Ditching is not a suicide
Yesterday an US Airways Airbus 320 (flight 1549) landed in the Hudson river after both its engines were hit by birds. What’s really stunning is that everyone onboard survived (150 passengers and 5 crew) — nearly a unique outcome in such situations. New York Times has a nice visualization of the incident, and Wikipedia gives more details.
I am really impressed by the perfection of all this. The flight’s captain, by the way, has an interesting background.
Image cropped from grego!’s photo at Flickr
Photos → the first published photo @ Twitter, by grego! @ Flickr, and at TimesOnline.
Update: Videos of the splashdow is now available (in the second clip action starts at 1:58)
In 1996 Ethiopian Airlines flight 961 was hijacked and crashed into the sea as a result of running out of fuel. Upon impact, the plane broke into millions of pieces and only 52 out of 175 onboard survived. Below is the footage of the impact.
In 1963 a small passenger jet, Tu-124, landed in the Neva river in Saint-Petersbourgh, USSR, with no causalities. The story behind it is so bizarre I would not believe it had not it happened in Russia. Note how close a bridge is to the crash site.
16th January 2009
