Plane crahes into the Husdon River

Not sure why he deserves a medal. He did his job (damn well, and better than many others would have managed) and saved his own life in the process. That's just saving your own skin, doing your job, and getting paid for it. Why does that deserve a medal?

There's a vast difference between "doing your job" and "losing both engines on your jetliner, not having enough altitude to make it to any nearby landing strip, and then performing one of the single most difficult feats in aviation."

Yeah, I think the part about crash-landing an airplane in water with zero casualties slipped past SockPuppet.

The pilot should at least get a pay raise.

Or better yet, ramp up training so more or all pilots are this capable perhaps? Oh wait, hero worship... even better idea...

Don't see why he needs a medal, or a pay raise, he's probably going to make millions on all sorts of deals.

Right! And baseball teams can ramp up training so all of their pitchers are as good as Cy Young!

I don't know if he deserves a medal, but he sure deserves something. AFAIK, no pilot has ever ditched a passenger jet airliner in water without a single fatality.

If that turns out to be true, the pilot literally made history.

What makes it all the more impressive is that previous semi-successful jet airliner ditchings (defined loosely as events where more passengers lived than died) involved planes with the engines mounted on the tails, which is much easier to deal with than the under-wing mounted engines on this plane.

Fixed for better emphasis of the argument.

-TM

I don't know, if he was that good wouldn't he have missed the birds in the first place??

i dunno man, i have been chased by geese, they seem pretty persistent when they're pissed off, they will get ya!

Invisible geese. Very difficult to avoid. There's one in this picture:

Can you find it?

Fair enough.

In Newsweek they had an interview with another pilot who outlined that it is indeed very difficult for even an experienced, capable pilot to land an aircraft on water. (I mean, well, duh, but it was nice to have somebody who knows spell it out).

But with the no casualties thing, were the deaths in other crashes due to lower level of ability of the pilot, or were they unavoidable for anybody with any level of skill?

There's really too many variables to tell, and there haven't been that many passenger jetliner ditches (as opposed to uncontrolled crashes into water) - maybe nine total in the history of jet airliners. One plane was being actively hijacked (45 of 172 lived), and a 1970 ALM flight to St Maarten was ditched after running out of fuel (20 out of 57 passengers died). There was also a 1963 ditching of a smaller (56 passenger) russian Tupolev turbofan airliner into the Neva river after they ran out of fuel, which is the only other no-death water ditching of an airliner I've found.

In any case, the USAir ditching has been recognized as "textbook" by many authorities. With no engine power at all and a fire in one or both engines, the captain missed the George Washington bridge by 900 feet and intentionally set the plane down within 3000 feet of 3 different ferry terminals so as to effect a faster rescue. Pretty impressive.

I can't believe there's no video of this thing.

ETA I found it.

I was? How?

I think it's this one:

It's not a medal, but I think tickets to Obama's inauguration make for a pretty sweet reward.