perseus
Active member
I’ve just seen a documentary on this called The Miracle of the Hudson Plane Crash on UK C4, which included eyewitness accounts of the accident from passengers, rescuers and witnesses.
Evidentially there is a "ditching" switch on the Airbus A320 that closes valves and openings underneath the aircraft which is meant to slow flooding in a water landing. The flight crew did not activate the switch during the incident because the instruction was on the end of a checklist for restarting the engines that had priority. Perhaps this might not have mattered anyway since a passenger opened one of the rear doors allowing the aircraft to flood anyway, whether the valves being open contributed to the rear being low I’m not sure. The only person on the flight who was seriously injured, one of the stewardesses, managed to partially close this door.
One of the front escape rafts/shutes didn’t fully deploy to start with, which meant some passengers were asked to jump in the river, and others fell of the wings being slippery. Others jumped off the wing being frightened the aircraft would explode. They quickly changed their mind once in the freezing water and tried to scramble back.
There were problems with the ferries as well. Some nearly rotated into the passengers outside the aircraft due to the swirling river and the ferry decks were too high to get the passengers off.
To cut a long story short, it was not as straightforward as it looked despite a safe ditch since the passengers nearly drowned or froze to death. There was just enough time to evacuate the passengers and fish out the ones that had jumped or slipped into the river.
Some more information is here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Airways_Flight_1549
This is not the first successful ditching of a large aircraft
Aeroflot Tupolev 124 ditching in Neva river, October, 1963, 52 occupants, 52 survivors, narrowly missed a tugboat which sped to plane, cast a line and towed it to shallow waters, where the occupants were deboarded onto tug. 100% survival rate
Pan Am Flight 943 Boeing Stratocruiser "Sovereign of the Skies", October 16, 1956, in the Pacific between Honolulu and San Francisco, 30 passengers and crew, 30 survivors, 100% survival rate
Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 2, Boeing Stratocruiser, April 2, 1956, ditched in the 430 feet Puget Sound, 38 passengers, all survived the ditching but 5 could not recover from the freezing waters, 87% survival rate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_landing#Emergency_water_landings
Evidentially there is a "ditching" switch on the Airbus A320 that closes valves and openings underneath the aircraft which is meant to slow flooding in a water landing. The flight crew did not activate the switch during the incident because the instruction was on the end of a checklist for restarting the engines that had priority. Perhaps this might not have mattered anyway since a passenger opened one of the rear doors allowing the aircraft to flood anyway, whether the valves being open contributed to the rear being low I’m not sure. The only person on the flight who was seriously injured, one of the stewardesses, managed to partially close this door.
One of the front escape rafts/shutes didn’t fully deploy to start with, which meant some passengers were asked to jump in the river, and others fell of the wings being slippery. Others jumped off the wing being frightened the aircraft would explode. They quickly changed their mind once in the freezing water and tried to scramble back.
There were problems with the ferries as well. Some nearly rotated into the passengers outside the aircraft due to the swirling river and the ferry decks were too high to get the passengers off.
To cut a long story short, it was not as straightforward as it looked despite a safe ditch since the passengers nearly drowned or froze to death. There was just enough time to evacuate the passengers and fish out the ones that had jumped or slipped into the river.
Some more information is here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Airways_Flight_1549
This is not the first successful ditching of a large aircraft
Aeroflot Tupolev 124 ditching in Neva river, October, 1963, 52 occupants, 52 survivors, narrowly missed a tugboat which sped to plane, cast a line and towed it to shallow waters, where the occupants were deboarded onto tug. 100% survival rate
Pan Am Flight 943 Boeing Stratocruiser "Sovereign of the Skies", October 16, 1956, in the Pacific between Honolulu and San Francisco, 30 passengers and crew, 30 survivors, 100% survival rate
Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 2, Boeing Stratocruiser, April 2, 1956, ditched in the 430 feet Puget Sound, 38 passengers, all survived the ditching but 5 could not recover from the freezing waters, 87% survival rate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_landing#Emergency_water_landings
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