Wreckers

The following pic may help you answer the question...

lol

too soon?

no such thing :p

Haha, that's fantastic.

Did you know inflating life raft / escape tubes were invented by an Australian and first used by Qantas?

Was some impressive flying and landing. Dead level on touch down or cartwheel and die basically.

I read somewhere it is the first successfull landing of a jet of that size on water. One of those 'theoretically possible, practically impossible' things to do.

Yeh the pilot got a fair chunk of heroism recognitionfor pulling it off

so skilled or lucky was the verdict? given that chances are he had to put down there anyhow, surely he wouldn't have chosen to.

From what I've heard it was skill and a textbook handling of the situation.

In an emergency, one of the pilots (doesn't matter which) takes over flying the aircraft to the exclusion of everything else - they don't deal with the emergency at all beyond flying the aircraft. This might be under certain instructions from the rest of the flight crew (get below flight level 10 if they have a decompression, for example).

The rest of the crew follows through the emergency procedures in an effort to rectify the problem.

From reports, the whole thing was over in a minute. From the bird strike he managed to maintain control of the aircraft in a space of 30 seconds, called "brace for impact" and then put it down in the water 15 seconds later. The key was that he was able to drag the tail like an old style biplane or similar with a tricycle undercarriage, which prevented flipping and let him get speed down to an absolute minimum before the rest of the fuselage contacted.

There's always some luck in these things, but it seems that by doing exactly what they were supposed to do and because of a huge amount of experience, he was able to fly the aircraft when it was completely at the edge of the performance envelope. These things can actually climb on one engine, so the loss of two was why it was so catastrophic.

But can imagine someone in NYC seeing a low flying commerical airliner...

Creac wrote:But can imagine someone in NYC seeing a low flying commerical airliner...

As luck would have it the SAM-sites were down that day for repairs!

i'm not surprised he was a former airforce pilot

now sometimes that can be just as bad as it is good. but i'm guessing combat pilot experience probably meant he kept a cool head and reverted to training instead of panicing.