Flight 1549

An amazing thing happened yesterday in New York.  An airliner crashlanded, in the Hudson River, and no one died.  In fact. the worst injury was had by a woman who broke both legs, and she got off alright too.  Although the air temperature was in the 20’s and the river temp was in the low 40’s, when all were off the plane, no one suffered very much.

The pilot did everything Right.  Everything.

I was a Gas Turbine systems tech on a Navy ship, and you know, gas turbines are another name for jet engines like the ones on Flight 1549.  We knew what would happen to our engines if they sucked "Foreign Objects".  A gas turbine is a series of "fans", blades spinning at thousands of revolutions per minute, and for them to ingest anything but air generally means the end of the engine.  "Catastophic failure" was the term we used.  Break a blade and it is sucked into others and breaks them in a chain failure that destroys the engine.  While training, we watched a video of what happens when a gas turbine sucks a 10-20 bolt – a small piece of metal that nearly instantly kills the engine by breaking blades, which get sucked into the blades behind them and break them, which break the ones behind them – a cascading failure that nearly instantly destroys the engine and it’s case, blowing the debris out the back and sides of the engine.  It happens almost without conscious comprehension for the operators – one minute, the engines rotors are spinning in unison and in the next, it’s trash.  Sucking a bird, a big bird like a goose, is as bad a sucking a bolt.

The pilot of an aircraft has three dimensions to think in; on the ship, we only had to think of two – we were already on the surface.  Our engines were mounted in enclosures to contain the debris, should they fail but mounted on an airplane’s wing, there is not much to contain the pieces of the engines as they fail, and that failure typically sprays shrapnel to the sides and the rear of the engine – that no one was seriously hurt by pieces of the engines was amazing.

With both engines out, the airplane dropped in altitude rapidly, but the pilot, an experienced glider pilot too, guided it into a perfect landing on the river – so perfect that the fuselage stayed intact, so that although river water filled the body of the plane, it filled much more slowly than it might have otherwise, and everyone had time to get out.  The crew was well trained and acted professionally and competantly, ushering the passengers onto the plane’s wings.  The pilot was the last person off the plane, after checking twice for anyone left behind.  Plenty of river traffic responded immeadiately and got everyone off the wings and onto dry surfaces.

People will call this a miracle.  If it’s not, I don’t know what you’d call it otherwise.