Emergency Landing In Water By Commercial Jetliner Saves All 155 Lives
By Vik Kachoria | January 16, 2009
January 15, 2009, US Airways flight from NYC-LaGuardia bound for Charlotte, NC crash landed in the Hudson River minutes after take-off. The plane encountered a flock of geese and lost both engines resulting in complete loss of power.
Pilot Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger saved all 155 passengers and crew members by successfully making an emergency water landing – a rare feat in commercial aviation history.
Captain Sullenberger is a U.S. Air Force Academy grad who flew F-4 fighter planes while in the Air Force. He has flown for US Airways for 29 years.
Small aircraft, corporate jets & military craft make water ditching almost once a day in US waters. Commerical jet pilots are not required train for emergency water landings and perception has been that large jets would not survive such a landing which could result in significant loss of life.
Many including a Ralph Nader group and various articles in the Economist have argued (incorrectly) that there has never been a successful emergency water landing by large commercial jet liners. Thus, they suggest, that life vests & rafts serve little purpose other than making passengers feel safer.
But according to a WikiPedia entry on landing planes in water (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ditching), there have been several (not many) landings over the past 40 years worldwide. Survival rates have varied.
The Federal Aviation Administration says there were about 65,000 bird strikes to civil aircraft in the United States from 1990 to 2005, or about one for every 10,000 flights. But since 1960, only 25 have resulted in crashes by large aircraft. 23 of these incidents occured below 400 feet.
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