Way to deflate last year's feel-good story of the year: The National Transportation Safety Board is issuing its final report on the amazing Hudson River splash landing of Flight 1549 in January 2009. But the Wall Street Journal reports, "Pilots who used simulators to recreate the accident—including suddenly losing both engines after sucking in birds at 2,500 feet—repeatedly managed to safely land their virtual airliners at La Guardia."
There is a caveat: It's not like Captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger would have known that he would have been able to return and "clear Manhattan's skyline had they tried to return to the Queens airport they left minutes before." And the simulations don't take into account the split-second decision making that Sullenberger and his co-pilot Jeffrey Skiles had to make. One expert said that Sully "could have made a different call but his decision used the best information he had... and was based on his experience and instincts."
The report also found that it was lucky that the plane had flotation devices, even though it wasn't required for that kind of plane, and that passengers were lucky that there were the different boats (like the NY Waterway ferries) available to rescue them. NTSB chairwoman Deborah Hersman said, "It was the outcome of a perfect storm of circumstances. If the visibility had been poor; if the flight had simply met, rather than exceeded, safety equipment standards; if the incident took place over open water where rescue vessels were not at hand; if even a single element had changed, the ditching could have ended not as a miracle but as a tragedy."
