Comments on the Landing of U.S. Air Flight into the Hudson River

A few comments to a more professional discussion of what occurred on that flight than found in the media.

As it well known, at around 3,000 feet over New York City, within minutes after takeoff from LaGuardia Airport, birds were ingested into both jet engines, causing them to instantly fail. The pilot then did what any trained pilot is expected to do: he lowered the nose to trade altitude for airspeed so as to prevent the aircraft from stalling and then flew the aircraft into the only flat area within gliding range. And that was the Hudson River. Up to that point, even a student pilot with just a few hours of solo flying would have done the same.

Landing on the surface of water is no big deal. This writer had made hundreds of water landings while an instructor in advanced flying in the Navy PBY Catalina flying boats.

The crew of that flight did a professional job of evacuating passengers. This professionalism was helped by the FAA's stringent requirement for yearly emergency evacuation training. As a pilot for Japan Airlines shortly after the end of World War II, the cabin crew even had to undergo a before-flight briefing on emergency procedures.

In 1967, a United Airlines Boeing 727 crash at Salt Lake City with the easily preventable death of 41 passenges. They died because of the lack of emergency evacuation actions by the crew. Scandalous information withheld from the public in that disaster, withheld by the political members of the NTSB Board, was the following documented information:

• United Airlines management repeatedly violated the legal requirement for yearly emergency evacuation training, saving money in the process, and then compounded the actions by falsifying government-required records. In this way they falsely indicated that the training was performed. Instead, the emergency evacuation training was only done every three years, and even then, only in part. Making these deadly criminal acts more serious, it was the easily preventable deaths of United Airlines passengers in an earlier crash at Denver that brought about the most strongly worded federal safety requirements ever issued. That directive clearly equated failure to comply with the emergency evacuation requirements to passenger deaths. This relationship is detailed and documented in the book, Unfriendly Skies: 20th & 21st Centuries, written by the FAA inspector making such reports.
   
• The inspector making the reports suffered major retaliation for attempting to protect passengers by reporting these problems, which was only one of many others—all associated with passenger deaths. Not a single culprit involved in these deadly corrupt practices ever had to answer for their misconduct, and all did very well financially.
   
• Reaction of the public to this type of corruptions and deaths? Yawns!

Getting back to the forced landing into the Hudson River: media people, and people seeking various forms of self-promotion (not the crew) repeatedly referred to the crew's reaction as being heroic. That implied that unless the pilots acted heroically that they would instead head toward the most prominent obstacle.

With the endemic corruption throughout government and other places, and the resulting harm suffered by the victimized public, such as in the ongoing housing and financial debacles, the public needed something like a heroic action. But then, with the standard practice of calling professional ball players and professional golfers heroes for finishing a game with one less stroke, then anyone should be called a hero.

What should have been emphasized by media people was the unusual nature of the events, the fortuitous arrival of rescue vessels, and the luck that the birds were not ingested shortly after takeoff, which would have resulted in the plane crashing into the high density New York City area with hundreds of deaths.