U.S. Airways Jet Down in Hudson River

[xsbank]

Might be about 10% above idle but 35% thrust is only good for hydraulics and a generator, won't push you at all.

[Widow]

Speaking of lawsuits,

US Airways Violates Federal Migratory Bird Laws
By Mike Licht


US Airways violated Federal migratory bird regulations by hunting geese with an A320 Airbus jetliner, claim anonymous government sources. The pilot of flight 1549, Air Force veteran and avid hunter Chesley B. Sullenberger, tried combining both of his interests by bagging a brace of geese over the wetlands near New York’s LaGuardia airport after takeoff, on his way to Charlotte, North Carolina.

The imported $77 million A320 airliner is not certified for either waterfowl or upland bird hunting, so it was not surprising that the aircraft malfunctioned, forcing Captain Sullenberger to ditch the plane in the Hudson River. The crew and 150 passengers were chilled and shaken but unhurt. Most were simply grateful to avoid spending the weekend in Charlotte.

National Transportation Safety Board inspectors, rushed to the scene, reportedly found no Duck Stamps on the downed aircraft’s fuselage. Captain Sullenberger has not been charged but is being held incommunicado at an undisclosed location. PETA is urging the government to prosecute the pilot for double honkercide and poaching, and the animal rights group is expected to file a civil suit on behalf of the flock.

The two victims were undocumented aliens, according to sources close to the investigation, Canada geese who had over-stayed their visas. Their goose gang scandalized their quiet Queens community by squatting in local cemeteries and golf courses, parking on the grass, cooking strange-smelling food and throwing wild parties late into the night. Neighbors say police dogs were called out on several occasions. Such incidents have triggered a wave of anti-Canada goose sentiment, but at this time revenge or hate crime motives are not suspected in the US Airways bird bashings.

Forensic examination of the avian corpses continues, and technicians are analyzing the two cadavers under heat with chestnuts, prunes, and Armagnac. NTSB inspectors have contributed a supply of testing fluid, a 2005 Zind-Humbrecht Riesling from Alsace. We will update this story as entrees details become available.

Note:The aircraft took off from La Guardia Airport before hitting the birds. La Guardia is operated by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. The Port Authority’s logo is a bird.

Why isn't Geraldo all over this???

[crazy_aviator]

I am aghast and not a little offended by the insensitivity and cavalier attitude espressed by the previous contributor, in contributing such a cold and heartless article in the midst of much grieving by me and my brethren in the environmental/ naturalist / nudist community over the loss of such wonderful winged friends !! I am considering legal action !
(( Good post Kirsten ))

[TG]

http://www.financialdirector.co.uk/fina ... ear-flying
Interesting comparison between bankers and pilots.

Andrew Sawers
Editor's letter: Fear of flying
Financial Director, 26 Jan 2009

Yet another ordinary day and, so far, the third perfectly ordinary takeoff of the day for the crew on board US Airways flight 1549.

Suddenly, around 90 seconds into the flight and at some 3,000 feet above the Bronx, the first officer spots a flock of large brown birds. He thinks they’re going to miss them, but it’s too late to do anything about it anyway. Captain Chesley Sullenberger’s initial reaction is to duck – not as silly as it sounds, since a goose can cause a lot of damage when it’s hit by an aircraft windscreen at a couple of hundred miles per hour. A number of geese fall victim to the engines on the Airbus A320. Both engines immediately fall victim to the geese.

While the pilots assess whether there is any power left, option A, an immediate return to New York’s La Guardia, is instantly ruled out. Teterboro airport in New Jersey looks like a good plan B, but only for a few seconds. “Too low and too slow,” Captain Sullenberger believes it’s out of reach. “We’re going into the Hudson,” the captain tells air traffic control.

You train for this day. You train and you train and you train – but not only do you never really believe you will have to put this training into practice, you probably never will. But if you have to, you can.

Pilots learn how to deal with a huge range of potential disasters and practise the correct response procedures over and over in incredibly realistic simulators. When it comes to risk, they are the ones with the front row seat. Moreover, the most experienced pilots, I’m told, almost always have an alternative plan in mind: if we lost all engines now, where would we put down?

When the crisis arises, the captain doesn’t get paid to be the best pilot on the plane. That honour could just as easily belong to the first officer (who is invariably lost in the media shadow of the captain when it’s all over, but many of our readers will know that feeling). The captain is paid to make decisions. La Guardia: not possible. Teterboro: too risky. The Hudson: flying south, with a tail wind (not good) but nearer to the commuter ferries than landing north bound.

Nor is the captain necessarily paid to make the absolutely best decision. Several days after the accident, some pilots on an aviation industry website calculated that the flight could have made it to Teterboro. But Sullenberger didn’t have the luxury of time that those on the ground had to perform the mathematical calculations. In any event, he almost certainly realised that too much could have gone wrong while flying a damaged Airbus over heavily-populated terrain.

He’s paid to know what decisions have to be made, to make them and to execute them superbly. And he needs a well-trained team – in the cockpit and the cabin – to make it happen.

Something in all of this made me think of the banking crisis. If you needed a pilot’s licence to lend money, most bankers wouldn’t make it to ‘Plane Spotter, first class’. If bankers had a pilot’s training in risk and what to do when it makes all your dials go red, then the heat would have been taken out of the financial system long before banks started falling out of the sky. Bankers fly into thunderstorms because that’s where the fun and excitement is, and it just adds to delay and cost to fly around them; besides, it’s not their plane, and they have a parachute. A golden one. Pilots avoid thunderstorms like cats avoid water.

It’s also striking how ill-suited our elected representatives are at times like this. It’s as if a Boeing declared an emergency and called upon the transport minister to deal with it. Now our bankers have crashed, the minister couldn’t help them, they’ve left the wreckage and the casualties all over the entire economy and they’ve given themselves such a dreadful fright they don’t want to fly any more. They don’t want to pilot the plane and they certainly don’t want to fly as a passenger in anyone else’s plane. They know how ill-equipped all the other bank-pilots are.

Some day the planes will be flying again. When they do, there’s an old saying in the aviation industry that’s worth bearing in mind: “There are old pilots and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots.” When we can start saying the same thing about bankers, we’ll be getting somewhere.

[C-GGGQ]

you really don't want to see my pics then. I figured at 1500lbs per load in the islander over a 2 week period i hauled 4-5 ton of dead goose. Washing that out was fun with a capitol F you

[Widow]

Bird Remains Found in Second US Airways Engine

By SUSAN CAREY

The National Transportation Safety Board, continuing its investigation into the cause of the Jan. 15 ditching of US Airways Flight 1549 into the Hudson River in New York City, said Wednesday that the left engine was found to contain bird remains.

The safety board said the left engine, which was recovered from the riverbed a week after the accident in which all 155 passengers and crew were safely evacuated, was torn down and found to contain evidence of a bird strike. The right engine, which was still attached to the aircraft after the accident, earlier was judged to contain organic material confirmed as bird remains.

The NTSB said the material is being analyzed by the Smithsonian Institution in Washington to identify the particular bird species. It is thought that strikes by Canada geese soon after the A320 plane took off from New York's LaGuardia Airport caused both engines to simultaneously lose power. The captain of the flight, Chesley Sullenberger, reported a bird strike before commanding the powerless craft to a landing in the river.

The safety board said during the plane's brief flight, the flight-data record revealed no anomalies or malfunctions in either engine up to the point of the reported bird strike. The aircraft, which has been recovered from the river, is in a salvage yard in Kearny, N.J., where it is expected to remain through the remainder of the investigation, which could take up to 18 months.

As part of the probe, the NTSB said it investigated an engine surge that occurred on the same aircraft two days before the accident. That engine, the right one, recovered from the surge and the flight was completed uneventfully. The safety board determined that the surge was due to a faulty temperature sensor, which was replaced by US Airways Group Inc. maintenance personnel. Afterward, the engine was examined and judged to be undamaged, and the plane was returned to service.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1233783 ... lenews_wsj

[xsbank]

GGGQ, I've done that with moose, both doors off the 180, no seats, for about 10 days. Know the feeling. Moose nose sticking out the right side and a leg out the left. 'F' is right.

[mcconnell14]

not sure if its been posted yet..havent looked through pages 4-9. but fox news is going to be airing the ATC conversation between the tower and US AIrways 1549. soon. heard this at 1:00pm eastern. so probably within the next hour

never mind

http://affiliates.foxnewsradio.com/radi ... 090205.mp3

ok not the best video. go here instead

http://www.faa.gov/data_statistics/acci ... dent/1549/

[Intentional Left Bank]

Good quality ATC recording with animation.

[Cat Driver]

Jesus Christ that crew forgot to make the three Mayday calls and squalk 7700.

[crazy_aviator]

Not trying to sabotage the topic here but i have a question for an old wise pilot !
Do you think driving a car ( or flying a plane for that matter) is a right or a priveledge Cat ?

[Cat Driver]

Do you think driving a car ( or flying a plane for that matter) is a right or a priveledge Cat ?

Driving a car or flying is a privilege that is only granted once you demonstrate you have earned said privilege.

I can not think of many rights that are granted that involve the risk of killing yourself and or others.

Maybe posting on Avcanada could be considered a right, up to the point you want to kill someone, but if you get to that stage could it be considered a privilege?

Let me think on it for a while.

[lilfssister]

it is definitely a privilege. Your sorry butt can be banned at any time (your as in the generic your, not the you Cat, your, though that could happen )

[B-rad]

Not trying to sabotage the topic here but i have a question for an old wise pilot !
Do you think driving a car ( or flying a plane for that matter) is a right or a priveledge Cat ?

Your pretty stubborn aren't you? Let's get this back on track

[Johnny#5]

I heard that in the left engine they actually found 3 geese and a C152.

[Poppy]

Who is it speaking on the radio?

[Intentional Left Bank]

Who is it speaking on the radio?

I don't believe the voice has been identified.

That said, the F/O was flying the aircraft when they struck the geese. The captain then assumed control, and the F/O began to run checklists and attempt restarts. Typically in that situation the pilot-flying (in this case the captain) would also be manning the radios until the pilot-not-flying had completed the commanded checklists and his workload permitted him to again handle the radios. So I'd guess the captain was speaking on the radio.

[Rockie]

One of the things about two crew aircraft when the Captain is flying, is the necessity of a middle man (FO) on the radio. Every communication requiring a decision has to be relayed in either direction through the other guy. When the FO is flying, the guy on the radio is also the guy making the decisions so there is no middle man or requirement to relay messages. That's only one of the reasons why in a dynamic emergency situation it is desirable to have the FO flying if at all possible.

The communications in the tape were clearly being done by the Captain because there was no hesitation or relaying of information. The guy talking was also the guy making the decisions. Also the FO would have been too busy running the checklists. Every Airbus pilot has the phrase "Ecam actions, I have ATC" burned forever into their cranium.

[FamilyGuy]

Jesus Christ that crew forgot to make the three Mayday calls and squalk 7700.

24 years and I've never heard "mayday" yet, but I've had plenty of emergencies. Seen quite a few 7700's but that was usually guys who couldn't talk - or the seat did the talkin for them...never did like those.

Anyone catch the crew, including Scully being honored at the SuperBowl?

[Cat Driver]

FamilyGuy, I was attempting to point out the obvious....in todays world of communication people have figured out that a simple statement that you have hit something and lost both engines got all the attention that was necessary and everyone understood the situation.

So why do they still teach the Mayday thing if no one uses it?

I have had several occasions where I had to shut down an engine and informed ATC, in one instance they asked me to squalk 7700 so the hand off to another area would be easier.....in the instances there was no need for a 7700 squalk because I was either in a control zone and visual to the tower or so far north only Santa Claus would have been in receiving range.

[FamilyGuy]

Cat I was supporting the absurdity of the phrase "mayday".

There was another thread a while back where some folks swore up and down that was the phrase to use - I didn't agree then and still don't. You are correct - don't need to say "mayday" to convey the message - radios have come aways since the radio range days.

[Main Gear]

Interesting read and a couple good quotes.


“My Aircraft”
Why Sully may be the last of his kind.

Modern piloting is built on routines. Hundreds of millions of man-hours have been poured into analyzing every possible eventuality, stripping it of risk and mapping out what to do on the rare occasion when something does go wrong. On the afternoon of January 15, Chesley B. Sullenberger III was following the routine. He reported for work at La Guardia at the appointed hour. He reviewed the standard preflight data: weight and balance figures; the amount of fuel needed to get to Charlotte, North Carolina; the takeoff, climbing, and cruising speeds. A few seconds before 3:25 p.m., the tower cleared US Airways Flight 1549 for takeoff. Sully’s first officer, Jeffrey Skiles, was at the controls. They trade off, and it was his turn. Skiles hit the throttle. Sully called out the appropriate speeds. And at 3:25, they were aloft over the Bronx, headed out toward the Biggy Intersection, the navigational fix over New Jersey that steers them clear of Newark air traffic. From Biggy, they’d veer south over D.C. to North Carolina. The controller cleared them to climb to 15,000 feet. Sully acknowledged. The skies were clear and calm. For Sully, this was the last leg of a four-day workweek. It had all the makings of a milk run.

Sully saw the birds a second before they hit—at 3:27 p.m., a huge flock of them. His first impulse was to duck. He heard them connect—thump! Then he smelled them. There was no mistaking it. Every pilot with enough flight hours has smelled burning birds. There’s usually not much more to a bird strike than that—maybe a little hiccup in the hum of the engines before the plane keeps on climbing. But this was different. This time, the craft lurched, and then there was silence. Sully had probably experienced something like that long ago, as a trainee, when his instructor leaned over, shoved the throttle into idle to mimic the loss of engine power, and asked, “Okay, now what?” But this wasn’t a lesson. This was real engine failure—both engines. Sully was 3,200 feet in the air, without power, slowly falling to Earth with 150 passengers and four other crew members onboard. For the first time that day, the captain took control of the plane.

“My aircraft,” Sully said.

“Your aircraft,” said the first officer.

Pilots have rules even for falling, and Sully set about following them. He lowered the nose so the plane would glide, not drop quickly. He ordered the first officer to start into a three-page checklist of procedures for restarting both engines, even though he must have known that was hopeless. He radioed the controller to report the bird strike. “Ah, this is Cactus 1549, hit birds, we lost thrust in both engines. We’re turning back toward La Guardia.”

The controller ordered the La Guardia tower to stop all departures. “It’s 1549. Bird strike. He lost the thrust in the engines. He’s returning immediately.” It was 3:28.

Pilots are taught that if you need to ditch, you should land at the nearest practical airport. But Sully didn’t have time for that. He’d been out of power for a minute already; he’d now dropped well below 3,200 feet. The controller asked if Sully wanted to land on La Guardia’s Runway 13. Sully responded: “We’re unable. We may end up in the Hudson.” Teterboro wasn’t a possibility either. He could see the New Jersey airport out of his window and knew it was too far. The rules weren’t useful anymore. Sully had no playbook to consult, even if he’d wanted to. No pilot in modern jet aviation had ever pulled off a successful water landing. The simulators don’t even offer it as a scenario.

He turned the aircraft south from the Bronx to align himself with the river. The George Washington Bridge was straight ahead. Sully had to eyeball it the same way he’d eyeballed Teterboro, deciding if he could clear it. He did, by just 900 feet. Then he had to calculate the projected glide path, and gin up a way to set the plane on the water at just the right angle, so the nose was up and neither one of the wings tipped. If the nose or a wingtip hit the water as he approached, the plane could flip, spin out, or snap in two.

It was 3:29. Sully saw a boat on the river. He wanted to be close to that boat, so passengers could be pulled from the wreckage. He was improvising. Without the use of his engines, he maneuvered the flaps just so to control his speed—enough to minimize impact, but not so much that the plane would drop like a 50-ton rock. And with 90 seconds left, he made his first communication to the passengers of Flight 1549.

“Brace for impact.”

But it wasn’t really his aircraft. It hadn’t been for years. When Chesley B. Sullenberger III was first starting out, 40 years and 19,663 flight hours ago, commercial-airline pilots were like gods. It was the age of . Yeager and Pan Am, and the captain in uniform was a breed apart, on a par with Hollywood actors and professional athletes. The job was prestigious and well paid; kids wanted to visit the cockpit, to grow up to fly. And on a clear but frigid January Thursday, when Sully set his plane down in the middle of the Hudson River, becoming the first pilot ever to execute a controlled water landing in a modern commercial airliner without a single fatality, the age of the hero pilot was once again, for a brief moment, alive. Sully’s deification, which began almost instantly, moved from the Inauguration to the Super Bowl and continues next week, when the pilot is set to appear on 60 Minutes and David Letterman.

But the truth is, in the years since Sully began flying commercial jets, piloting has become anything but glamorous. Automation has taken much of the actual flying out of the job. The airlines’ business woes have led to longer hours and lower pay. Flying is now governed by enough rules and regulations to fill several encyclopedias. The people attracted to the profession today are different, too. Where the piloting ranks were once made up of former Air Force jocks, many of them combat veterans, they are now filled mainly with civilians for whom flying is less an adventure than a job. “Twenty-five years ago, we were a step below astronauts,” says one veteran pilot. “Now we’re a step above bus drivers. And the bus drivers have a better pension.”

From a passenger’s point of view, that’s mostly a good thing. Each year, hundreds of millions of people fly commercial in the U.S., and fatalities are almost always in the low double digits. In the past two years, there have been absolutely no deaths at all. Changes in the way pilots are recruited and trained are a key reason: In the vast majority of situations, airline-safety experts say, you want the company man, not the cowboy. But then there are the exceptions, the Miracles on the Hudson, the rare moments when it is following the rules, not subverting them, that becomes the riskier course of action. Pilots like Sully who can perform in such circumstances are a dying breed.

Sully has been in the business long enough to witness firsthand the domestication of the airline pilot. In the early days, pilots were largely uneducated farm boys or blue-collar kids who left home to become barnstormers. Some might never have spent a minute in flight school or read a flying manual. But as commercial air travel began rapidly expanding, the airlines embraced the image of the heroic captain, the distinguished man in uniform you can trust with your life. The industry paid top dollar for a new generation of service-academy-educated aviators, many of whom had been through Vietnam. This was Sully’s generation. By the seventies, as many as 80 percent of commercial-airline pilots had served in the military. “When Sully first got hired,” says Keith Hagy, the director of engineering and air safety for the Air Line Pilots Association, the pilots’ union, “he probably made a pile of money.”

The airlines liked military pilots, in part, because “the government had done all that work for them,” says Don Skiados, who has worked closely with pilots for 40 years as a past chairman of the Aviation Accreditation Board International. The military had already tested the pilots’ psychological abilities, emotional traits, knowledge base, reaction time, and ability to make judgments. The only downside of the military background was that the pilots were, by necessity, trained to be risk-takers. “The approach to the mission is that this is war,” says Bob Ober, who worked as a pilot for Pan Am for 25 years and Delta for 10. “We gotta go. It doesn’t matter if certain things are inoperative, we’re gonna take some risks.”

Since that time, pilot culture has done almost a 180. The maverick pilot has given way to the professional—the captain who knows how to put aside his ego and not take unnecessary risks. The change began when the military started downsizing after Vietnam and its talent pool dried up. The pilots of the military made room for a generation of pilots largely educated in flight schools offering four-year degree programs. Candidates racked up flight hours on small commuter planes over Albuquerque and Toledo, not in fighter jets.

The planes also began to change. Where a Vietnam-era pilot could fly more or less by stick and rudder, today’s pilots fly primarily by computer. Sully, for instance, was flying the Airbus 320. On older aircraft, a pilot pulls back on a wheel attached to cables that literally pull the plane up. On an Airbus 320, he pulls back a joystick that sends a signal to the computer’s auto-throttle. If he’s doing it wrong, the computer often corrects him, thrusting if he doesn’t do it soon enough, never stalling if he pulls back too hard. Takeoff has preprogrammed speeds; the pilot just moves a lever into a notch. Practically everything about the Airbus assumes the human factor to be the most dangerous thing about the flight. Incredibly, you can go on autopilot from as low as 100 feet in the air. Although some pilots worry about overreliance on technology and the distractions it can cause, most like a tricked-out plane. Still, there’s no getting around the fact that automation has taken control away from pilots. It’s the same with regard to air-traffic controllers and airline operations. Pilots used to have to navigate themselves; now it’s all done with GPS systems. Pilots used to have more discretion over takeoff times and maintenance decisions; now they’re frequently overruled.

The state of the airline industry has also diminished pilots’ status. The modern era of airline mergers and bankruptcies and rising fuel costs has meant extended flying schedules, wage freezes, and pension cuts. Today starting salaries at some airlines are as low as $25,000. Sully’s retirement plan was taken away during one airline bankruptcy, and over two decades, his pay has increased by just 6 percent. “Pilots are being treated as a commodity,” says Gary Hummel, training committee chairman for the U.S. Airline Pilots Association. “Until you need them to park a plane in the Hudson. Then you say, ‘Hey, there might be more to this job.’ ”

Pilots and pilot advocates worry that great aviators may be being bred out of the system. “I have a son who is 27 and a software engineer,” says Hummel. “I have a daughter who is 25 and is a professional nurse. They both graduated from good colleges. Both of them have flown an airplane, but I told them, ‘Find another profession, because you won’t be able to feed your family or have a retirement in this one.’ My daughter earned more in her first year as a nurse than Jeff Skiles, Sully’s first officer on Flight 1549, earns after eighteen years of dedicated service with US Airways. Why would I encourage them to be a professional pilot?”

Pilots have a hard time making a case about the potential effects of all of these changes, because the airlines’ safety records are so impressive at the moment. “You go and argue with either the public or the CEOs that there’s going to be an impact on safety at some point,” says Bob Ober. “The statistics make it hard to make that case to someone who isn’t intimately acquainted with day-to-day operations, sitting in the cockpit next to people. But the guys in the industry know it’s got to.”

So what does happen when the unexpected happens? In an emergency, what separates a great pilot—a Sully—from one who fails catastrophically?

Keeping calm is clearly an essential factor, but what’s that a function of? In 1989, United Airlines Flight 232, a DC-10 piloted by captain Al Haynes, crash-landed in Iowa at Sioux City Airport. The craft had lost one engine and all three hydraulic systems, forcing an emergency landing. One hundred and eighty-five people survived the crash. In part, self-preservation is what helped keep Haynes calm, he says. “Panic just won’t do you any good. From day one, you know that if you panic, you’re dead.” Not only does piloting self-select for people who tend to handle stress effectively, but the airline industry has developed sophisticated systems for ferreting out candidates who aren’t unusually self-possessed. “When I was hired,” says one retired commercial pilot, “you got hired on the basis of your qualifications, your interviews, and that was it. Now you see a shrink, you’ve got batteries of psychological tests, you’ve got an interview process to go through with very sophisticated questioning.”

The thousands of training hours pilots log also help them numb their stress, Haynes says. “By constantly being retrained, and going through all kinds of different problems and having to do it calmly and efficiently, that just sticks with you. So when the time comes that something really goes wrong, that’s inherent in you and you just do it.” Today’s flight simulators can mimic almost any situation. “They’re actually a little more difficult to fly than the airplane, so if you can fly the simulator, then you can certainly fly the airplane.”

In recent years, the old paradigm of the lone pilot’s single-handedly saving the day has been discredited in favor of assiduous collaboration. The approach is known as Crew Resource Management, and it’s seen as another critical tool for successfully managing a crisis. Haynes’s United Flight 232 is taught as a case study in CRM. Denny Fitch was a flight instructor and check airman who happened to be a passenger on Flight 232. When Fitch sent word to the cockpit that he was intimately familiar with the systems of a DC-10, Haynes brought him forward, and he and the rest of the crew worked together. “Any other captain probably would have said, ‘Why don’t you shut the hell up? I’m busy up here,’ ” says Gary Hummel. “But Captain Haynes said, ‘Absolutely. I’ll take all the help I can get.’ ” It was only by working together—Fitch had knowledge of the plane’s hydraulic systems that proved critical—that Haynes and the others managed to jury-rig an effective solution. “If you read the cockpit transcript, there’s no arguing at all,” Haynes says. “None of us knew what to do, and we’re just working together to find a way to get the thing down to the ground.”

The airlines have since concluded that the least communicative pilots and crews in crises are the ones that fail the most, and CRM is now a standard part of flight training. Simulated flights are even videotaped and critiqued to maximize collaboration among pilots and between pilots and crew. “In the debriefing,” Hummel says, “you actually sit down with the captain and the co-pilot and say, ‘Hey, when you were having that emergency situation, and you looked over at the co-pilot and said, “Give me the gear now”—how did that come across?’ And the co-pilot can say, ‘Well, he kind of shut me out. It was like he was screaming at me.’ And the captain might sit back and say, ‘You know what? I didn’t know I came across like a jerk. I could have said, “Hey, how about the gear, please?” I could have included him and made him more inclusive.’ ”

At the same time, a pilot has to know when to take over an aircraft himself and simply improvise. Al Slader was the co-pilot of United Airlines Flight 811, a 747 that was en route from Honolulu to New Zealand in 1989 when a cargo door failed, blowing out several rows of seats. With a gaping hole in the side of their plane, the crew was still able to make an emergency landing back in Hawaii. Nine people died, but 346 survived. “We had two engines out, Nos. 3 and 4, same side,” Slader says. “We were gonna go down; it was just a matter of where.” United’s procedure for severe engine damage is to pull the firewall shutoff, he says. “If I had done that, we’d have lost two hydraulic systems”—half the plane’s flight controls—“and we’d have probably ended up in the water. But I didn’t do that.”

In emergency situations, Denny Fitch says, you have to “live by what you can use out of the book, then adapt your airmanship if it’s not in the book. You just have to come up with your answers to problems that nobody ever thought of before.” Old-fashioned optimism, Fitch says, can also help. “My attitude from the very beginning of that incident was that we weren’t going to crash,” he says. He had a clear vision of the desired outcome: “We are going to successfully land this thing, with the wheels down, rolling down a runway, and come to a stop. The evacuation doors are going to open, the slides are going to deploy, and 296 people are going to slide out safely. Then we are going to get ground transportation, go to the nearest bar, and I am buying.”

When you break the rules, of course, you’ve got to get it right. That’s what leaves other pilots in awe of the Hayneses and Sladers and Sullys of the world. “Pilots are on-off switch people,” says Jack Stephan, another US Airways pilot. “We go through a decision tree, through procedures and training and checklists, and the pilot knows what to do. Captain Sullenberger displayed the type of piloting that’s required when the checklist really doesn’t cover the situation. There is no way to train for this. Clearly this was a hand-flying masterpiece.”

Being lucky doesn’t hurt, either. It was pure chance that Sully had been trained as a glider pilot. It also helped that the sky was clear and the winds light that day. “If Sully had been a mile or so in almost any other direction across the river, he wouldn’t have made it,” Slader notes. “He wouldn’t have been able to glide into the river. So he did a heck of a good job, but there was a little bit of luck involved. Same thing with ours. We were lucky.”

Some experts worry that today’s pilots—with their lack of military experience, their aversion to risk, their reliance on automation—are perhaps less capable of improvising in an emergency. They may be the right men for providing the greatest margin of safety for the greatest number—and in a world in which 80,000 planes take off and land in the United States every day, having that kind of pilot corps makes sense. But what if you are one of the unlucky few who wind up in a plane that’s in trouble? On that plane, you may want the pilot who dodged enemy fire over Vietnam, the seat-of-the-pants stick-and-rudder guy. “I’m not suggesting that a young pilot or new pilot could not handle a situation,” says Jack Stephan. “But would you want your kid in that flight?”

The importance of a pilot’s ability to improvise in an emergency isn’t lost on passengers. Haynes, Fitch, and Slader all stay in touch with some of the survivors of their flights. They have dinner together, see shows, go to ball games. Fitch says he gets a Christmas card every year from a family whose baby daughter survived the crash. She’s in her twenties now. “I’ve watched that child grow,” Fitch says. “The note would include, you know, ‘Look at her, this is the life you saved.’ What a sweet reminder of how they regarded me for my efforts.”

David Sontag, a 74-year-old screenwriter turned professor, was flying home to North Carolina on US Airways Flight 1549 after attending the funeral of his brother. From the back of the plane, in seat 23F, he had heard the bang a minute into the flight. From his window he could see flames coming out of one engine. The next five minutes were a blur of fear: the impact, the evacuation, waiting on the wing to be rescued. Before they hit the water, he said a prayer: “God, my family does not need two deaths in one week.”

Last week, Sontag wrote letters to Sully and the rest of the crew. “I tried to personalize each of them as best I can,” he says—even those to the flight attendants in the front whom he never met. In his letter to Sully, he says, he thanked the pilot “for his extraordinary skill and clear thinking and decision-making, and the calm and professionalism he exhibited.” He included words that he spoke at his brother’s funeral, back in New York: “We leave a little bit of ourselves with everybody we come in contact with.” The whole crew, Sontag says, “would live on with everybody who was on that flight—and everybody we touch with our lives.”

Sontag believes Sully did one crucial thing that day that prevented a widespread panic: He didn’t announce “Brace for impact” until it was absolutely necessary. “My feeling is he waited that long to keep people from freaking out,” Sontag says. “By saying it that close to impact, all you could do was put your head down. If that was his choice, I thought it a good one.”

Of course, Sully also might have been too busy gliding over the Hudson to keep the passengers posted. But Sontag prefers to think he was in control the entire time—that it really was his aircraft. So do we all. For many of us, faith in the captain is the only thing that gets us on a plane.

http://nymag.com/news/features/53788/

[Main Gear]

Virgin's Richard Branson LOVES Sully!

Count entrepreneur Richard Branson among fans of Captain Chesley Sullenberger, who managed to land US Airways Flight 1549 into the Hudson—with all 155 passengers and crew members suffering only minor injuries— last month. Branson, who founded Virgin Air, told Rush & Molloy how dazzling Sully was, "Every single thing he could have done right, he did right — from the second he made that decision not to go to that local airport, to put the plane down in the water, to the way he looked after everybody," and added, "I’d like him to come fly for us. We’ll make him the best-paid pilot at Virgin — we’ll give him double [the salary of] anybody else. He also can become one of the astronauts in my intergalactic spaceship company. The man can write his own ticket with me.” Sully's reaction? "That’s amazing. I hadn’t heard that... I will be happy to entertain all the things that are coming my way."


http://gothamist.com/2009/02/01/virgins ... _sully.php

[cyxe]

Cat I was supporting the absurdity of the phrase "mayday".

There was another thread a while back where some folks swore up and down that was the phrase to use - I didn't agree then and still don't. You are correct - don't need to say "mayday" to convey the message - radios have come aways since the radio range days.

I agree that its pretty clear when its a mayday even if the word isn't used, but I always wondered why it was used so rarely.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KhZwsYtNDE

[FamilyGuy]

Not getting off topic but nice link CYXE.

It's interesting to compare the differences in RT between AWE1549 and TOM253H and in particular the word Mayday.

AWE1549 and ATC never say it. TOM253H says it on intitial and again sporadically at the start of almost every Tx. They even call themselves "Mayday Thompson253 Hotel" when taxiing back in

Also IMHO the assignment of 7700 to TOM was a little unnecessary - the pilots are no doubt busy and seems ATC knew the situation. But those are likely the SOP's over there so what ya gonna do.

I don't know which way is better, but the Yanks seemed all "get r done" and the Brits were way more formal and by the book. Seems to me that saying "Mayday Thompson253 Hotel" on every Tx is a bit of a mouthful and only slows down the process.