One-In-A-Million

Whatever your job is there are only so many scenarios which you can be trained to handle. People are usually confident that they have been prepared for the most common of occurences and are ready to respond in a reasonable way. But what about those one-in-a-million instances that seem so outlandish that they should be a plot element in the latest movie? What would you do if you were faced with such a scenario and how would you respond? Thankfully most of us rarely if ever have to face such situations but that wasn't the case for the passengers and crew of US Airways Flight 1549 from LaGuardia to Charlotte yesterday afternoon.

It started off as normal as most flights do in this modern, post-9/11 world that we live and travel in. However the flight quickly turned from ordinary to extraordinary in very short order. Within moments of take-off a flock of birds (I believe they were geese) flew into the flight path of the airliner and ended up getting sucked into the engines of the Airbus A320 resulting in failure of not one but both engines. It's a scenario that seems almost impossible to imagine only becuase it's almost never happened before. The pilot of the plane, identified as Chesley B. "Sully" Sullenberger III, managed to land the plane in the Hudson River after being unable to get the plane to the alternate site being touted by air traffic control, Teeterborough Airport.

It was one of those scenarios that you always see in airline safety cards but one which pessimistic people always claim will be impossible. You know the one I mean. It's the safety instructions as to what to do in the event of a water landing. Perhaps it's our thoughts biased by Hollywood movies depicting plane crashes or our general thoughts that a plane being bulky and heavy could never survive a water landing but it's the truth and here we have a case in point. Captain Sullenberger, a former Air Force pilot, managed to bring the plane in safely for a landing on the water and the plane managed to stay afloat long enough for the entire passenger compliment and the crew to be evacuated. And although the plane did eventually sink lower into the water, it survived long enough for a rescue to be made.

I think it's a credit to the calm and obviously cooly made moves of Captain Sullenberger and even the crew who attempted to keep the chaos described in the cabin at a minimum. I guess that part of what we see in the movies isn't really the case. Usually in the movies we see passengers panicked but strapped securely in their seats, in this case, some passengers reported that people broke into a panic when the plane started going down. It's understandable but it could have been a whole lot worse had the pilots been unable to affect a controlled landing. Shortly thereafter the passengers were evacuated onto the wings of the plane and then eventually into the flottila of boats that converged on the scene. One could argue that they survived in large part due to the fact that rescue came so quickly but it's also due to the calm reaction of their crew.

It's hard to say how people would react in such circumstances but I think it's safe to say that the reputation of the training the Air Force instills in their pilots will go up thanks to Captain Sullenberger. It's probably not something he ever imagined he'd get to do outside of a simulator but at least he proves that planes are still safe and that if one follows the directions of trained personnel, it is possible to survive a water landing. The FAA reports that bird strikes on airplanes are as frequent as 1 every 10,000 flights but not all of them result in all engines on a plane failing (unless of course it's a single engined plane) but the actions of the captain and crew speaks to the training and dedication they have to maintaining a safe environment for their passengers.