Can a commercial jet actually perform a "water landing?"

Factual Questions
1

Okay, so we’ve all heard the airline spiel about safety features and precautions, but the last time one statement in particular struck me as worthy of examination. They always make note that,
“in the event of a water landing,” one can use their seat cushion as a sort of innertube.

All well and good, but I was wondering this: can a commercial jet actually make a water landing? I would imagine that, at 600 miles an hour, liquid is just as bad as solid ground, maybe
worse in some ways. Unable to picture anything but the plane breaking to bits on the water’s surface, I checked around for successful water landings in the past and found nothing.

Any ideas?

2

Given flaps and spoilers, and paging Broomstick, that given enough notice, any good pilot could make a water landing at a slow enough speed to keep the fuselage intact for rescues.

My thoughts? Hell, anyone can crash into the ocean, but even in a rough sea, an airliner which is relatively airtight should be able to touch down and survive a belly landing.

Broomstick will correct me if I’m wrong. . .

Tripler
I’m basing this off of navigators and pilots I know.

3

I’ve seen video footage of a 737 making a crash landing in the ocean, not far from shore. A wing appeared to snap off, but the fuselage remained largely intact. If memory serves, there were few, if any, fatalities. There was no fire, because the plane was out of fuel. The crash was the result of a hijacking.

4

When I hear that line I always think YOU MEAN CRASH!?!?!

5

Any plane can make a water landing, so long as the water and the plane cooperate. Unfortunately for the statistics folks, no pilot intends to hit the water, and normally the pilot does everything that can be done to prevent that consequence. As a result, the water landings available for analysis are the unintended ones. Which is to say, if the pilot can’t keep the plane out of the water, it is probably already too late, and he/she wouldn’t be able to keep it in the air regardless of what was under it.

Gairloch

6

Another of the well known airplane acts of denial- to minimize passenger anxiety. Of course it is a CRASH.

7

I’m an airline pilot. As others have said, jet ditchings are few and far between, so the statistics aren’t real reliable.

If the airplane hits the water at speed, (ie inadvertantly) it’s not gonna be much different from hitting the land at spead. It’ll shred and so will everyone on board.

OTOH, if the situation requires a landing on water (scenarios such as fuel exhaustion, or an untenable fire on board far from land), that’s a very different, and eminently survivable, situation.

Sunny day, fairly calm seas, I’d far rather try to set my Boeing on the ocean than out in the countryside. Sure rescue is harder, but the odds of more folks less injured when the noise stops are far better. A bay or large lake is far better than rolling (or mountainous!) terrain.

Night time gets tricky, and high seas get trickier yet. In a hurricane/typhoon, it’s gonna get real ugly.

Per the manual, we’ll do it with normal landing flaps but no wheels. So the horizontal and vertical speeds at touchdown will be essentially the same as a normal runway landing. Ballpark 120-140 mph horizontally and 100-200 ft/min vertically.

At least that’s the goal. Nobody I work with is ultra-confident they’ll be able to perform this trick flawlessly the first time they try. Do it OK, yeah sure; do it perfectly, well maybe not.

Assuming decent luck & skill at the touchdown, the deceleration will be very abrupt, but within the design criteria of the seats, seatbelts and floor structure. Also within the absorbtive capabilities of the human body. After everything stops, the fuselage shell ought to be mostly intact, the interior should be mostly undamaged and the jet ought to float for at least a few minutes.

There have been several incidents since the 1950s where jets have been trying to land at an airport on a bay and ended up in the water short of the runway by anything from 3 miles to a few hundred feet. That situation is akin to a planned ditching as to speeds, but presumabley the crew was quite surprised when they hit the water. So their touchdown technique would be poor at best. In their favor, most such events have occured in bays or at least near the sea shore, so tumultuous seas haven’t been a factor.

In all cases the aircraft was left basically intact or broken into two pieces and floated for several minutes. One floated for 4 hours as I recall. Many passengers suffered minor injuries and a few got killed.

In all, a water landing is a very survivable event.

In fact these days the most likely way for you to end up in the water is not a planned ditching but rather using an airport situated adjacent to water and then have either a botched approach resulting in landing in the water short of the airport, or some problem just after takeoff resulting in the airplane settling back into the water.

Your role on every flight is to 1) be paying attention to the takeoff and landing. 2) know where the two nearest exits are, 3) wear the seatbelt snugly, 4) if the stuff hits the fan, wait for the motion to stop, then unbuckle and move smartly towards the best exit without getting your crap out of the overhead bins.

In a few jet accidents, nobody has any chance at all. In the vast majority of accidents / incidents / headline events, most folks are still intact when the motion stops. It’s what they, as individuals, do in the next 60 seconds that determines whether 10% survive or 90% survive.

8

I think you are referring to Ethiopian flight 961 which was a Boeing 767. Although the video didn’t look all that bad to me at the time, the number of casualties was actually very high. I tried to google an exact number, and got varying results, but all were approximately 125 killed and about 50 survivors. The plane was only about 500 yards off shore when it hit the water.

On this page you can see how badly torn up the plane actually was:
http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/9611/24/ethiopia.hijack/#waters

This page has a couple of still photos that look like frames from the video as I recall it:
http://www.airborne.org/flying/forum_fly1.htm#Termination of Hijack

Further on down the same page there’s a 707 that ditched and came out of the whole ordeal in a much better condition:
http://www.airborne.org/flying/forum_fly1.htm#Ditched B707

9

The short answer is “YES”.

It’s not called a “water landing”, it’s called “ditching”.

It has been done in the past. The incident that Q.E.D. refers to actually involved a 767. There were many fatalities, but they were caused because the hijackers attempted to land the airplane, NOT the crew.

For the three most well-known ditchings (including that one), go here.

Colinmarshall, at 600 mph water is just as dangerous as land; in fact it’s the same at 100 mph. Why would this make a difference? Do you assume that airplanes land at 600 mph?

To separate the wheat from the chaff: if an airplane (jet airliner for the discussion) is out of control when it hits the surface (ground, sea, beach, whatever) the result will be the same: destruction.

If we are talking about CONTROLLED flight, then things get much better. During a planned ditching, the pilots will line the airplane up with the prevailing waves (landing parallel to the waves, and on the top of the prevailing wave) thus preventing the fuselage from breaking.

How long the airplane remains above water is subject to massive amounts of debate.

The important point to take home is:

We ARE trained on how to ditch an airplane. We will line up with the waves, extend all the flaps we have (but NOT the gear), and put the airplane down at the absolute minimum speed that we still have control.

This gives us the greatest chance of survival (for us and the passengers).

The Most Imprtant Point Of All: The success of a ditching depends almost entirely on the sea state. If the sea has 14-foot waves, any airplane trying to ditch is doomed. If the sea has 3-foot waves, the airplane had better be lucky. To survive, you need a calm sea and a calm crew.

10

Thanks for that. I knew it was a Boeing plane, but I thought it was a '37. It’s been a while since I saw the video, and it didn’t look that bad to me, either.

11

Also, welcome LSLGuy!

There are several pilots here on the SDMB:

Broomstick is the master of private pilot and small airplane issues. She always has detailed and well-thought-out posts.

Johnny L.A. now lives in the Pacific NW but can speak volumes about flying helicopters. He is a master of many subjects, but still seems to have his passion for flying.

And I am a fellow airline pilot. I welcome someone else who can answer questions in GQ that come up while I’m out on a trip!

12

Howdy, all - I hear I got paged earlier in the thread but I was out of town for Thanksgiving. If I had been here I would have said wait for the jet-jockies to show up for a detailed explanation, but I seem to have appeared after the fact.

Another factor in surviving a water landing (after the aircraft is down and you’ve “deplaned”) is the water temperature. I don’t know about ocean landings, but here near Lake Michigan about 2/3 of the year the water is too cold for a person to survive longer than a minute or three without passing out from hypothermia unless they’re wearing a survival suit. Most folks who ditch in the big lake do not survive, particularly in winter, even if they were uninjurned in the landing (“watering”?)