Has one, with modern military jets?
I just made up “pull a Sully” but I can’t be the first.
Safe water landing ala Sullenberger.
Sully was a good pilot, no doubt. The miracle is that no one was hurt in that event. As far as the piloting skills involved, any competent pilot can ditch a plane in the water. Remember, Sully didn’t have waves to make the landing more difficult, he had a relatively flat surface.
Not to take anything away from Sully, but honestly, I’ll bet military pilots could have done it just as successfully.
Shape of the plane, stall speed, wave height, all have a big input.
Many many pilots have the skill.
A lot fewer have the ability to be that cool under that pressure & with many lives at stake.
Military has a great pool of good to draw from but remember, hitting the numbers ( carrier pilot ) does not guarantee skillful smoothness and delicate control. At certain points, you need innate talent of art, not just skill.
Example:
Back in the day before all the fancy auto pilots and accurate Navigation equipment for the civilian market aerial mapping was done by little companies in little planes.
Yeah, yeah, the military, I know, we used the WWII Fairchild T-12 cameras bought surplus but they ( military ) had unlimited resources and did not have to make a profit and the pilots would not get fired if they could not do it… but I digress.
Anyway, I had under 500 hrs when I first stated do it in an old C-180 ( 1956 model ) for a small local company. I had the knack through no fault of my own. I just could do it. I had no idea I could or couldn’t.
As the years went by, the need for other pilots would happen time to time and especially during bad economics for the airlines, we would get some rather high time, over qualified pilots looking to not starve but still fly. I thought it would be easy for them. No so much.
The technical ideas and requirements were candy to them but all their time had been getting from A to B, even the ones who did acrobatics or had their own pvt planes. The idea of flying diagonally cross country using your eyeballs only and staying within 100 feet either side of a line on a map or of something on the ground, passing over two points from 800 feet to 4-5 apart miles while 3000’ above the ground and hold it straight, well, that was a whole new world to them.
The were great pilots for the most part, it was doing something that just was not their skill set. There was a bit if art or natural ability to it. Did not make the mapping pilot better, just a different skill set.
In conclusion: Sully was good but in this particular time & circumstance, he was the best and the one who did it with no advance warning or practice.
Many times in crash investigation, the will program a SIM with Black Box INFO and have qualified pilots see if there was something that they could have done to safe the day or could be added to training. Many times, with all the info, knowing what was going to happen, could not change the outcome. Sometimes they could.
For no amount of money would I do that flight with any pilot, even Sully now. It was done then. Has zero bearing on what will happen the next time even if exactly a duplication right down to the last 100 feet.
IMO, as with most things but especially flying, the using of the word ‘routine’ is just us whistling in the dark as we pass the cemetery.
I think you’d have a lot more difficulty pulling a Sully in a fighter just because the stall speed is higher. Sully was able to slow the plane down and drag its tail in the water for a bit to slow it even further before it splashed completely into the Hudson, and even so the impact was enough to rip off one of the engines (it hit a lot harder than it looked in the video). A fighter won’t be able to slow itself as much and will therefore slam into the water at a much higher speed.
Military cargo planes, on the other hand, are designed for short takeoffs and landings and therefore have a much lower stall speed. You might actually find it a bit easier to Sully a cargo plane than a commercial passenger liner.
A C5 has a big belly, high wings. It might do well. A fighter jet has a small surface area on the main body. And as noted, a high landing speed. I think it would be very likely to dig in hard instead of skimming to a slow stop.
A large bodied aircraft, capable of low speed and drop rate will do best in a water landing.
There are a few aircraft designed to do just that. They land on their bellies in the water all the time. I used to fly in one often. ( passenger ) It came in very handy when the engine crapped out.
A fighter pilot would not do this - he’d eject instead. Touchdown would be too fast for a high chance of survival.
I’m no expert but, with the high wings, once ditched, would there be evacuation difficulties resulting from excessive rolling? A low wing aircraft, like most commercial airliners, would almost float horizontally (both longitudinally and laterally), whereas a C5 would roll a fair bit, would they not?
Hard to get much flatter than the Hudson River estuary in favorable weather.
Wiki water landing.
I just mentioned some of the basic landing issues.
But skipped a lot of details there too.
So many variables.
Ideally, you are landing straight into any wind. Calm water. So you can have even drag on contact with the water. Otherwise it can all go to spinning tumbling hell in an instant. Not sure how bad the wing droop is on a C5 during landing. Could easily catch a tip. But on most passenger jets, you will first catch an engine for sure.
In the C5 instance. Hopefully you did a fuel dump. Unfortunately, your big buoyant fuel tanks are in the overhead wings, not at water level like most passenger jets. Point to you. Yes I suppose the plane will tilt more immediately to one side. I don’t know if the empty fuel tanks would counteract the engine and wing weight. It might end up one wing under, one pointing up. Troublesome exit for sure. If you have time for that.
Damn near anybody can land on the water if they keep their cool. Finding the water from where and when Sully started, and correctly deciding that that was the best percentage play versus making for an airport or some sorta-flat sorta-empty land was where his magic came in. And he made a nice touchdown. The smooth water conditions and nearby immediate rescue flotilla helped prevent any follow-on injuries. That nobody froze or drowned was down to that.
Touching down smoothly given flat water is not that much harder than landing on land.
As folks have said, getting a good touchdown is not intrinsically harder in one type than another. Fighter types are going to have somewhat higher touchdown speeds, but less lever arm to cartwheel if they dig a wingtip. Close to a wash in terms of risk IMO. But, as said above, there’s no circumstance I’d choose to ditch over ejecting.
With bigger airplanes, high- versus low-wing is a big issue for post-touchdown survivability. A high-wing aircraft like most military transports & the B-52 will tend to sink the fuselage pretty quickly, then float with the wings laying on the surface. That’s bad.
A low-wing airplane like a typical jet airliner, an airliner-type cargo plane, or even a B-1 or B-2 will tend to float with the fuselage on top of the water. Which gives a lot more time for post-ditching egress.
Our general expectation is that in a planned water landing in a decent sea state, or even somehow falling out of the bottom of an approach over water and hitting the water unexpectedly (e.g. SFO or BOS), the airplane will at worst break into two pieces, killing a few folks right at the break point. Other than that the deceleration forces will be highly survivable and folks will be mostly uninjured as they start getting wet. The casualties will flow from the egress and time spent in the water awaiting rescue.
If we’re ditching into a typhoon, that’s another matter. Anybody not critically injured in the impact will be dead in half an hour from the elements. “Ditching” over the high Arctic where the ocean is solid is also not a very attractive prospect.
How would a chop-and-drop work in a F-15 or such? Could the stall drop speed enough to make the drop without breaking the structure? Enough to be survivable?
Or would the drop shear the wings and instantly submerge the fuselage?
“SFO” “BOS”?
- B2 waterlanding…beyond awesome…*
ETA: * Then continues, descending Thunderball style into manta ray underwater supersub…Gotta call DARPA…*
OP note: yes, I was talking about aircraft, not pilot skills
SFO is San Francisco International Airport.
BOS is Boston-Logan International Airport.
Both airports are notorious for over-water approaches and runways that, if you land a tiny bit short, or overrun the end, puts you into a substantial body of water (not a retention pond or a stream). Logan had a nasty overrun in 1982 (photo). In the Asiana crash at SFO in of July, 2013, the plane’s tail hit a seawall - you only get one of those if you have water at the end of the runway. Most runways have a nice flat, hard surface going at least 1000 feet past the end of the runway. SFO and BOS don’t have that, instead they use a material called EMAS that acts like aerated concrete, breaking away under the aircraft and slowing it down quickly. Kennedy Airport has a similar issue, but SFO and BOS are at the head of the pack. Logan has some pretty nifty water rescue resourcesthat no other airport in the US has, just because all of their runways have water at the end.
Chop and drop? Turbine powered aircraft don’t really have a concept of separate power-on and power-off stall speeds. Although it might be a relevant tactic in something like a C-130. Given fighters’ very strong wings, even for the rapid transient from negative G to positive G that an upright vertical drop into water would cause, you could drop an F-15 from quite a height before the wings broke on impact. The pilot’s spine would be another matter.
The plan of attack for ditching a jet is to arrive level near the water at the minimum flying speed still with engine power if at all possible, then set up a very slow steady descent and simply await the arrival of the water. If the water is flat or nearly so that’s a pretty readily doable maneuver. The goal is to eliminate the variable of guestimating your height above an utterly unfamiliar surface with very few scale cues.
Absent power you’d want to glide down at a much faster speed, say Vmin + 100 knots, then slow in level flight at the lowest altitude you thought you could safely judge, then compromise rate of speed loss and rate of altitude loss to ensure you got into the water before getting to minimum speed. Absent power, once you’ve bled off all the speed you can and are at max AOA, your descent rate (and subsequent impact violence) will increase quickly. Best to not have too much farther to fall.
If there’s significant waves the challenge becomes judging height above the water and trying to time the touchdown for the correct point in the swell cycle. Most folks think most of us would screw that up at least partially, especially at night.
There are only a few scenarios that keep me awake some nights mulling, rehearsing, and desensitizing. Open ocean ditching is one of them.
Nowhere as neat at Boston’s boats, but I do note that there are small boats in a boat shed between the runway and the river at Reagan (National) airport in DC. I noticed it last time I flew out because a few fire/rescue trucks were there and people were doing something routine to the boats. They clearly were capable of quick launch into the water.
DCA (Washinton National) would be another place where a surprise landing a quarter mile short would be in the water, at least on some runways. Ditto PHL (Philadelphia). There are a couple runways at JFK that qualify too.
Or a failed takeoff.
I can’t imagine any military pilot of a fighter not punching out once he’s certain the aircraft isn’t pointed at a school or hospital.