Perhaps those drills aren't entirely a waste of time

[jducoeur]

There's something faintly surprising to see a large plane ditch in the water successfully. You get the water-crash drill every time you take off, but I don't recall actually seeing that trick *work* before.

Granted, the plane wasn't 5 miles up yet, so it wasn't a worst-case scenario; still, I'm impressed at the early reports that everybody seems to have made it. I'll take a completely-survived disaster as an oddly comforting portent for the year...

Comments

[ckd]

There's also ALM 980, which ditched in the Caribbean in 1970. Many survivors, though not all; "warn passengers" was added to the ditching/emergency landing checklists after this crash, as the investigators concluded that the lack of warning caused some fatalities.

[loosecanon.livejournal.com]

I am so impressed that the pilots were able to navigate the Hudson so cleanly. It's a messy river for traffic. How fortunate that today is too cold for recreational river users.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Major kudos to the pilots. Holy crap. I am impressed.

Good point on the portent!

[mindways]

My impression was that being at low altitude is rather worse than being 5 miles up for losing both engines? (Less time to react / handle the situation / prepare for the crash)

(Of course, being 5 miles up for a water landing is likely to mean that you're much further from shore, which makes getting rescue boats there much more difficult. But insofar as the actual crash goes...)