Award? Hero? Under appreciated? I realize it's natural to celebrate a fortunate outcome and thereby the people who did a fine job in ensuring that outcome, but let's not lose all perspective. Just looking at the facts, as objectively as I can (considering my complete lack of credenditials in aviation), it seems to me that things were far from perfect in this incident.
* The FAs appeared not to be aware that they were landing on the Hudson, situational awareness at least not on super-hero level.
* Lots of passengers evacuated without any floatation device, had the ferries not arrived quickly, one would expect quite a few casualties. It turned out also there was no particular urgency in evacuating, the plane floated just fine, although this is easy to state in retrospect. But the ideal handling of the situation would include more pax with vests/floatation, taking slightly longer to get out.
* In the channel 4 documentary, I belive one of the passengers were instructed by a FA to jump out into the water, without floatation device. There were better options available, to put it mildly.
* The aft door, yes a FA "heroically" managed to close it partly, but it's clearly a failure that it was opened in the first place. Perhaps it was unavoidable or close to it, but until that's established I tend to think a stronger and more assertive FA could have prevented the opening in the first place. Ironically, he/she probably wouldn't be pegged a hero in that case.
Regardless of my nitpicking (which I hope is appropriate and not complete off, despite not being celebratory in its nature), this incident certainly stands out as a prime example of how intelligent decision making and good craftmanship can avert a potential disaster. Hope you professionals can use this newfound respect and karma for something more innovative than the mind-numbing nagging about the safety briefing.
