Never Been Happier to be Wrong
A while back, I agreed in the comments with Toney about the instructions for a water landing being unnecessary because planes rarely end up in tact after colliding with water. I am happy to admit my error as it looks like all passengers of US Airways 1549 survived.
posted by Armen Adzhemyan at 1:42 PM
8 Comments:
I remembered that comment and came to N&B just now to say something.
Armen: you and I rarely agree, but this is one time I'm thrilled you were wrong. No offense- haha.
Uggh. CNN? Couldn't you link to a reputable, local news source?
Pilot associated with UC Berkeley
It's really difficult to understate just exactly how bad ass this guy is. First, losing full power under any circumstances blows. But let's say you're at 30,000 feet, you have some time to glide the plane down and land at an airport. But right after take off? You don't have the luxury of using gravity to increase your speed (and giving you lift). Second, you lose all power. That includes avionics. Sure, the emergency wind driven generator provides some power, but it's only for basic instrumentation. You don't have hydraulics. Third, you are coming into water at somewhere around 120 to 160 mph, with effectively two giant scoops attached to your wings. Any guesses what happens?
Finally, and by no means to take anything away from Sully's flying, but as much as I hate Airbuses in general (not enough leg room), I think they do have some durability built into them. It was also an A320 that made a perfect landing at LAX without its nose gear properly deployed. I later learned that the nose being at perpendicular is a design feature. Whenever the landing gear fails, it gets "stuck" at 90 degrees. Any thing else could potentially cause the plane to fly off the runway. I'd imagine some element of the design helped bringing about this incredible result.
Difficult to overstate!
<-- Idiot.
Not to take anything away from the captain's flying, but it amazes me that the media keeps leaving out that there were actually two pilots (no, s/he is not called a co-pilot) aboard and flying. Both are equally qualified, and I'm going to go out on not so short of a limb and speculate that this second person, who deserves a lot more attention, wasn't sitting back reading the in-flight magazine. Actually, without the NTSB preliminary report, we don't even know who hand flew the ditching. Also, Armen, contrary to popular belief, when you lose even both engines, the plane doesn't lose power. There are these fancy things called batteries and generators that power such things as avionics (which on a clear day, when you know you're going in a river, you really don't need). Although, I'm really curious to learn about these "wind generators." Is it a Dutch thing? I know, recently having spent an unanticipated night in beautiful Hollister, California, what happens when batteries don't work. And you kinda do have the luxury of gravity to increase your speed--lower the nose, reduce drag/life trade off, hello speeding ticket. The real prolem is speed control: how to aim for your touchdown point, avoid a stall (going to slow), while not impacting the water at 250 kts. Thankfully, that's what flaps are for and judging by the photos post-crash, there was enough hydrolic power to lower them. Lastly, on the LAX incident, it wasn't the plane that made a perfect landing; it was TWO pilots at the control. Nose gear inop landings happen all the time. Just, KTLA isn't always there to film them. And 99% are uneventful whether or not the plane has the A320 style perpendicular gear.
honestly people, except for the few boalties which actually have flight training or have previous experience with planes, the rest of you don't know anything, and it's kind of shameless to be posting on here stuff you know nothing about.
please use your intelligence where you can actually make a contribution to society.
don't mean to be an ass but i'm tired of how sometimes people at boalt have their heads in the clouds and feel as though they're entitled to have an opinion about things they know nothing about.
sorry and thanks.
ps.
this statement was not aimed at anyone on this post that like steven sounds like he knows what he's talking about.
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