Chronus
I wasn't actually referring to him or what he did but to such an event! Yes he was a very brilliant, skilled and competent pilot.
I was talking about choices and the choices of landing into houses or if you have the glide range of putting down into a river.
As in any forced landing without power from a small aircraft up there is a large element of skill and some luck I don't take that back
Even in the Hudson case had the engines stopped at a lower altitude it would have been a different story so an element of luck has to be there
I remember after the event looking at London and the Thames and thinking whether anyone could put down there! Parts yes but there are many curves and bridges closer together as well as boats which could stray into your path so even with the larger, wider, straighter Hudson there has to be luck but at least the Hudson is a wide very long potential runway albeit water
Check this out? Could a 25 year old manage it? Maybe ?
As the public has come to understand it, Sully saved the lives of everybody on board through nerves of steel and superhuman flying skills. The truth isn’t quite so romantic...
[The] nuts and bolts of gliding into water aren’t especially difficult. The common sense of water landings is one of the reasons pilots don’t even train for them in simulators... and nowhere in the public discussion has the role of luck been adequately acknowledged. Specifically, the time and place where things went wrong. As it happened, it was daylight and the weather was reasonably good; there off Sullenberger’s left side was a 12-mile runway of smoothly flowing river, within swimming distance of the country’s largest city and its flotilla of rescue craft. Had the bird-strike occurred over a different part of the city, at a lower altitude (beyond gliding distance to the Hudson), or under more inclement weather conditions, the result was going to be an all-out catastrophe, and no amount of talent or skill was going to matter...
Nothing they did was easy, and a successful outcome was by no means guaranteed. But they did what they had to do, what they were trained to do, and what, presumably, any other crew would have done in that same situation. And let’s not forget the flight attendants, whose actions were no less commendable. Thus the passengers owe their survival not to miracles or heroics, but to less glamorous forces. They are, in descending order (pardon the pun): luck, professionalism, skill, and technology.
There’s little harm in celebrating the unlikely survival of 155 people, but terms like “hero” and “miracle” shouldn’t be thrown around lightly. A miracle describes an outcome that cannot be rationally explained. Everything that happened on the river that day can be rationally explained.
http://aviation.stackexchange.com/qu...-on-the-hudson