Hats off to this man!

[Tez3]

I have just been watching the news, the air traffic control tapes have been released of the flight where the Captain landed in the Hudson river. The Captain who must surely be the coolest headed man on this planet sounded as if landing in a river safely was something he did everyday!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7873716.stm

Obviously training comes into play here but surely the character of the man too is what makes this an amazing feat. How many of us could cope in a situation we train for with such aplomb? It does show the truth perhaps of the RAF saying "there's bold pilots and old pilots but no old bold pilots"
The news also has said another pilot has landed in the water in Australia. I wonder if the first landing influenced the second ie he did it so can I?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7874423.stm

 

[CoryKS]

True professionals. You never really know the guys behind the cockpit door, but I feel a lot better about flying knowing that pilots such as these are out there.

 

[FearlessFreep]

It's an interesting convergence that this happens so close ot the story about the Areoflot pilot who was supposedly drunk and the airline said it really didn't matter because the planes pretty much fly themselves anyway

 

[redantstyle]

good gung fu.

 

[exile]

But they really did luck out on this one. The pilot of that US Airways plane runs his own private consulting firm which has, as one of its special research areas, the maintenance of discipline and group cohesion in flight crews under extreme crisis circumstances, which he then extends to working groups in other high-risk situations. This guy in effect wrote the book on how to keep your crew operating as a team even in the kind of ultra-frightening scenario that that flight found itself in. That, combined with his deep and varied flight experience over decades, might well have made him the one guy in the world you would have picked to be in the pilot's seat under those conditions. A lot of people probably used up a major chunk of their lifetime supply of very good luck that day...

 

[Tez3]

It's an interesting convergence that this happens so close ot the story about the Areoflot pilot who was supposedly drunk and the airline said it really didn't matter because the planes pretty much fly themselves anyway

It's true they fly themselves...you just need a pilot (sober) for the takeoffs and landings. Oh and the emergencies!

 

[arnisador]

Luck, skill, experience...one needs it all in a case like this, with lots of the first.

 

[Archangel M]

You can trust machines to do routine operations perfectly almost every time. You still need a human being when quick decisions and creative solutions need to be achieved.

 

[Gordon Nore]

It's a great story, made even greater by the fact that the pilot has emphasized that he and his crew responded as a team. He could have appeared on every talk show by now, but he has resisted the spotlight and limited his appearances (that I know of) to the Presidential Inauguration and the Super Bowl.

 

[grydth]

It's a great story, made even greater by the fact that the pilot has emphasized that he and his crew responded as a team. He could have appeared on every talk show by now, but he has resisted the spotlight and limited his appearances (that I know of) to the Presidential Inauguration and the Super Bowl.

All of the above being quite true, and being well within his rights....

Yet I cannot help but feel that this is the type of person the world would benefit from seeing more of. Look at the quality of what we usually see overexposed on talk shows... TV has become one long freak show, Talk shows talk on but say nothing, and it isn't "News" if it isn't bad...

 

[exile]

All of the above being quite true, and being well within his rights....

Yet I cannot help but feel that this is the type of person the world would benefit from seeing more of. Look at the quality of what we usually see overexposed on talk shows... TV has become one long freak show, Talk shows talk on but say nothing, and it isn't "News" if it isn't bad...

But it's like what they say about power: the only people you can trust with it are the people who fundamentally don't want it and who basically mistrust it—like Cincinnatus, who went back to his plough. The people we most need to see and hear about are probably people who least want that attention and foregrounding, much less adulation and celebrity.

This came up in another thread in a different context: those whom we judge, with hindsight, to have been the moral heroes of their time are often people who believed that what they did out of ethical conviction was nothing special, but merely a necessary choice, given their values. Over and over again, this angle keeps emerging in different guises....