Plane Down in Hudson River - NYC

[Heliport]

F/A Sheila Dail, Captain Sullenberger and F/A Donna Dent with their Master's Medal certificates.



Capt Sullenberger accepted the awards on behalf of F/O Jeffrey Skiles and F/A Doreen Welsh who were unable to attend.

[Brian Abraham]

Extraordinary graphical recreation of the accident sequence. Interesting crew dialogue descending through 300 feet.

http://www.exosphere3d.com/pubwww/pa...son_river.html

[BOAC]

My admiration for Capt Sully and the crew has just leapt several thousand percent from an already 'high'! Awesome! ATC good stuff too.

The '300ft' conversation has to be the best I have heard!

[GearDown&Locked]

I suspect this 6min flight will be mandatory study for future pilots, atcos and airline management.

It has it all, from every angle you look at it.

[RAT 5]

I admire the way this event was handled. I respect the airmanship displayed by the crew. IMHO the hardest decision to make was to reject the extended glide option to a normal runway. That took great courage, and I'm sure Sully's experience weighed heavily in his favour. Would a 3000hr captain have had the same courage? The skill after that was for all to see.

I have no paticular affection for any particular airline, but I feel saddened that the courage and skill of the RYR captain at CIA has remained under the radar, both amongst ourselves and in the media. He had a split second to make a decision, realise that the a/c was under-powered, take control from PF and convert a G/A into a survival arrival on a shortish runway. Imagine if he'd delayed that decision a few seconds, and we might now be discussing why there is a large smoking hole in southern Rome, with 100's dead.
I take nothing away from Sully & crew, but why is it that this act of superb captaincy/piloting is so negelected. Compare it to the BA crew at LHR. They had no choice but to extend the glide. Hardly an einstein decision: Sully had many moments to consider the options and execute the plan: our colleague in CIA had the 'wink of an eye' to make a decision and execute it, and they all walked away from it. I don't know his name, but he deserves to be up there with them all.

[lomapaseo]

Brian

Extraordinary graphical recreation of the accident sequence. Interesting crew dialogue descending through 300 feet.

http://www.exosphere3d.com/pubwww/pa...son_river.html

Thanks for the reconstruction, great job and it makes it much easier to grasp the workload in the cockpit.

For anybody out there a couple of questions

1. Am I correct that only one engine (#2) was actually shutdown and that the FO was concentrating on restarting this one while #1 engine was only able to come up a little bit?

2. at time 2:30 in the link, the comment was:
FAC [Flight Augmentation Computer] one off then on
What is happening here?

[kappa]

I have viewed over-and-over all of the amazing reenactment videos of the events connected with 1549, and I have read and re-read the accompanying text. Awesome!

But nowhere could I find an explanation of the significance of the final screen of Central Park and adjacent areas. Being intimately familiar with the area, I first surmised that the greenish coloration totally covering the Park (and other areas I know to be open) represent trees and vegetation.

But when I drilled into the URL and expanded this screen, I saw the greenish areas are over what I perceive to be open water and isolated built-up areas.

And I cannot understand the differentiation in the areas colored in red, green and yellow and the dark spots where I know buildings exist. The tabs on the left and top give me no clue.

And finally, I fail to understand what this screen has to do with Flight 1549. What am I missing?

[twentygrand]

I expect that Capt Sully, being the professional that he is, had thought about what he would do if he had a power failure on take off from this particular airfield. His options, of course, were limited but I'm sure that had already thought through his course of action. He made his decision and stuck to it.

[cessnapuppy]

Brian Abraham

Extraordinary graphical recreation of the accident sequence. Interesting crew dialogue descending through 300 feet.

http://www.exosphere3d.com/pubwww/pa...son_river.html

Excellent find sir!

I was interested to hear that the birds were visible on radar.

(from the link)

Originally Posted by from article link

Most people don't realize this, but the birds were visible on radar, before the event occured. After integrating the raw radar data into our 3D environment and creating motion targets representing those radar returns associated with the flock of birds, our timeline clearly depicts the intersection of Flight 1549 with birds at a time of around 1527:10 (HHMM:SS). This coincides well with the CVR transcript which indicates loud "thumps" at 1527:11.4 (HHMM:SS.0). The NTSB Wildlife Factors Report has identified the feathers in the aircraft as Branta Canadensis (Canada Goose) by means of visual, microscopic and DNA analysis. Identification of the feathers was conducted by the Smithsonian Institute Feather Identification Laboratory. Though the errors may be intolerable, it is possible to pursue an altitude calculation for the birds by triangulation, this due to the fact that there are two separate radar facilities that reported data. We know the altitude of the birds at the time of impact, but it may also be helpful to determine their flight profile to understand where they were going or where they departed.. We will attempt this analysis as our work continues on the accident.

The timelapse (10x) animation below presents a detailed view in the area of the bird strike and clearly shows motion, disorganization of the flock following the bird strike, and the subsequent re-organization of the flock(s) following the passage of a second aircraft, Eagle Flight 4718. Aircraft altitude is in 100's of feet. Eagle Flight 4718 actually came quite close to birds but luckily was not on an intersecting flightpath

Other than gassing thousands of birds and killing some eggs (after the fact) it seems that this could have been prevented, no?

[Oleo]

All due credit to the two pilots: a great job well done is an understatement.

A very surprising book on the subject was reviewed in the New York Times and the book gives a view I disagree with. (Sounds like the author might be an embittered would-be pilot IMHO)


http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/11/bo...20river&st=cse

Books of The Times
A Cool Pilot, but the Plane Was Cooler

DWIGHT GARNER
Published: November 10, 2009
Uplift sells better than unpleasant facts, which is why, I suppose, William Langewiesche’s new book, “Fly by Wire,” has been published with an upbeat subtitle (“The Geese, the Glide, the Miracle on the Hudson”) rather than with the more cynical one its publisher initially intended to use. That original subtitle, “The Truth About the Miracle on the Hudson,” more accurately reflects this gripping book’s contents.

Clovis Franca
William Langewiesche

FLY BY WIRE

The Geese, the Glide, the Miracle on the Hudson

By William Langewiesche

193 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $24.

Related
Excerpt: ‘Fly By Wire’ (November 10, 2009)
Times Topics: Chesley B. Sullenberger III“Fly by Wire” isn’t muckraking, exactly. Mr. Langewiesche doesn’t dispute the events of Jan. 15, 2009, when US Airways Flight 1549 successfully ditched on the Hudson River after its engines were knocked out by geese strikes shortly after takeoff from LaGuardia. (All 155 passengers and crew members survived.) Nor does he dispute that the flight’s pilot, Chesley B. Sullenberger III, a k a Sully, is, as he puts it, “a brave and decent man” and a “superb pilot.”

But Mr. Langewiesche does bang a few light dents into Sully’s hero aura. What the public doesn’t understand, he writes in “Fly by Wire,” is the extent to which advances in aviation and digital technology have made pilots almost superfluous, perhaps even “the weak link in flight.” Mr. Sullenberger’s airplane, an Airbus A320, was nearly capable of guiding itself gently to the ground, even after losing both of its engines.

Mr. Sullenberger made a good choice to land on the Hudson. But his actual control of Flight 1549, Mr. Langewiesche writes, was “less reflective of unusual skill.” No knock against Sully, he suggests, but almost any decent pilot could have done it.

Mr. Langewiesche, the author of “American Ground” (2002) and “The Outlaw Sea” (2004) and a pilot himself, seems annoyed that Mr. Sullenberger has yet to praise publicly his Airbus plane and its sophisticated design. He seems annoyed, too, that Mr. Sullenberger has spoken of the problems of automation failure since his flight, while his own plane’s automation “had emphatically not failed.”

“He was no Charles Lindbergh, seeking to make history, no Chuck Yeager breaking the speed of sound,” Mr. Langewiesche writes. “The Übermensch era of aviation had long since faded. But he crashed during a slump in the American mood, and overnight he was transformed into a national hero, at a time when people were hungry for one.”

That may sound a bit snarky — and this slim book, at its worst, is. Written quickly, it lacks some of the eloquence and steely control of Mr. Langewiesche’s earlier books. (The author is the Steve McQueen of American journalism.) It’s looser, jokier and more digressive, and it contains pointlessly macho asides, like this one about Mr. Sullenberger:

“His performance was a work of extraordinary concentration, which the public misread as coolness under fire. Some soldiers will recognize the distinction.”

Based on an article Mr. Langewiesche published in Vanity Fair in June, “Fly by Wire” is not just about Chesley Sullenberger, however. Mr. Langewiesche uses Flight 1549 as the pretext for a smart, confident, wide-ranging discussion of commercial aviation.

He assesses the low morale at most major American airlines caused by bankruptcies, pay cuts, union strife and the decimation of retirement pensions. He refers to these things as “the insults of an airline career.”

He painstakingly reconstructs what happened that January day on Flight 1549, and spends a good deal of time talking about the damage birds can do to an aircraft. He writes about how the National Transportation Safety Board goes about its work, and about the physics of gliding. The book is also filled with hair-raising stories of other flights in peril, the kind of thing Mr. Langewiesche writes about as well as anyone alive.

He is so familiar with airplanes that his descriptions of how they work are simple and revelatory.

“Jet engines are air compressors,” he writes. “They gulp the outside air, compress it with fans and fire, and shove it out the back at high speed.”

This book’s true hero — this will be an additional insult to some of Sully’s admirers — is a Frenchman, a former test and fighter pilot named Bernard Ziegler, whom Mr. Langewiesche calls “one of the great engineers of our time.”

In the 1970s and ’80s, working for Airbus, Mr. Ziegler and his colleagues perfected a revolutionary system known as “fly-by-wire control,” marrying electrical circuits and digital computers to make almost perfect flying machines. “Within the limits of physics and structural science,” Mr. Langewiesche writes, “Ziegler and his colleagues identified the wrinkles of conventional handling and mostly ironed them out.”

The airplanes that resulted — including the Airbus A320 — are not only easy to fly and filled with redundancies that make mechanical backup systems unnecessary, but they will also not let pilots make certain mistakes. The airplane “will intervene to keep people alive,” Mr. Langewiesche writes.

Because these rare interventions cannot be overridden, they are not popular with all pilots. The fly-by-wire system wasn’t designed to protect passengers from people like Sully, Mr. Langewiesche writes, but from “people at the low end of the scale, who occasionally will be at the controls of any airplane that is widely sold and flown. Unsafe pilots? Sure, of course, there are quite a few, and testing can only go so far in weeding them out.”

This prickly and uneven but plainspoken book will not make Mr. Langewiesche many friends among commercial pilots, about whom, as a group, he is not admiring.

“If you had to pick the most desirable trait for airline pilots, it would probably be placidity,” he says. He adds that “with exceptions, the ‘best and the brightest’ have never chosen to become airplane pilots, at whatever salary, because of the terrible this-is-my-life monotony of the job.”

Mr. Sullenberger may not have needed the help — keeping the wings level, the nose up and the glide smooth — that his Airbus A320 automatically provided him during Flight 1549’s short time in the air. But he and his co-pilot, Jeffrey B. Skiles, did fly by wire during the glide.

“They had no choice,” Mr. Langewiesche writes. “Like it or not, Ziegler reached out across the years and cradled them all the way to the water.”

I don't think so........... Like someone else said, the early, best and gutsy decision to head for the river made the world of difference here

[Fantome]

Oleo - please don't attack before you have researched your target.

William Langewiesche is a 10,000 plus pilot of many types big and small. (Incidentally his father, as all real aerophiles know, was (?) Wolfgang Langewiesche, author of 'Stick and Rudder').

[protectthehornet]

Fantome

you are right about the author...I spoke with him when we were both flight instructing at Palo Alto, CA airport almost 30 years ago.

This doesn't mean I agree with his ideas or the gist of the book.

and it doesn't mean that William is a bad guy.

I think the airbus is a POS. I think it is built to be sold to countries that don't have a rich pilot heritage, so that some 200 hour pilot can ''make it go''.

TWENTYGRAND...all takeoff briefings at usairways include how to handle an ENGINE failure...but not neccessarily an ''all engine failure''.

[Huck]

“If you had to pick the most desirable trait for airline pilots, it would probably be placidity,” he says. He adds that “with exceptions, the ‘best and the brightest’ have never chosen to become airplane pilots, at whatever salary, because of the terrible this-is-my-life monotony of the job.”

Wrong on both counts.

Spoken like someone who has never actually been there. Commuters, maybe, but he's never taken a swept-wing jet around the world. Monotony? Balls.

And placidity will get you fired, eventually. They pay us to make decisions, often.

Gimli said it best: "You speak evil of that which is fair beyond the reach of your thought, and only little wit can excuse you."

[SDFlyer]

Langewiesche: “His performance was a work of extraordinary concentration, which the public misread as coolness under fire."

This is largely a distinction without a difference, despite the author's protestation. Obviously, when something like this hapens you show coolness under fire by concentrating on a solution to the problem. If you don't show it, you will become seriously distracted and the risk of failure increases dramatically. I haven't read this hastily-written book but have read some of his other writings. He's an experienced and knowledgeable aviator but sometimes seems "intoxicated with the exuberance of his own verbosity". He also spends too much time attacking straw men. This is less of a problem for non-pilot readers I suppose, and those would often be his intended audience.

[twentygrand]

Fair point HORNET - all airlines have a similar T/O briefing. But I would not be surprised if Capt Sully, while he was relaxing in the bath one night thought "what the hell would I do if I hit a load of those geese on takeoff". That is how professionals behave and he certainly is one.

[Capt Kremin]

The A320 FBW system did not/could not;

a: turn the aircraft towards the Hudson,

b: Commence the checklists that may have restored thrust,

c: Instantly calculate the glide distances to La Guardia and Teterboro and conduct a risk assessment as to the probability of a successful landing at either.

d: alert the Cabin crew and passengers in a timely manner to prepare for the ditching.

e: flare the aircraft at to appropriate time to reduce the rate of descent; had the aircraft been flying itself it would have struck the water at over 1500 FPM, travelling another 50 knots faster with Flaps UP!

f: make sure that everyone was off before it evacuated.

Langweisches premise is thin, wrong and downright insulting. What some people will do for a buck!

[Oilhead]

Sullenberger's reponse to Langewiesche today in NYT

November 15, 2009, 8:54 pm
Sullenberger Takes Issue With New Book
By CHRISTINE NEGRONI

A new book addressing the role of automation in US Airways Flight 1549 is wrong, according to the pilot who safely landed the plane on the Hudson River in January.

In an interview on Sunday, the pilot, Capt. Chesley B. Sullenberger III, said that the book, “Fly By Wire,” by William Langewiesche, “greatly overstates how much it mattered” that the plane he landed in the river, an Airbus A320, featured an automated cockpit. Mr. Sullenberger said the outcome of the emergency landing he made on Jan. 15, after the jet’s engines were knocked out by geese strikes shortly after takeoff from LaGuardia, would have been the same whether the plane was an electronically controlled Airbus or a more conventional Boeing.

In his book, subtitled “The Geese, the Glide, the Miracle on the Hudson,” Mr. Langewiesche praised the engineers behind the Airbus’s highly automated aircraft. He said that by creating an airplane that will not allow pilots to go outside certain flight parameters, they devised a craft that “will intervene to keep people alive.”

Since the day that he and his co-pilot, Jeffrey B. Skiles, landed the plane on the river, Mr. Sullenberger has tried to tone down a public perception that he is a hero. He says credit for the fact that all 155 passengers and crew members survived the ditching should be spread around. But when it comes to the role of the Airbus, Mr. Sullenberger said, its impact was minor.

“Others in the industry knowledgeable about these technical issues know there are misstatements of fact in ‘Fly by Wire,’ ” Mr. Sullenberger said. His own book about the event, “Highest Duty,” is largely a memoir, though he does devote several pages to the fly-by-wire technology.

“There are some situations where the automation will protect a pilot, but at the same time a highly automated airplane makes possible other types of errors * so it’s a mixed blessing,” he said in the interview. “And greater knowledge is required to fly a highly automated aircraft.”

Mr. Langewiesche said he was mystified by Mr. Sullenberger’s reaction to “Fly by Wire.” “There have been some characterizations of the book that are wrong,” he said, adding that he was neither a proponent nor opponent of fly by wire, but that it was important to examine its role in what happened to Flight 1549. “I don’t think its role is critical, but it was functioning, it’s part of the story.”

The National Transportation Safety Board has not issued a final report on the event, but when it does, it is likely to show that there were “flaws in this design,” said Dan Sicchio, a US Airways pilot who represented the pilots’ union in the investigation. “There are things that will come out that will show problems with the control system in this airplane. There were things that helped Sully and things that hurt him.”

[p51guy]

I am surprised the comments that are not favorable to Airbus are still not deleted by the monitors. They must have taken the weekend off. I started to copy and paste so obvious posts that could be retrieved could be seen and compared to what was still allowed to be left as a post.

[clivewatson]

Rat 5 - I am in complete agreement with you.

[protectthehornet]

twentygrand

I haven't taken a bath since I got my ATP over 27 years ago (I take showers). I have thought of losing all engines over every portion of the 48 contiguous United States...I fly domestic USA and haven't bothered with alaska or hawaii, or the myriad of other places on the earth.

Sully is not unique, except that his plane happened to need his skill on a particular day. I would like to think that all of Sully's comrades at USAIRways would have done as well.

I've often thought of what I would do with a 911 situation...but I won't tell you.

That's what good airline pilots do...they play: what if?

One critique of sully...why did he go back for the maintenance log book and not the portable PAsystem/bullhorn/powered megaphone?