QotD: Are Birds The New Terrorists?
A flock of birds took down a US airliner. What is Bush 43 planning on doing about it?
Tags: Satire
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- Common Sense Political Thought » Blog Archive » Some weekend linkage | January 17, 2009
Okay. This pilot is being treated like some kind of hero, but isn’t being ready for this thing and not crashing part of the job?
Is it me? I mean, I think not crash landing a plane would be a big part of the job description. Maybe after 8 years of Bush, this country is so used to people not doing what they are getting paid to that that when someone actually does their job it seems like a great accomplishment.
Well, if we rid the country of all the trees, then the birds will be broken of their network and they all collapse. Therefore, let’s attack the trees!
Extraordinary rendition for birds!
Although I think they call that Kentucky Fried Chicken in the US.
Dick Cheney is way ahead of everyone on this.
LOL@anon!
We should send those birds to Guantanamo.
Alfred Hitchcock tried to warn us. Randy Johnson showed us how. But did we listen?
I think there is a sleeper cell in the poplar tree behind my house.
Okay. This pilot is being treated like some kind of hero, but isn’t being ready for this thing and not crashing part of the job?
“Is it me? I mean, I think not crash landing a plane would be a big part of the job description. Maybe after 8 years of Bush, this country is so used to people not doing what they are getting paid to that that when someone actually does their job it seems like a great accomplishment”
Yes, it is you. The Captain of this plane made the right decision with very little time and then displayed the superior airmanship to land the plane in the water. His “presence of mind” leadership is what has earned him accolades.
We are screened, selected and trained to deal with emergencies like this as part of our jobs.
Maybe people get the idea of getting loads of money while being frauds from Frankiln Raines, the Clinton appointee who defrauded Fannie Mae for almost $18 million dollars?
Yeah, that must be it Mike, Clinton…uh huh.
I am impressed by the pilot’s command presence and his flying skills. Landing an unpowered airliner in water isn’t a sure thing at all. Even more impressive was the response of the emergency crews and the volunteer rescuers.
I was very impressed with what the pilot did. I think it was heroic and he showed very good judgment. He deserves all the praise he can get. The actions of the airplane crew and the rescuers was also quite heroic.
There’s a video on CNN of the plane landing in the water (taken by surveillance cameras. The plane looked like it just floated onto the water. Very, very impressive.
If he so much as dipped one wing too low so that an engine or a wing hit the water before the fuselage did, the aircraft would have somersaulted and broken into pieces.
If he came in too fast the plane might have broken up. It’s only surrounded by a 1/8th inch aluminum skin at most.
He had to gradually let gravity slowly take the plane down without stalling the wings.. too slow of a speed and a wing might lose it’s lift, causing the plane to start to flip left or right…
There was alot to consider.. it’s just not like he looked for a swimming pool and dived in.
All while avoiding ferries in the busiest section of the river, and considering noone.. ever in the 80 some odd years of flight have successfully done what he did without losing a single life… yeah, I would say it is impressive.
I just read an article which stated the crew had 3 1/2 minutes from impact a 3000 feet to landing.
Brian,
Isn’t that what is supposed to happen? Shouldn’t passengers be expected to be returned to the ground when predictable failures like bird strikes happen?
Maybe I’m too demanding. Not dying is a big part of the service from my point of view.
He had to gradually let gravity slowly take the plane down without stalling the wings.. too slow of a speed and a wing might lose it’s lift, causing the plane to start to flip left or right…
That’s not flying… that’s “falling with style.”
If this is such a miracle, it means that everyone should expect to die when you get on a plane. Awesome!
I suspect, when he speaks about it, Chesley B. Sullenberger III will be much less impressed with his accomplishment than the media and I will be proven right (again) and the world will be proven wrong.
…just like when you claimed Dennis Spivack would beat Castle.
I was wrong and the world was right on that one. (I also said Protack could upset Bill Lee. So my record is not 100%)
Example of what could go wrong:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PresBOtxFaY
Heroic, I’m not so sure about.
Skilled? Hell, damn, yeah.
Out of ten water ditches, how many times should each outcome happen?
If the answer is 6 times out of 10 everyone dies – then people who think this Sully guy is the next Chuck Norris may have a point.
I think the ratio is 8 times out of 10 most people live – so big whoop. He did his job.
I think we should decide whether or not he is a hero after we determine his political party affiliation. 🙂
Very good point, A1…LOL
Looking at the pilot’s credentials, I’ve got my guesses.
In response, Bush is planning to send Cheney out to shoot pigeons in the park.
Actually, I was thinking of you when I wrote that…
Happy New Year, Mike – here’s to another year of vitriol. 🙂
I can only hope…
Now, will we be meeting at the shindig on the 24th? Or will you be showing up and remaining incognito?
It would be like controlling your car without brakes while going down a mountain. 95% of the time you are going to bump into something, run off the side of the road, or tumble down the side of the mountain.
Every so often you make it to the bottom in tact and everyone lives.
yeah, it was skill, luck, experience… but in reality, you are flying in a tin can 35,000 feet in the air. Technology is great, but things fail and shit happens, and you should expect to die when it does. They make multiple redundancies to minimize the failure rate, but just through the law of averages the right sequence of events happens.
The Concorde crashed because a tire shredded after it rolled over something on the runway, shredding and flinging high speed rubber through the wings, breaking up the fuel tanks, starting a fire. Ruined a 25+ year safety record.
You can’t engineer everything, and birds are one of them.
In my four years aft Dover AFB, I know of two separate bird strike incidents on takeoff. One was a flock of birds and took out three engines of the four, the pilot barely flew it back in, fully loaded, on the number one engine, farthest out on the wing. The pilot was ordered to ditch it in the Delaware Bay, and refused, brought it back in. If that other engine would have been hit, they would have fallen like a rock.
Another was a single engine strike, and with three other engines there was no problem getting it to land.
This crew had zero thrust, they basically controlled a crash, gliding it in. One strong gust of wind, one false move anywhere in this story and the outcome would have been different.
So yeah, aircraft defy nature and physics, and when nature strikes or the perfect storm of technology failures hits, prepare to die.
It’s a house of cards, and you’re sitting on top.
Here is more detail of the timeline of events for that flight.
No one expects to die when they get on a plane, but when there is a serious problem it is going to be many orders of magnitude more complicated and with more possibility for catastrophe than if you were in your car. Pilots are not just trained to fly their planes, but to also manage known (and unknown) in-flight problems. This is a serious skill set, even though we are all trained to treat getting on and off of these vehicles as casually as if you are catching the Chinese bus to NYC. And unplanned landings due to equipment failure inflight (two engines burned out on this plane — two) are by no means a sure thing to survive. A good pilot helps to ensure that as many as possible survive.
This is the dumbest argument ever on DL.
Hey Mike,
Sorry, I won’t be there, in or out of cognito.
If Mike Protack could have landed that plane, do you think Sarah Palin could have, too?
Bush would have flown it into the Empire State Building, and then declared war on flying squirrels.
Oh my…lol
Good thing there wasn’t enough time for Cheney to order it shot down.
One of my correspondents sent me this blog entry showing the flight track of that plane.
Once his engines burned out, that pilot functionally had a glider — which has none of the fine controls that a fully powered plane has.
And mad props to the cabin crew too — who got 150+ people out of that plane in about 3 minutes.