US Airways Flight 1549 belly-landed in the Hudson river today after (bird-caused?) engine failure. No casualties, all passengers and crew rescued. Wow! Props to the crew!

This is the image i have when I hear water ditching...

... the pilot seems to have done a poor job leveling the plane before impact.


Ethiopian 961 ditches in the Indian Ocean:

That's because he had a bunch of hijackers freaking out on the flight deck at the time.

Yeah, i forgot about that, also I think they ran out of fuel.

It takes an incredible amount of skill (and luck) to make a successful water ditching in an airplane and quite obviously the highly experienced pilot had both, to do it with an airliner is simply amazing. Kudos to the flight crew and lottery tickets to the passengers.

The scoop on the pilot ... Chesley B. "Sully" Sullenberger, III

Not to take anything away from today's excellent airmanship. The Hundson river is a much smoother water surface to ditch in than the Indian Ocean.

I watched the Discovery show on Ethiopian 961, I guess it was that pilots 2nd or 3rd hijacking. In the future, I think I will stick to US Air and not on Ethiopian Air.

pn

BTW, ditching in water is not something that is ever practiced in a simulator. So unless the captian or 1st officer had any time in a float plane, they were probably praying and hoping for the best outcome. Luck was on their side today.

Just now on the 11 o'clock news, the news anchor woman ... "Whenever a plane hits a bird or a flock of birds, that's known as a bird strike"

Oh really?


.

Yeah, well, just listen to them trying to explain technology stuff.

Sometimes watching the news and listening to the questions they ask the passengers is pretty brutal....
eg. Larry King asking the passenger if he was worried or not...??? Wish the guy answered and said he was too busy checking out the stewardess' ###'s when it all happened, just to shut him up.
Joking aside, this is as close to a miracle I've ever seen.

Air France Flight 358, a flight from Paris, France to Toronto, another miracle - Everyone Survived.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_358

There must be a God!!

Adrian, you are so right.

Larry King needs to hang it up. I remember watching an interview with him and Michael Moore a few months ago. He asked Michael why he was in Traverse City Michigan, Michael answered, "Because that is where I live Larry". My wife and I fell off the couch laughing.

But these journalist / reporters do it to them selves too. Last night Wolfe on CNN asked a reporter "why don't they put screens in front of the rotating fan blades on jet engines to stop birds from getting in there". Like the reporter has any idea how to answer that!

pn

No miracle, just a pretty good pilot.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider

Gimli's a 90 minute drive north. I've flown up there with a buddy. The aircraft wreckage rotting beside the runway is a fun touch for those of us who are less than comfortable with powered flight.

Bren R.

I remember seen a few years ago on dateline or 60 minutes the story of Flight 236 of Air Transat. A Canadian charter airline that safely made an emergency landing in the Azores after it ran out of fuel. Crazy story, the pilot was heralded as a hero at first but then found responsible for making the error of not dbl-checking the amt of fuel they were carrying.

Bren the wife and I used to fly into a somewhat smallish (2300ft) island runway that spanned the entire length of the island it was on (Cedar Key, FL) ... I remember being a little unnerved a time or two while landing or taking off over the top of an airplane that either ran too long or too short and into the water off either end of the runways.

Freeport Intl. (Bahamas) used to bulldoze the wrecks into the woods at the ends of their runway and leave them there ... I always thought that was funny.

You'd think they'd clear that stuff away for scrap, especially at small civvie airports. Luckily we had a 30 minute hold while the skydiving club did a drop over the airport so I could chain smoke half a dozen cigarettes before getting into the flying snowmobile. (Stock image, not that one I was in, as you can tell by the tail markings)

Bren R.

Jet trivia. Turns out there is a button the pilot can push to turn the jet into a raft. I caught that on the news on the way into work today.

Think Jetsons.

The StThomas airport have a mountain right at the end of the runway. You could see the prop airplanes that have crashed on the mountain left there for years.
It was fun flying there on a A300s. Take-offs were like a rollercoaster ride ... pretty hard acceleration and a quick hard left bank to avoid the mountain ... and the view, wow. It wasn't unusual to find passengers that as a joke would raise their arms like on a rollercoaster during take-offs there,,, good times

You know, I've been thinking about that "grills over the intakes thing," and I think I've figured out why there aren't--correct me if I'm wrong, those who actually know what they're talking about. In any case, at 400 MPH, I'm thinking that the grills would do no good--they'd get smashed straight into the engine, and might in fact do even more damage. Right?

Your right that there isn’t any material available to make a screen that could withstand a birdstrike and still let sufficient air into the engine for efficient operation and as you suggest the screen would only add to the damage.

We average a couple of birdstikes each month (seasonally variable based on bird populations.) In fact we’ve had two ACFT ingest birds into their engines already in 2009 while doing transitions. High bypass turbofan engines like to suck things in when running at high RPMs like during takeoff. I’ve watched birds get sucked in after coming to close to the intake while doing high power maintenance runs on the ground.

I believe it was in 2002 that this ACFT from our unit ingested 2 turkeys in it’s #2 engine while landing in Bangor Maine. They got sucked in just as the pilot hit the thrust reversers shooting bird and engine parts forward and then back into the #1 engine and both left flaps. I think the final bill was around 10 million and took about 6 months to fix and fly home. Never was quite right after that though.

http://eu.airliners.net/photo/USA---Air/Boeing-KC-135E-Stratotanker/0536477/L/

If you zoom in real close you can barely make out the new nose are the crew chief gave it after the incident. He painted a turkey on the nose and renamed it “Osama bin Goblin”

Our birdstrikes do more damage to the airframe than to the engines, the PT6 engines we use are a reverse flow design that allows for a screen and a filter and has a much smaller intake opening than the big guys. The windscreens are a three piece design with the center section being safety glass while the two outer curved pieces are Plexiglas and over the years I've had a seagull shatter my front windscreen and two buzzards completely break out the side panes, one of them landing beside me in the cockpit. Also while in a steep turn several years ago I hit a buzzard just above the windshield, it got caught and rode up the wire strike cable, a cable affixed from the top of the windscreen to the top of the tail for deflecting electrical wire strikes away from the tail, lodging itself between the rudder and the vertical stabilizer darn near causing me to do a low attitude roll to the ground.
I've had both exhaust stacks almost closed completely from going through a flock of birds and all sorts of dented leading edges on the wings, vertical and horizontal stabilizers from birds. In all of the years I've been doing this I couldn't venture to try to guess how many hundreds of birds that have hit or just missed my windshield yet I've never seen one bird get hit by the rotating propellers it just went through.

Freakin' birds are dangerous little critters.

be careful Rick

I am Randy, it's the birds that really needs to be careful.

The day before this plane went down in NY, a couple of my neighbours and I were near Pearson Int'l airport having a coffee at Tim Hortons. The airport property basically comes right up to Dixie RD (where we were), and you can see most of the airport from the West side down one of the main runways. There are a handfull of trees and a couple of small ravines on the airport property and amongst the trees you could see a couple of deer. There was an issue a few years ago, about removing (killing) the deer in this particular area that had the environmentalists up in arms. Our conversation turned to the safety of the airplanes upon seeing these deer, and what could conceivably happen. I haven't heard of a problem with planes/deer yet but...as far as birds go Toronto uses trained Falcons in an effort to chase or keep birds away ( I think alot of airports do this now). Just seemed ironic that a day later that plane came down due to a bird strike.

I've heard of a couple of deer incursions on the runway, here's one example but beware of the graphic picture.

During the summer months we use a lot of very narrow roads along canals and sugar cane fields and I've had a couple of deer jump out from the 15ft tall sugar cane into the path of my plane and jumped right over a canal on the other side, no hits so far though. I did hit a huge raccoon year before last, I was using a narrow road with a cane field on one side and a big canal on the other side and while I was rolling out I saw the raccoon run from the field to cross the road, he couldn't do anything with the canal so he ran back towards the cane field but not before I hit him with my right landing wheel, I just felt a thump. One of the loading crew guys went and snatched him up for supper. I also hit a wheat field upside down in North Dakota a little over ten years ago, totaled the plane but I made it out with just a few stitches and bruises ... but that's another story altogether.

I better not come back to this thread, I can talk about flying all day ... can you tell?

Ouch!!!

No, no. Its "Oh dear!"

90 minutes??????? So you really live in Emerson? 30 minutes from my front door to the cottage at Winnipeg beach, 10 minutes more to the Seagrams plant

I guess I overestimated (using Google maps).

And your estimate does not take the speed limit into account.

Bren R.

Probably why I have Warrant as a user name.