lexxity
Lady Lexxington
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: The Manor House
Age: 29
Posts: 964
Replying to post #487.
Ditching has already been discussed and dismissed due to several factors amongst them the weather, the dark and the sea conditions found on the open sea as opposed to somewhere like the Hudson.
I've never sailed across the South Atlantic, only the North and the swells can be awesome, enough to toss a 70,000grt vessel, designed for those conditions, about
so I don't see an airframe standing a chance. I do stand to be corrected though.
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Guess we'll have to rewrite past history and advise people that actually survived ditching in open water in the past that they in fact didn't make it. I've flown with a pilot that survived one. He talked about his ditching being easy, as opposed to the other crew that he knew about that ditched in the North Pacific or Atlantic under adverse conditions and survived.
Swells in the ocean can be awesome. And sometimes the seas are amazingly smooth. U.S. television show covers fishing in the Bering Sea in winter. Sometimes it's amazingly calm, and other times there are terrible sea states. Airframes can, and have, survived water landings(ditchings) so they are survivable.
Unfortunately a debris field has been found
so it appears, from the limited information available, that a ditching was not attempted.