Breaking: US Airways flight 1549 crashes into Hudson River

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I'd like to hear Kent Wien chime in on this. Personally I never thought a plane could land in the water safely, i.e. without breaking up or exploding. How much do pilots & crew train for this kind of contingency?

I hope everyone's safe.

1-15-2009 @ 7:58PM

Kent Wien said...

We do train for this. I even complained about watching the life raft videos every 9 months of my career in a recent post.

That crew may have unknowingly saved more lives than just those on board. For a long time we've known that a successful ditching was possible, but there were just so few examples of a prepared ditching. The most famous one was the Ethiopian 767 hijacking, but the pilots were fighting with the hijackers before ditching which caused the airplane not to touch down level.

This served as a great example for everyone and just might make me pay more attention to the 25th viewing of our slide raft video during training.

My hat is off to the entire USAirways crew. The pilots were no doubt very experienced (as every pilot at that company is) and the flight attendants must have done a great job getting everyone out.

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