Turn on just about any news station and you will see this story today. Apparently a US Airways flight hit a flock of Canadian Geese that shutdown the engines causing the pilot of the plane to make an emergency landing in the Hudson River. In effect the pilot had control over a sinking paperweight as it plummeted towards the ground. From watching the coverage of this amazing event I have a few observations that I wanted to point out.
My first observation is that this is being called an emergency landing. I question whether the term emergency landing is an accurate one for what took place. Is there a line between a crash and an emergency landing? If a plane ends up under 10 miles from where it started in the middle of a river I would go as far as to classify that as a crash, not a landing. It may be a very safe and excellently executed crash but looking at what happened in this case it was still a crash. A few things have to take place for a landing to occur, the largest is that the planes wheel's have to touch down on dry land (which in this case it did not).
A second observation that I have is the fact that you see these bundled up news reporters in sub-zero conditions talking to soaking wet victims in some cases still wearing just a t-shirt and a pair of jeans. Don't you think that it would be the proper thing to do for the reporter to offer the victim their jacket? These people have just been through a plane crash (yes I said it CRASH not emergency landing) and are shocked from the craziness that is taking place around them, the least the reporter could do would be to offer them their coat.
A last observation is the fact that this plane came fairly close to hitting the George Washington Bridge. How horrific would that have been? Those are two things that people may be the most afraid of, bridges and planes. I feel the catastrophe of a plane crashing into a bridge would deter people from both flying and crossing over bridges for a good amount of time.
This is just one of those stories where in the face of a looming tragedy everything went right, something we can all be thankful for.
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