I heard somewhere Captain Sully and his F/O didn't switch a button on for ditching in water? Probably because of time, trying to restart the engine among 1000 other thing going through their heads in such a high pressure situation

It is one of the most amazing things I have ever seen with the perfect landing, just wondered if the plane would have stayed afloat if the ditch button had been pressed?

To your good health! I heard the Charles Lindbergh's Trimotor got air worthiness again. Once you are 'clear' I'd call them and 'beg for a ride...

While you are temporary on leave, do you still maintain recurrent training? (or does the company waits until you complete the leave to get you back to 'current' status?) for example-- are you still getting the recurrent sim training?

Well, here are my thoughts on Sully. When I said "shortly" (above), I was thinking in terms of geological timeframes.

As I said, this movie got so much right. I like the fact that they used the terms QRH and APU without feeling like they had to have the characters explain it:

"Grab the QRH! You know, the Quick Reference Handbook, the thing that provides guidance for emergency and abnormal situations."

They just presented the exchanges between the pilots the way pilots would talk.

OK, here are the nits that I can remember now, over a week after seeing the movie.

(1) The visuals showing the flight path of the emergency aircraft, both the F4 flashback and the Airbus descent to the Hudson, showed the airplanes kind of bobbing and weaving when the actual flight paths were almost certainly the much less entertaining rock steady descents. In the case of the F4, if it was a flight control issue (e.g. losing hydraulic assist to the controls) then, sure, it's possible he had to wrestle it a little more and so maybe the flight path would be more erratic. But for the Airbus, the plane was flying just fine and Sully would not be jinking around the sky.

(2) The scenes in the back, immediately following the bird strike but before the FAs knew what was happening, showed the FAs already up in the cabin. They went around reiterating the need to check seat belts for security. In normal ops, they would have been in their seats below 10000'. Like I said, this is a real nit.

(3) During the simulator re-creations of the event, I noticed that the Captain in the second one (the one that diverted to Teterboro) kept her hands on the throttles throughout the scenario and even ******ed the throttles at touchdown as one would normally do. These throttles are merely ornamental after both engines have been lost and the QRH would probably leave them in the flight idle position. It may just be "muscle memory" at work here, and it certainly didn't do any harm. I just happened to notice it. Nit.

When they did the simulations, and the first one ended with a successful return to LGA, I immediately thought what BS it was that the pilots reacted instantly and began the turn back within a couple of seconds of the engines rolling back. I can't imagine that ever being the case and I loved it when this was addressed (Sully spoke up and mentioned this exact thing).

I said it before itt: if you have to ditch a plane this is almost best case scenario, except for the lack of any power. Long, wide, protected waterway with rescue boats only minutes away. The other big negative was the frigid water and I wonder if Skyles' line in the movie was added or if he really said it. I loved that line. (When asked by the NTSB if he would do anything differently, he said "Yeah. I'd do it in July.")

Now, although I did say it was best case scenario, I'm not saying it was no big thang. If I was faced with this situation, my sphincter would definitely pucker. This incident goes down in aviation history: A forced water landing in a jet weighing over 100,000 lbs with 155 souls on board and not one life was lost! It could have been so much worse and full credit to Sully and Skyles and the cabin crew.



So bottom line: good movie, more accurate than any other aviation movie I've seen.

I remember hearing this too. I think the Airbus has a "Ditching" switch will close all external doors (e.g. the outflow valve which, on my plane, is a circular port about a foot in diameter on the side of the rear fuselage). This wouldn't make the plane airtight, but it would probably increase the float time.

Pushing that switch was probably an item in the Ditching checklist in the QRH, but they never got to that checklist. Maybe someone here read that entire transcript (I didn't read it all yet) and can comment on whether this came up at all with the NTSB.

The plane actually did stay afloat so I guess it wasn't that crucial.

I'd take you up on that offer! Somewhere, I have a picture of me leaning out of the cockpit window of that plane (Serial #10, iirc).

While I'm out on disability, I'm essentially dead to Flight Ops. I went non-current on landings after 90 days and at this point it's been about eight months since I flew. Our recurrent training cycle is nine months for my fleet (in the 757/767, it was six months because of the World Wide Ops training that was included). If they called me back tomorrow, they might try to just put me through the standard 9-month recurrent training, which consists of two 4-hour sim sessions. At this point, I'd like a little more than that.

I seem to remember reading something that said there was damage to the rear portion of the plane from the force of the landing. Wikipedia (yeah, yeah) seems to confirm: "The impact with the water had ripped open a hole in the underside of the airplane and twisted the fuselage, causing cargo doors to pop open and fill the plane with water from the rear." So in this case I assume the 'ditching' switch wouldn't have made much differences.

Since you have flown the Jetstream 41 before, I thought of getting your input on this incident. See here:

https://aviation-safety.net/database...?id=20160924-0

And here for photos, runway drawing, and videos of the (ex?) jetstream 41...

http://www.jacdec.de/2016/09/24/2016...t-at-bhairawa/

The plane had a runway of 4,921 feet, touch the runway pretty early, and still somehow managed to need more than 350 feet post the runway to stop. My basic understanding is that with this length of runway the J41 can basically stopped even with partial break and lowering the engine power. Any take on this incident from the initial data?

PS- you may have actually flown this plane in the past. It used to be listed as N304UE Atlantic Coast Airlines

(https://www.planelogger.com/Aircraft.../9N-AIB/679004)

Automation might be hard but it seems like it wouldn't be very hard or expensive to add an alarm.

Didn't they make a movie about the farm field landing/crash where the plane lost hydraulics and the pilot steered with the throttles? That seemed more counterintuitive than landing on a river and took some quick thinking.

Speaking of starting the APU, did they do that because the batteries didn't have enough power to run everything, or where they trying to get the teeny bit of thrust from it?

Hard to comment on this because I really only have the result to go on. There is no mention of the weather conditions or the experience level of the pilots. That runway length is certainly sufficient for the J41. The shortest runway we flew into when I flew that plane with Atlantic Coast was about the same length (State College PA, 5000' iirc). I never had a concern about the length.

On a 4900' runway, if you land a little long and little hot (by hot, I mean carrying extra speed) you could find it sporting to get stopped. Throw in a light tailwind and it gets worse. But that's why you pay more attention to having a stabilized approach on the proper glidepath when landing on a shorter runway. If it looks like you're not going to get it on the ground at the point you planned on, go around and try again.

Yes, I've flown as a Captain on this specific airframe so it kind of breaks my heart to see it lying broken off the end of the runway in Nepal. I was still at Atlantic Coast when we started retiring these planes (after Atlantic Coast became Independence Air), taking them up to Presque Isle, Maine.

You're probably talking about United Flight 232, a DC-10 that crashed in Sioux City, Iowa in 1989. I don't think I've seen that movie. Do you know the name of it?

In normal flight, electrical power is provided by two engine-driven generators. Either generator is capable, by itself, of providing all electric power. We like to have redundancy with something so important as electrical power, so if one engine fails the QRH will direct us to start the APU, giving us another generator.

In situation like Sully's, with both engines inoperative, we would only have emergency power provided by the ship's batteries. This would give us minimal emergency power (including communications on radio #1) for at least 30 minutes. Starting the APU would power everything.

There is no thrust provided by the APU. Even though it's a turbine engine in its own right, the exhaust is usually not ejected along the longitudinal axis of the plane. But even on planes where it is ejected straight out the tail, it's insignificant.

I figured so. I just remembered seeing one where it was super obvious, maybe on a 747, and the exhaust was straight out the tail.

RE: United 232, maybe it was a made-for-tv movie I was thinking of?

WRT to the FAA "trial" I think I would have demanded to see the 11 failed simulations those guys flew before they got the good one. And maybe it was for the movie, but the sim looked more like Microsoft Flight Simulator than a real airline sim.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wdo3XEYvfRM

I recommend this Air Crash Investigation about United 232.

Hope a prop falling apart doesn't happen too often. This guy handles it well.

I once flew home sitting next to a pilot. He said that more/less the plane basically flies itself en route while landings and take-offs are the hard part.

With landings being the more difficult part.

Is this true?

Can you expound on any of this? Like what is a situation where flying en route can be tricky?

This is significantly different than the way the hearing is depicted in the film. Obviously, a lot of the changes are done for dramatic effect, but essentially the NTSB is the antagonist of the film, despite the fact that the actual transcript suggests the NTSB wasn't critical of the decision-making.

So I was wondering, does this reflect some general negative feelings of commercial pilots towards the NTSB?

I don't think so. I've never heard a disparaging remark about the NTSB. What I think is going on here is that they realized that the movie would be boring if it's just a 90 minute love letter to Sully, so they needed an antagonist. And you can never do much better than a government agency when you need a bad guy.

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Was listening to the ATC at a busy airport and pilots were having trouble understanding this particular controller. Many readbacks were "say again" or were in fact wrong and required correction. I'm used to hearing that "almost never".

The controller was not enunciating clearly - basically mumbling. Is there a review mechanism addressing radio intelligibility?

im not critisizing sully, but i would think that the loss of both engines at low altitude right after takeoff would cause an almost instant turn back since you know exactly where the closest runway is rather then breaking out a manual and discussing procedure.

everyone has a first flight flying passengers, if the fo is fully qualified, then how does a pilot get their initial flight

I know this is Cracked, but this article written by a crop duster is fascinating:

http://www.cracked.com/personal-expe...p-dusting.html

The videos are crazy to watch. I had no idea this stuff existed, but whoever these people are, they are way underpaid for their amazing work.

(Apologies for the delay in responding to recent posts. I spent the last three days in Minnesota, at the Ryder Cup and the cheap-ass place I stayed didn't have free internet.)

I've heard pilots who are also guilty of not speaking clearly on the radio. There really is no formal review mechanism for either group. With controllers, I would hope that a supervisor would catch this at some point. If a controller (or a pilot) gets enough "say again" requests, it's going to start to be obvious that there's a problem.

This may seem intuitive to you, but it would often be the wrong decision. As a student pilot, I was taught to resist the temptation to make a 180 degree turn back to the runway if I had an engine failure on takeoff. In many light planes, the climb rate is so anemic that you won't have the necessary altitude to trade off for airspeed when you lose power. And banking the plane reduces the vertical lift vector, thus increasing the descent rate.

In a lightly loaded jet, you could well achieve sufficient altitude to safely accomplish the maneuver but, as you saw in the movie, the decision has to be made almost immediately to have any chance for success. Unless you know it's coming, you probably won't initiate that turn soon enough. Even if you are willing to ignore procedures (and not break out a manual, as you put it), there will still be some time involved in just determining what it is you're dealing with.

The first flight with passengers is done under the watchful eye of a check airman during what is called IOE, which stands for Initial Operating Experience. This will usually comprise about 20 hours of flight time for domestic operations and somewhat more for international ops. IOE is the transition from all the classroom and simulator training to real world line flying.

booked a non-stop flight on an Airbus A320 using Orbitz.
the computer selected isle seat 29D but isle seat 28D was available.
(Exit is Rows 20+21.)

I cant find any difference between the 2 seats on seatguru.com.
Why did it select a row further back as a better seat?