Thread: U.S. Airways PLANE DOWN

For all the Military establishment Haters out there...........Aren't you glad they Produce some of the World's Best Aviators !
Another shining example of how having a strong military Saves Lives!

Originally Posted by MotoZ

Originally Posted by Nouniquenicks

Him landing it is amazing, how wide is this river? For him to land it with it ripping to pieces would require him to flare like a bitch before he hit the water (and that would require a lot of room), trying to hit it with hardly any speed.

Best glide speed of the A320 is about 140 knots (161 MPH). That's "hardly any speed" for a passenger jet.

Yes, but you don't hit the water at that speed

Originally Posted by Nouniquenicks

Yes, but you don't hit the water at that speed

What speed do they hit at?

The stall speed is 113 KIAS and I doubt that the pilot took it down that low. My guess is that he held it about 20 KIAS over that, which would put it at about 135 KIAS (155 MPH). Still hauling ass. Gentlemen's bet? I know he didn't drop it in at 35 MPH.

Originally Posted by dex71

Chosen has remained quiet.

And he better. He already won enough today. He bombed the shit out of our squad in BF2.

Having lived outside NYC for years the Hudson River is about 3 miles wide at the point of impact. The only possible thing he could have hit would have been the GW Bridge there were no buildings that were in the way.

Miraculous.
That’s the descriptor that continues to pop up in many accounts of the successful landing of US Air Flight 1549 in the Hudson River on Thursday. Aviation experts see the events a little differently. What happened to captain Chesley Sullenberger III and his crew was a piece of tremendously bad luck, mitigated by a few turns of equally stunning good fortune and a sequence of smart decisions by the captain and his crew. Here’s a pilot’s eye view of what went right during the emergency, the landing and the rescue that saw all 150 passengers rescued safely from the plane. –Allen St. John

Breathing Room
If the majority of expert speculation of Flight 1549's ditch is correct, it was a bird, or a flock of birds that took out the Airbus A-320's engines. Bird strikes—a bird or flock of them being sucked into the engine’s turbine—are relatively common, according to Fred George, a senior editor at Business and Commercial Aviation and a former Navy pilot who has clocked hours on an Airbus A-320. Most of those bird strikes cause no damage to the plane. A bird strike that is serious enough to damage an engine is exceedingly rare, but doesn’t result in a full-on emergency. The plane usually can simply turn around and makes a largely routine landing on one engine. A double bird strike bad enough to disable both engines, which is what most likely befell the US Airways jet, is a stroke of massive bad luck.

But it could have been much worse. If the bird strike had happened seconds earlier, right after takeoff, it would have likely proved disastrous. The plane probably would have plunged into rough and frigid water of Long Island Sound at very high speed. And those extra seconds proved crucial. “Once he got the thing up to 3,000 feet, now he’s got a little wiggle room in terms of forming a plan of action,” explains George.

The Right Stuff
When both engines failed, Captain Sullenberger found himself in the kind of situation that doesn’t arise even on a pilot simulator. At that point, “he found himself in the position of being an experimental test pilot,” says George. So Sullenberger did what all good aviators do (and what glider pilots know best): He kept flying the plane. “An airplane doesn’t quit flying when the engines quit as long as the wings maintain their structural integrity” explains retired pilot John Wiley, a 27-year veteran of US Air. During a normal landing the pilot pulls the engines back to idle. (The fly-by-wire avionics in the Airbus A320 features a warning system that says “Retard,” in an English accent, to remind the pilot to cut the throttle when the plane reaches an altitude of 50 feet.) Sullenberger’s challenge was to find the familiar in the midst of a dire emergency. “You take the picture you’ve got and you turn it into one that you recognize,” says Wiley. “You visualize the river like it’s just another runway.”

Hope Floats
The cockpit crew had three choices: Return to LaGuardia, push on toward Teterboro, or land in the Hudson. The plane was going too fast to return to LaGuardia, and would have likely overshot the runway without the engines working in reverse to slow the plane. Getting the plane to Teterboro would have risky, since the airport’s short runways aren't designed for a large commercial jet. This left option number three, experts believe, as the safest choice. If you have to put a jet down, the Hudson River is close to an ideal venue. It’s wide and the water is relatively calm. The plane was also filled with jet fuel, which is lighter (6.7 pounds per gallon vs 8 lb/gal) and more buoyant than water, which helped it stay afloat long enough to evacuate.

A Team Effort
While much credit has rightfully gone to Sullenberger, his co-pilot Jeffrey Skiles deserves to be commended as well. In an emergency, the US Air procedures call for the co-pilot to take the controls while the captain makes the decisions, free from the mechanical burden of flying the plane—this is called Pilot Monitoring or PM, in aviation parlance. It’s not clear whether whether Sullenberger or Skiles actually landed the plane, but the man in the PM seat would have been plenty busy, calling out speed and altitude, and, if there was time, running through the plane’s ditching checklist, and possibly pushing the ditch button found on the Airbus A-320 which seals some of the ports on the airplane’s belly.

Onboard Communicators
Of the three mandates in this classic aviator’s truism—Aviate, Navigate, and Communicate—the last may have been most important in this emergency. Sullenberger and the crew followed this tenant exceptionally well.

“He communicated his intentions very calmly to the air traffic controllers and to his on-board team,” John Wiley says. This enabled first responders to arrive on the scene as quickly as possible, and kept passengers from panicking as they were rescued. “It allowed the passengers to think they were going to get out of this alive,” he says.

Don’t’ underestimate the actions of the flight crew. While on an uneventful flight most of their time pouring coffee, updating the flight log and distributing headsets, flight attendants are highly trained, and are required to practice in-water simulations of this kind of an evacuation. On Thursday, the flight crew kept a plane full of passengers calm, donning their life jackets and helping the women and children off first. Thanks to this, they avoided the onboard panic and chaos that could have made a bad situation much worse. Furthermore, “they had the presence of mind not to open the back door which would have flooded the aircraft,” says Wiley, who is also a contributing editor at Business and Commercial Aviation.

Local Response
If the Hudson was the best, if improbable place for an emergency landing, Sullenberger couldn’t have picked a better spot on the river to land. The location, near New York City's bustling midtown, is also where several ferry lines cross. Because of this, boats were on the scene in a matter of minutes, bearing crews who have been trained to deal with rescuing panicked civilians. A police helicopter with trained divers was also on the scene in a few minutes—the pilot having the presence of mind not to get too close to the scene where the prop wash could have actually blown passengers into the icy river. In an act symbolic of his grace under pressure, Sullenberger’s last act was to calmly walk up and down the aisles of the plane not once, but twice, to make sure that everyone was evacuated. “Sully’s not only a good pilot, he’s a good guy,” says Wiley, who has worked with the captain. “He really earned his fourth stripe.”

http://www.popularmechanics.com/blog...s/4300211.html

Originally Posted by MotoZ

Originally Posted by Nouniquenicks

Yes, but you don't hit the water at that speed

What speed do they hit at?

The stall speed is 113 KIAS and I doubt that the pilot took it down that low. My guess is that he held it about 20 KIAS over that, which would put it at about 135 KIAS (155 MPH). Still hauling ass. Gentlemen's bet? I know he didn't drop it in at 35 MPH.

Just watched a documentary on this crash. The plane hit the water at, quote, "over 150 MPH."

Nailed it. :10

Here's a good video to compare airplane glide speed to car speed. This is police video of an AT6 landing dead stick (engine out) on a crowded freeway. The AT6 passes a moving car like it is standing still. My guess is that the AT6 is doing about 120 MPH.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zHLcnXZNqc