The story of the plane non-crash keeps getting more and more improbable. First we have a plane lose both engines on take-off due to avianterrorism. Then we have a pilot who misses the city, misses the bridge, and lands it in the water without breaking the plane, made possible by his skills and the hundreds of thousands of man-hours that have gone into improving plane safety. Passengers who all get off of the plane. The guy in the exit row who read the card. (Don’t forget praise for the flight attendants.) Passengers none of whom drown or freeze to death. Perfect rescue response complete with plucky NYC commuter ferries.
And now we find out that the pilot not only was superbly trained, but had been an accident investigator and a glider pilot.
This was really a test-run for a new Hollywood blockbuster, right? Reality is punking us.
The Edge of the American West 
19 comments
January 17, 2009 at 8:57 am
kid bitzer
i like to think it’s an omen.
as 9/11 was to bush, so 1/15 will be to obama.
no, i don’t mean obama will use the episode to institute a dictatorship, demonize the opposition, and drive the country into a pointless immoral war. (“the birds brought down the plane! death to the bats!”)
no, i mean: no sweat, no drama; competence pays off; looked dicey but we pulled it out. s’gonna be alright.
January 17, 2009 at 9:21 am
KMK
Amazing story, but I’m frustrated by the constant references to how this was a “miracle.”
I know eight years of utter incompetence from the Bush administration have people believing that when things go right for once, it must be the result of Divine Intervention, but all these people survived because the pilot was superbly trained in emergency procedures and the plane, with its ditch switch, was properly designed and constructed to withstand the landing.
Training. Expertise. Competence. Yep, we’re truly in a new era here.
January 17, 2009 at 9:56 am
Johnny Disaster
It’s a triumph of union labor. Do you want a scab doing your emergency landings?
January 17, 2009 at 10:09 am
dana
I think we often use the world “miracle” to indicate improbable events. I also think that people often credit God with the “miracle” of ensuring everything was in the right place at the right time (e.g., all of the factors listed above), without taking away from the skill of anyone involved.
So while I’d rather praise the people, I don’t see “miracle” as diverting credit.
And some of this is just weird. Apparently the passengers first headed towards the back and couldn’t get the plane exit open, which turns out to have been fortunate, since the tail was low in the water and almost assuredly would have sunk the plane more quickly. They survived in part because the guy who could get the exit open happened to be in the front of the plane.
Also, I’ve been trying to imagine a mini-series on the plane non-crash, and I think I’d reject it as bad art if we made it part of the plot that the pilot had had glider and crash investigation training.
January 17, 2009 at 11:18 am
ben wolfson
I also think that people often credit God with the “miracle” of ensuring everything was in the right place at the right time
Dana is a compatibilist regarding the miraculous.
January 17, 2009 at 11:21 am
dana
Best of all possible worlds, bitches.
To clarify, I think that “miracle”, “luck”, “Providence” mostly refer to an explanation of the sense of wonder one gets when one ponders how much had to go right for there to be no fatalities. I don’t think anyone recognizing how lucky everyone was is taking away from the pilot’s mad glider skillz.
January 17, 2009 at 12:42 pm
tona
welcome to the new real world, in other words
January 17, 2009 at 12:51 pm
Mark
When you recap it the way you did, it sounds like a story written by Tom Clancy.
January 17, 2009 at 1:02 pm
Dr J
I’m comfortable with people praising god for the miracle of putting that brilliant pilot in the plane as long as they curse him for putting the geese in the flightpath, too.
January 17, 2009 at 1:03 pm
Megan
I dunno. I think I expect formidable competence from an airline pilot, because of the combination of screening and training. Once we’re talking about a person impressive enough to become that skilled, I’m not that surprised that he has also become good in ancillary aspects of his job. I think formidable people can only stay interested in one thing for a decade or so before they look for another facet to master. Given that he’s 50, I’m not surprised that he is impressive in three or four skills related to flying.
(Actually, I’d kinda be surprised if he weren’t. If I heard he’d never gone further into flying than standard training, I’d expect him to fly for twenty years, get bored and go find an entirely different discipline to master. Then we’d be surprised to hear that the jazz pianist who organized the theater evacuation had been a pilot in a previous life.)
All my respect to him for being that type of person, and additionally not-choking when the time came, but it isn’t luck that he was there and I’m not surprised at his level of ability.
January 17, 2009 at 1:51 pm
Maineiac
Society as a whole wants safe air travel. Everything else is a special interest.
January 17, 2009 at 2:40 pm
Bitchphd
Aren’t most pilots former military, and therefore pretty well-trained in safety issues?
And doesn’t everyone who sits in the exit row read the card and all that? I try to sit there a lot, and I always do, and I’ve never sat next to a fellow exit-row passenger who didn’t. (Best flight attendant shtick I’ve ever hears was the woman who told us shed done an emergency landing once and never wanted to do it again, and that she would give us 10 minutes to review the emergency card, then come back and quiz us. Anyone who missed an answer would be reseated.)
January 17, 2009 at 2:55 pm
dana
It’s not just that he was a superb pilot and well-trained; that seems to be part of the job description. It’s that he was a well-trained pilot that also had experience landing unpowered machines and one who had specifically worked with the NTSB on crashes. There have been other water landings that didn’t work out quite so well, so I suspect that his specialized skills may have helped. Maybe any pilot could have made that landing, but from the article it sounds like he was a little bit unusual:
At the academy, he was selected along with about a dozen other freshmen to be involved in a cadet glider program, and by the end of the year was an instructor pilot.
“It was a tremendous asset to get exposed to that kind of flying early on,” said John Eisenhart, a fellow cadet in the program who now flies 767s for United Airlines. “And there’s no doubt in my mind that that came into play yesterday. When you’re in a glider you’ve got one shot at it. You’ve got to plan your energy, and of course your altitude is your energy, and that gives you one shot at the approach.”
January 17, 2009 at 3:05 pm
drip
When you recap it the way you did, it sounds like a story written by Tom Clancy. Except Clancy never would have made the pilot a Air Line Pilots Association union safety chairman. As Johnny Disaster pointed out above, its another triumph of union labor.
January 17, 2009 at 3:40 pm
essear
And doesn’t everyone who sits in the exit row read the card and all that?
You’re joking, right? I stretch out my legs and try to get to sleep before the plane takes off.
January 17, 2009 at 5:20 pm
RobinMarie
“Aren’t most pilots former military, and therefore pretty well-trained in safety issues?”
My father, both of my Godfathers and one of my uncles are all pilots; Dad had time in the military, but not flying planes, and none of the others were ever in the military, so my experience doesn’t seem to confirm this.
But I am curious now if my experience is actually an exception.
January 17, 2009 at 5:46 pm
Michael Elliott
This story has reminded me a lot of a few pages of Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink. Gladwell is discussing there how in incredibly high-stress situations, most people’s brains start functioning differently, esp. if they haven’t actually been in the situation before. (He compares it to a kind of temporary autism, and I don’t know enough to know if that’s an accurate characterization, but he makes a persuasive case. He’s Malcolm Gladwell.) This is why, he says, police officers often fail to follow procedures in high-stress situations, like car chases. In periods of intense stress, people will sometimes fail to do things they know how to do. There’s even a line he quotes from someone — a police officer, maybe — who advises people to practice dialing 911 on their phone (presumably with the connection disabled) — because he says a surprisingly high number of people fail to do this correctly in an emergency. So what’s astonishing to me is not that everyone here knew what to do — but that they actually did it, and did it correctly. That’s why the guy re-reading the exit door card was so smart. He was going to be called to do on something simple, something he probably already knew how to do, but in a period of unbelievable stress, and so he made sure that had re-learned how to do it.
January 17, 2009 at 6:56 pm
tf smith
There are old pilots, and bold pilots, but no old, bold pilots.
The captain and first officer had more than 70 years of flying experience between them, a mix of large and small jets, propeller aircraft, and gliders.
The cabin crew were all veteran of their profession, and professional.
All five members of the air crew were union members, and their unions mandate seniority and safety training.
US Airways is a US flag carrier, which means an additional level of safety and training requirements.
Air travel is heavily regulated by government, which is, in fact, there to help you.
The aerospace industry is reality-based, not faith-based, and is founded on science and engineering.
The rescue service personnel are full-time professionals, not volunteers; they are union, so they make a living wage, can support their families, and do not need, because of financial straits, to only provide services to those who can pay;
The professional merchant mariners involved (every member of the crews aboard the ferries, for example) are union, with training and licensing requirements that non-US flag companies do not need to meet – thank the Jones Act.
Etc etc etc…
January 19, 2009 at 9:14 pm
nnyhav
avianterrorism
Al Quillda?
plucky NYC commuter ferries
and plucking the passengers outa da water, so said the first reports.