is ex-military.” Indeed he is. He learned to fly in the 1970s at the U.S. Air Force Academy.
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