The emergency landing of US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River is a story which will not be soon forgotten, especially in New York; I suspect many people now know a lot more about bird strikes and the damage they can cause than they ever did before, and there are probably a lot more folks out there who know what FOD means than there were. (For those of you who don’t, it stands for “foreign object damage.”) What should be remembered longest, however, is the extraordinary job the captain and first officer of that Airbus A320 did to keep everyone alive. As the Wall Street Journal summarized the accomplishment,
The pilots of US Airways Flight 1549 achieved one of the rarest and most technically challenging feats in commercial aviation: landing on water without fatalities.Although commercial jetliners are equipped with life vests and inflatable slides, there have been few successful attempts at water landings during the jet age. Indeed, even though pilots go through the motions of learning to ditch a plane in water, the generally held belief is that such landings would almost certainly result in fatalities.
And yet, with their engines disabled by a flock of geese, Capt. Chesley Sullenberger and his FO were able to keep their plane in the air and their speed up long enough to maneuver around the skyscrapers of Manhattan and land safely in the Hudson. It was a remarkable technical and personal accomplishment, and I’m not kidding: they deserve a medal. Congress needs to get on that.