There was a ditching of a highjacked airbus in the Indian Ocean that didn’t go very well. Can’t really blame the pilot though, he was fighting off the hijackers as the plane went in.
More than one amphibious seaplane pilot (that is, the plane is amphibious) has come to grief by making a water landing with the wheels down. I was at a company that did a full reconditioning on a Turbo Beaver. It looked a little ungainly, but I’m sure it was the hottest thing on the lake. Until…
They got wet during the ditching (they’re located in the back of the plane, and this one was settling by the rear). If there’s salt or any other contaminants in the water, and you just pull the black boxes out, the water will evaporate and leave the contaminants behind. They’re kept in water until they can be cleaned and dried under controlled conditions.
One thing I noticed is that the rear of the aircraft sank farther than the front. It looked like they kept the rear doors closed and didn’t use them during the evacuation. (Good awareness by the cabin crew, there.) Rescue boats were on the scene in minutes, so it wasn’t an issue; but if they’d been farther from land would they have been able to deploy enough life rafts to hold all the passengers?
There is so much credit to go around. The crew, emergency response, the FAA, ATC, Airbus, etc. It almost seems like nitpicking to look for things that could be done better, but that’s how we got this far in the first place.
AP reported the pilots forgot to throw the switch that makes the plane more water tight, and may help it stay afloat longer.
Turns out they didn’t need it, but that’s gotta be a real ‘slap yourself on the forehead’ realization for them both.
They’re still both steely-eyed sky jockey giants to me.
Hope they don’t get charged for hunting geese out of season.
Forgot? I only heard that it wasn’t used, no reason given. Did one of the pilots say they forgot? (Certainly understandable in the heat of the moment, but it could have been critical.)
It’s hard to track down links to news stories that change as often as this one (so I’m not going to try), but I heard that the passengers rushed to the rear, which caused the plane to tilt in that direction; a stewardess told them to not open the door, but a passenger cracked it anyway, causing water to come in.
IMHO (and I’m no expert, but I was a pilot), this is the sort of thing you “make time” to do when ditching in the water. Perhaps it couldn’t be done without engine power, but they still had hydraulic power so I’d guess probably the “ditch switch” was still functional.
But I’ll defer to the NTSB on it. And I still think the pilots did a fantastic job and deserve major kudos.
Re: the '82 crash into the Potomac - A helicopter had dropped lines into the water to pull survivors toward the bank. One woman, weak from hypothermia, could not maintain her grip and let go, sliding below the ice covered surface a short ways from the bank. While that was a heartbreaking scene, if memory serves a paramedic from the heli dropped into the drink and rescued her.
I think the one person to have survived the crash and made it to the surface that wasn’t pulled to the shore was the man who kept refusing to take the rope himself until all the others, sadly only a half dozen or so, were on shore. When the heli had taken everyone else and returned for him specifically he’d finally, along with the wreckage he’d been clinging to, slipped below. Another real hero, to be sure.
I think I misunderstood your “I wouldn’t ask if she had died…”. Found this… here you go.
Would be pretty crazy to design a “ditch switch” and then make it reliant on engine power. If you have engine power, you’re most likely going to be trying to avoid ditching.
I would presume hitting the ditch switch would have been the responsibility of the co-pilot as he ran through the ditching checklist, but it seems to me that there’s a very good chance he didn’t get through the checklist given the extremely short period of time available. Plus he was initially trying to restart the engines. Something he’ll just have to remember for next time. 
Oh my! For some reason I thought Kalhoun was talking about a woman in the water after this Hudson ditching, not the icy Potomac crash. My fault, I didn’t pay enough attention to what he was quoting. Of course, yes, I remember that woman, and I’ve seen clips of it, via a documentary and a TV movie. It’s been a long time, but I believe someone on the shore jumped in to save her.
Yes, I remember him too. Definitely a hero.
I was a truck driver at that time, and early that morning we started out in snowy Connecticut on our slow, laborious way to southern Georgia. We passed over that bridge not too long before the crash, but didn’t hear about it until late late that night when we finally got to my co-driver’s house. That storm blanketed the whole northeast, and even reached to Atlanta, where people were abandoning their cars on the sides of the highway, because people didn’t know how to drive in ice and snow.
On preview, thanks for the link.
I’d advocate for revising the checklist so that when the decision to ditch in the water is made, one of the first items on the checklist becomes “hit the ditch switch”.
And I concur there’s lotsa stuff going on before a plane crash. In the plane crash I was in, that involved advancing the throttle, pointing the nose down to try to regain airspeed, then screaming in terror when it became obvious Mr. Plane was going to impact into that nice tidy field of oats and make a mess no matter what we tried to do about it. :o
Ugh…why do I watch stuff like this? I’m a knot of anxiety after that…
I got to hear more about this`: What kind of plane, reason for crash, ( oblique reference to a lack of airspeed intrigues me) was you a drivin or just a screamin along for the heck of it?
Don’t quote me with authority on this, but from my past experience with USAirways planes (dunno if this still applies after the merger) some of their 737s and A320s were identified in the safety card with a “-EOW” suffix (as in, “B737-400EOW”) and those were the ones operated across open seas (e.g. PHL-STT or CLT-SJU); they were outfitted with not just the automatic popup rafts at the exits, but also additional containered rafts kept in dedicated overhead compartments. Would not surprise me if this were FAA req for planes flying beyond X miles offshore, that you have more than enough rafts for everyone; but on the flights I took in overland or coast-hugging routes I never saw those compartments unless the plane was EOW-designated. A LGA-CLT flight would at most hug the NJ coast before turning inland, or actually turn inland over northern NJ, so they’d probably fly with overland specs. (Interestingly, Canada’s Jazz regional carrier made news last year by announcing as a cost-cutting measure that they’d stick to the letter of their regulations, and on any planes that would not go more than 50 miles offshore they’d take out the actual lifevests and just make everyone grab the seat cushions)
They wont,geese are in season.
Yeah, I just watched the whole thing too. I’d seen it before, and others, but it never gets any less frightening and horrifying. All those people. That woman’s baby. The man, Arland D. Williams*, who survived the crash, rescue teams there, but not in time for him. I had imagined that a lot of people survived the crash but drowned, trapped underwater, but according to the Wikipedia page Williams was the only one to die of drowning, which means everyone else died in the crash, a small blessing.
- This was nice to read:
In better news, going back to the Hudson topic, Sully and his family, and the rest of the flight crew (and their families, I assume) are going to the Inauguration
Their daughters definitely want to go!
The major of their city confirms…
Inauguration: Pilot Sullenberger And Family Invited
And this, if shown, will induce goosebumps:
Sully is so loved!
Was Sully on the Today show this morning? I thought he was scheduled but we don’t have a TV to watch, and I haven’t read that he appeared anywhere.
I was co-pilot. The whole sordid tale appears here.
From the angle the plane hit the water, and some pictures I saw of the bottom of the rear fuselage I think the plane hit the water with that part first, I guess one of the reasons both engines where not ripped off. Also I would expect some of the panneling on that area to be torn, letting in water.
I’m not sure if you should do that. That switch closes all (all?) the intakes and vents in the plane, and you may need some of those to remain open to keep flying. For example, and this completely out of my rear end, closing the intake that cools down some flight control avionics at the very beggining of an emergency may mean that before you hit water you may add up fried flight controls to your list of worries.
Well, then amend that to “hit the ditch switch at the appropriate time” on the checklist.
And this is merely a nitpick, but that’s how proper checklists for a wide variety of emergencies are put together, by nitpicking after an incident/accident.
Anyway, the experts will sort it out and make their recommendations, not me.