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A magnificent bit of piloting I am sure many of you have by now heard the coverage about the airplane crash into waters off of La Guardia airport in New York.
What I have not heard yet are comments on the fine piloting it took to grease a rather good size metal bird into the water. The pilot could not have had many minutes to think about his options, and yet as far as I can see, he did everything flawlessly.
I just want you all to ponder what it takes to bring a commercial transport of that size down on the water, in one piece, floating and with all your passengers alive.
The pilot and co-pilot of this flight deserve all of the applause we can give them and a heart felt thank you from all the passengers and their families.
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I’ve seen footage of quite a few large planes trying to ditch in the water, and they always, always break the fuselage.
I always used to laugh at the picture on the safety announcement of people walking onto the wings of an intact, floating plane, yet there they were.
Incredible.
Intrigued to know quite how he handled it; initial reports seem to suggest he flared right up just before touching the water; I suppose if you get your timing just right you stall without being too high up and just flop into the water.
(or she, obviously)
I might note that I will be flying from SFO to JFK tonight after working a job here for the last week. Unfortuneately the landing pattern for JFK will take me no where near where I could get an aerial photo of the plane sitting in the water, assuming they have it in shallows for recovery.
Clearly all praise is due to the pilot, and also to the people who quickly mobilised the various boats that carried the passengers ashore.
From reports, it seems that the A320 flew into a flock of geese, and collisions with the geese caused the failure of both engines. Assuming this is what happened, can anyone think of any other incidents where a twin jet has lost both engines due to bird strikes? I can’t think of any, but that just might be ignorance on my part.
Congrats to the pilot, for saving the lives of his or her charges.
The last sentence caught my eye:
They are anticipating a legitimate question I suppose, but, this is starting to resemble the ‘everything looks like a nail to a hammer’ syndrome.
Initial reports are that they were Canada geese though.
How high will the northern fence have to be?
These would be Canada geese, I presume.
More evidence for the need of a secure Northern border. With a REALLY high fence.
congratulations to a pilot who managed to manoever in congested airspace with few options and very little time.
The pilot and co-pilot of this flight deserve all of the applause we can give them and a heart felt thank you from all the passengers and their families.
We should give them a chance to change their shorts before the celebration starts.
Mayor Bloomberg was quick to praise the pilots.
Tail of this plane was briefly visible from our office’s windows. Stunning work on pilots’ part. Equally amazing rescue response – fire & police departments were there instantly. Privately owned ferries, aka “river taxies” rushed to pick up stranded passengers, as this is not a day to be wet in Hudson River ( polar temps). No serious injuries, everyone’s safe in NY & NJ hospitals. Not a miracle as some say, but a result of professional conduct of many.
The praise for the crew is now starting to roll in (and rightly so).
See (eg) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7832439.stm .
Actually, it wasn’t really a plane. It was a missile, surrounded by a hologram to look like a plane. Those people on the news – they’re all actors. Don’t you find it suspicious that there are so many Jews there?
Also, if you look at the pictures in the water, it’s not a real plane. It clearly has missing ailerons from the wing so COULD NOT POSSIBLY HAVE FLOWN. And there’s no way emergency services could have been there so quickly – they must have known.
This was done to, erm, not sure why but someone will think of something…
Mr. Jennings:
“can anyone think of any other incidents where a twin jet has lost both engines due to bird strikes?”
Both of two engines, or more than one of 3 or 4 will have a similar effect. On September 22, 1995, an Air Force E-3B AWACS (a 707 with the AWACS dome on it) encountered a flock of Canada Geese at Elmendorf AFB, Anchorage. Loss of Number One, catastrophic failure of Number Two engine, and the plane only reached about 250 feet of altitude. Resulting crash claimed 24 lives.
And while we are thanking the pilots for an outstanding job, we should remember that in an emergency we do what we practiced in training. Every year they probably spend a week or two back in the simulators, and engine-out procedures are ALWAYS on the agenda! Still, the training would be worthless without the quick thinking and reactions of a pair of top-notch pilots. I hope USAir remembers to thank them.
Brian (FlyingPig)
Wait until y’all read about the background of “Sully,”
who does NTSB work, is himself a trainer for such events.
Seconded, absolutely brilliant work by those guys, all possible praise to them.
Isn’t it odd how we never read that there are not enough ethnic minorities or gender-of-your-choice or whatever, among airline pilots?
blue badge abuser, hehehe
Slightly O/T, my father was one of the very few Fleet Air Arm pilots who made it all the way through the Second World War (98% death rate I believe). Both engines failing soon after takeoff was one of the many near death experiences he survived, although he was lucky to have been taking off from a shore strip rather than a carrier on this occasion.
“Spot landing” on the Arctic convoys consisted in touching down with the nose in front of a line on the deck and the tail the other side, with the deck pitching by up to 50 feet. Miss, and you were dead. Make it, and you spent your spare time in the biggest submarine target for a thousand miles. No reliable radio or radar – you could hear someone doing torpedo practice off Iceland but not the carrier 15 miles away, which made a fog a bit of a problem.
In the late 50’s, when I was about 5, he retook his pilot’s licence – then never flew again. At the time I didn’t understood but later I tipped my hat to the old boy. Good for him!
“And while we are thanking the pilots for an outstanding job, we should remember that in an emergency we do what we practiced in training.”
I was once flying with a friend of mine in his Grumman Yankee. He was annunciating his panel scan, and then verbally made a note about a road, on scanning out the window. I understood why he did that, and commented, asking, “Could you really hit that road if you had to?”
“Oops,” he said as he cut the throttle to idle: “Engine out.”
This was before I started flying and could understand how to set up an approach like that. As he’s going into his base leg, he’s explaining to me that drills and checklists are all fine, but you’re never going to really know what you can do until you put the wheels down. And that’s what he did. We rolled along that country road for about three hundred yards before he put power back on the airplane and we flew away.
A line pilot explained on MSNBC yesterday that while they have checklists for ditching, they usually think about them in a context of, say, a fuel leak over the north Atlantic, in some kind of scene where you’ll have twenty minutes to set it all up and everything’s properly in the bag at touchdown. It’s not something that most pilots keep in mind for an episode where they’ll have 180 seconds to put everything in order.
The pilot on this flight came from USAF F-4’s. That’s the jet that taught us that with enough power, you can make a brick fly. That means he knows energy management, and that’s exactly the cat you want in that left front seat on a day like that. They say that he made the George Washington Bridge with only nine hundred feet under him. And he’s maneuvering through the Hudson River VFR Flyway without power. That’s an amazing thing all by itself, even before we get to the part where his jet didn’t become a full yard-sale tumble on impact.
Really splendid work. God bless ’em all.
Well, a dead-stick landing is never fun. A dead-stick landing into a river…
I have flown USAir before. I most certainly will again.
Also praise is due to the FAs for getting everyone off in rather unusual circumstances…
The A-320 is fly by wire, if I remember correctly.
How do you dead-stick that one without engine
generated electricity for the computers/hydraulic pumps.
Batteries ????
This case doesn’t count and the crew deserves much praise but several A-320’s have been lost because of what was claimed to be pilot error but I have long suspected it was more to do with ‘cute’ aeronautical engineering. ( computers & FBW ). To the point that
I WILL NOT get on an A-320 AT ALL – even if I have to eat the ticket !!!
As to engines out, again, if I remember correctly, a 747 lost all 4 (!!!!) over the Pacific several years ago due to volcanic ash literally ‘snuffing’ out the engines one by one.
Crew was able to get them restarted before the worst happened.
Even Fly-By-Wire control system requires a full redundant back up system for this very real situation.
Suppose the plane had been equipped with 4 engines, same power in total. The engines would have been smaller than the existing two. There would have been more drag, slightly higher fuel consumption, higher maintenance costs and increased maintenance times. All good reasons for using two instead of four engines. But with four engines there is a chance that all four would not have been wiped out in the bird strike. What is the overall aircraft lifetime costing, two engines against four, when the cost of replacing the plane is added into the equation?
Nick M
There are dead stick landings and dead stick landings. From 500 feet, with the low stall speeds and gliding characteristics of the time, not bad IMHO.
If you want another anecdote, late in the war Dad was flying transport duty for the navy in a de Havilland Rapide (any relation, Perry?), in a squadron with the reputation of flying when the ducks walked (pilot’s call, of course). One flight was fogbound and with less than 10 minutes fuel left he at last saw a beach (Dungeness I think) and landed, all passengers being told to run like hell.
A bit later, in the air raid/Home Guard/whatever hut, he was given a blanket and a cup of tea and the comment that he was “Very lucky mate”. “Absolutely, I thought we were goners. I couldn’t land with the undercarriage down or we would have cartwheeled, so I had to pancake.” “Not what I meant. You were very, very lucky – see those things stacked up by the wall?” “Yes.” “Well those are the mines we took out of the beach last week.”
Another of my WW2 favourites comes from the funeral eulogy of one of my godfathers, who did his pilot’s training in Canada. Apparently he once had to land backwards, because the wind speed exceeded the slow flight speed of his plane. Bet they don’t sim for that.
Sincerely, all credit to the pilots at La Guardia. But without detracting from them, to those of my age who listened, there were a great number of wonderful stories from before the days of ‘elf and safety and modern technology and these were events which were shrugged off routinely as “shit happens” by a past, or rather finally passing, generation, rather than as heroism. Well done them, I say.
Since one of the purposes of these threads is to entertain as well as discuss, my most valuable source of old tales was an ancient buffer who lit up after a few glasses of sherry at one of my parents’ drinks parties. He had been one of the so-called “war babies” who went off to WW1 from Dartmouth Royal Naval College at the age of 15. He was in Turkey at the fall of the Ottoman Empire and was on a train the navy fitted out with 4-inch guns to go hunting “this man Ataturk” across Anatolia. Demmed nearly got him. Bought a sable coat in the market in Istanbul in 1918. Stopped in 1931, after several years abroad, for not halting at a red traffic light (invented since he was last in the UK): “Officer, I haven’t stopped at a red light since Port Said in 1921.” And many other gems.
All hail the heroes, and heroines, of whatever generation.
“The A-320 is fly by wire, if I remember correctly.
How do you dead-stick that one without engine
generated electricity for the computers/hydraulic pumps.
Batteries ????”
It’s called a RAT: “Ram-Air Turbine”. It’s a little propeller gag that drops out of the fuselage on an arm and it drives a generator for auxiliary power.
I’m still pretty impressed with the Airbus myself, given the bad press the A3XX series have had over the years it was more impressive than the 767 in the incident in Jakarta (I think that was it).
This case doesn’t count and the crew deserves much praise but several A-320’s have been lost because of what was claimed to be pilot error but I have long suspected it was more to do with ‘cute’ aeronautical engineering.
There have been several CFTs (Controlled Flight into Terrain aka crashes) with the Airbus Fly by Wire control system. Several of the early ones were due to problems in the flight control system, i.e. repeats of the Paris Airshow crash where the flight computer assumed the landing profile and refused to allow throttle up after the fly by.
After that Airbus put in place changes to the FBW systems to allow for instant over ride of the flight control system. After that, I can think of 2-3 repeat performances which were put down to pilot error because the crash investigations showed that even though the pilot had been trained on the flight operations, they didn’t over-ride the flight computer even when warnings were given.
That sort of failure/crash has become pretty rare now as pilots have logged more hours in Airbus and have got used to them.
To be honest I’m more worried getting onto an elderly MD-8X series aircraft or an older 747-400 than I am on an A320.
The 747 volcano incident is described here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Airways_Flight_9)
You want to see how an Airbus can handle problems with the right pilot (http://tinyurl.com/26hcoa) – really really glad I wasn’t on that one.
blue badge abuser, it’s all because we’re at war:
http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/alevy/2009/01/15/if-i-wrote-for-the-huffington-post-give-geese-a-chance/
😉
Video of final part of water glide unfortunately not a very good resolution. The CAM zooms later to see closer the rescue efforts.
Plane appears from left at about 2 min Time.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3S5LWz5Hrg&eurl
‘It’s called a RAT: “Ram-Air Turbine”. It’s a little propeller gag that drops out of the fuselage on an arm and it drives a generator for auxiliary power.’
Knew about those, just didn’t think there was time to deploy it !!
Also, originally they were for some lights, radios and had relatively low power output capabilities – hydraulic pumps
use a LOT of power.
As for full redundant back-up system – fine – then why have fly by wire at all ???
That’s like full backups for solar/wind power generation for cloudy/windless days. If you have to have a full backup systems what’s the point of another layer of complexity just so you can claim FBW. Make no sense.
‘The aircraft is the first subsonic commercial aircraft to be fitted with fly-by-wire controls. Instead of having a central control column and aileron wheel, each pilot has a sidestick controller.
The fly-by-wire system is supplied by Thales / SFENA. The digital fly-by-wire system is controlled by five dedicated computers.
All the primary and secondary flight controls operate by a combination of electronic signalling and hydraulic jacks. Very high safety standards have been built into the flight control systems, including extensive system redundancy.
Flight envelope protection is embedded in the flight control system that will not allow manoeuvres to exceed the aircraft’s structural and aerodynamic limitations. It is, for example not possible for the aircraft to exceed the designated g-limits nor to fly beyond the maximum operating speed for longer than a few seconds.’
From a 2009 article.
Knew I’d seen it somewhere long ago – there is no mechanical backup system !! You simply wouldn’t have the leverage needed by using what amounts to side mounted joystick !!!
Also the idiocy of being second guessed by a computer saying that I can’t exceed the design limitations NO MATTER WHAT is simply arrogant stupidity.
I really don’t care if I increase the wing dihedral a few degrees in order to avoid a building !!! But no, mother silicon says you can’t, so ……….. just dumb.
There are too many ‘cute’ things on Airbus aircraft that have led to some interesting situations.
At one time –
Fuel indicators that could be toggled between gallons, liters and pounds – but NO INDICATIONS as to which one was being displayed ( if you’re looking at pounds and think its gallons you going to have a serious problem !!! ) But hey, it was EASY to program and added only a few line of code and besides it was neat and and and ( too damn 14 year olds far too fascinated with ANY new technology to think what the ramifications of their actions might be. No practical experience !!)
FADEC – full authority digital engine control – A302 being ‘pushed back’ and stopped rather abruptly, ‘rocked’ rearward causing the nose gear strut to expand as the nose rose slightly – micro switch on the strut told the computers ‘we’re rotating (taking off)’.
Computers, in their infinite wisdom said, ‘ wow throttles should be full’ and advanced the throttles. Only quick action by the crew prevented a realy bad day for a lot of people.
Too damn much dependency on programming and cute new functions.
Airbus- you can keep ’em.
“Knew about those, just didn’t think there was time to deploy it !!”
Won’t take long, it’s automatic and there are batteries for the unpowered period inbetween.
They’re no weeny little things either, the one on the A380 is 5 foot diameter, and 70kVA.
Anything that minimises the scope for pilot error is fine by me, given that is usually what causes fatal crashes. I think Airbus is terrific.
Video showing the plane “hiting” the water:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5R-I_Jlnks
Ok, so there were no HUMAN fatalities- but I wonder if the birds which the jet murdered were endangered? The only way to stop such slaughter in future, apart from convening the World Court for crimes against the environment, is to ban all air travel!
Any seconders?