3D Reconstruction of Flight 1549 ditching into the Hudson River with Black Box voice recordings

[NNN0LHI]

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[spanone]

1. wow. thanks.

[alcibiades_mystery]

2. Incredible

It's still shocking, despite all the hype.

Then we get Schettino, the anti-Sullenberger.

A remarkable display of competence and grace under pressure.

[Lurks Often]

3. A brilliant piece of flying

Capt Sullenberger and F/O Skiles did an amazing job.

At that altitude and airspeed, loss of power gives few options and very little time to make a choice.

[Mister Ed]

4. It was brilliant, and absolutely routine.

The reason the pilots were able to pull this off and make it look easy is that they've done it over and over and over again. They all have.

My late father retired as a 747 captain, and my sister is also a captain for one of the major airlines. Me, I ditched the idea after stopping just short of getting my private license at age 16. As a teenager, I sometimes got to ride in the jumpseat when my dad was retraining in the flight simulator. They're really cool. Once the door closes, they're indistinguishable from the cockpit of an airliner in flight.

Once, as we walked away from a training session, I wisecracked, "So, have you ever crashed the simulator?" Without missing a beat, he said, "Sure, all the time. Everybody does."

He explained that, in training sessions, multiple challenges are sometime heaped on the pilots, until they become insurmountable. It might start with turbulence on approach. If you take that in stride, they might have you lose an engine. No problem? Then add a hydraulic system failure. The trainers want to make sure such harrowing experiences become absolutely routine, so pilots will respond with calm and precision in a real emergency.

The preparation for an event like the one faced by Sully and Skiles starts very early. I didn't have but a few hours' training under my belt the day my instructor calmly reached over and pulled the throttle out to a bare idle while in flight. In response to the questioning look I shot his way, he shrugged and said, "You just lost your engine." Then he gazed out the window at the scenery, looking bored, before turning back to me and asking, "So. What're ya gonna do?"

"Um, um...I'm gonna set down in that field over there. The long one. It's, um, it's in line with the wind. And there's no phone lines, and it doesn't look mushy."

"Well...?", he said. "You're wasting time."

So, I set up my approach. Had enough altitude for downwind, crosswind, and final. With a couple hundred feet of altitude remaining, he pushed the throttle back in and revved the engine up to full power. "Hey, whaddya know", he smiled. "Your engine's back!" And up we climbed.

I don't mean to take away from the feat performed by those two pilots. Indeed, the knowledge that it was a matter of practiced routine, and not bold derring-do, makes me admire them and their brethren all the more.

[Lurks Often]

6. I disagree, it wasn't routine

while they do in fact practice loss of one or both engines, an airliner making a water landing without fatalities is extremely rare.

I re-read the Wikipedia article regarding the incident and the NTSB investigators used Airbus' flight simulator to re-create the incident. They ended up running it two ways. The first way allowed the pilots flying simulator to react immediately upon the simulated birdstrike. In that scenario all 4 pilots were able to bring the aircraft back to LaGuardia. However NTSB felt that an immediate reaction to a known scenario wasn't realistic and re-ran the simulation and forced the pilots to wait 30 seconds before acting. When re-run that way, all 4 pilots crashed the simulator.

From one of the links in Wikipedia:
"Air & Space: Had you trained for dead stick landings as an airline pilot?

Sullenberger: That’s never been part of our annual recurrent training. I do remember on a number of occasions attempting in the simulator under visual conditions—not a water landing, but an attempt to make a runway. We would be set up on a nearby heading where we could see the airport, and we knew that it was at a place and an altitude where it was possible to get to the runway. That was the one thing I remember practicing some years ago." http://www.airspacemag.com/flight-today/Sullys-Tale.html

Based on Capt. SUllenberger's own words, what he managed was not included in routine or annual training.

[Mister Ed]

12. It looks as though you're right! n/t

[renate]

7. wait... your instructor did that in real life?

I'm impressed by both your and your instructor's intestinal fortitude.

[Mister Ed]

9. Well, he had flown helicopters in combat situations in Vietnam

That probably wasn't as scary as flying around with a kid like me at the stick, but it was still an experience that would tend to build intestinal fortitude.

[musette_sf]

11. Actually, Captain Sullenberger had a great deal of experience

with GLIDERS.

Chesley Sullenberger enrolled at the United States Air Force Academy in 1969. He was selected as one of around a dozen other freshmen for a cadet glider program, and by the end of that year, he was an instructor pilot. In the year of his graduation, 1973, he received the Outstanding Cadet in Airmanship award, as the class "top flier". He holds an Airline Transport Pilot Certificate for single and multi-engine airplanes, and a Commercial Pilot Certificate rating in gliders.

[neverforget]

5. Great video and a great piece of flying by Capt Sullenberger and F/O Skiles.

[uppityperson]

8. thank you. Great piece of flying, glad it turned out as well as it did. Incredible.

[hifiguy]

10. Yet some asshole desk jockey in the executive suite`

makes ten to twenty times what a hero like Sullenberger makes.

Tell me again who has a harder job and more responsibility...

[XemaSab]

13. Damn

Even though I know how it turned out, it was still thrilling.

[Gabi Hayes]

14. seen this?

&feature=related

[lonestarnot]

15. OMG ROFLMAO!

[Gabi Hayes]

16. yeah...I followed the link from OP to youtube, and came up

with that one

quite the surprise ending, hey?