I am in awe of Capt Liu Chanjian and all of his crew. They did a magnificent job of successfully dealing with a pretty horrendous event. I am particularly interested to note that Capt Chanjian was so obviously competent in dealing with a total lack of automatics and hand-flying the aircraft to a very successful conclusion. For years and years I, and many of my contemporaries, have been ridiculed by the children of the magenta line for banging on about the wisdom of continuing to practice the art of hand-flying our aircraft and having the skill to switch everything off and get down to minimums raw data. Management just love the automatic button-pushing method for it works most of the time and it saves them money. I doubt if I could have done as good a job as Capt Chanjian but with my background of 18 years in the military and my insistence of keeping my hand flying skills in current practice, I might have given it a good try. If I was going to work tomorrow and I was a child of the magenta line and going to spend the day behind an A319 windscreen, I would be seriously wondering how I could cope with this sort of situation and whether I have really been adequately
trained to deal with it.