Holy Crap

Hey, It looks just like on the safety card!! Fuselage and body intact.

Oh me of little faith. I always thought it would be broken up and sunk shortly after donning the life-vest and assuming the “brace” position.

Holy crap indeed. A goose is a big bird, and one of them would easily break a turbine fin. Once one fin goes, the engine’s unbalanced, and at 20k+ RPM can shake itself to bits in a very short period of time.

Yes, I always figured thing touches water and erupts into a smoking fireball.

@CheapBoy: For what it’s worth, a low-speed water landing is pretty dang safe, as long as you’ve got a way to get people off the plane. Planes (particularly those with retractable landing gear, ie all commercial jets) glide nicely over the water, and any pilot worthy of the title can drop the plane in the water very gently.

@IanJ:
That’s assuming the plane has aerodynamic integrity.

An amazing bit of flying.

@ManchuCandidate: Well, sure. Touch down a twisted wreck, and it becomes a more-twisted wreck. But for a simple engine-out landing, a water landing’s comparatively safe.

(FWIW, I’m a licensed pilot, and have given this topic some thought. The little, fixed-gear planes I fly would not land anywhere near as nicely in water, although I’d still ditch in water rather than land into a tree or rocky area.)

@IanJ: Witness said pilot dropped it in tail first, then it spun 90 degrees. Engines off – eerily quiet.

FlyingChainSaw: I remember flying US Airways in the mid-90s. Back then the safety cards had translations into several languages. Fiddling through it pre-flight, I noticed the German word printed above the emergency brace pictograms (including for water crashes):

Nichtlandung.

Ah, German.

No doubt the pilot was amazing, but the flight attendents deserve mad props too. To have every passenger out of the plane in two minutes even with the rear exits inaccessible is freaking wonderous.

Glad that everyone is safe, and the terrorist geese were quickly identified, saving us all from elevation to red-martial-law terror level.

For real, now: if Dubya even thinks of referencing this and 9/11 in the same breath tonight, it will take every ounce of discipline I have to keep me from breaking out a window at my condo and flinging myself out of it.

[ADD: I join the opinion of flippin eck.]

[ADD #2: Mistress Cynica: Chatter on the Audabon Society website suggests that a Canada Geese breakaway cell of al-Honqda is claiming responsibility.]

@chicago bureau: I recommend duct tape.

@Mistress Cynica: There’s a rumor flying around the city that the birds were terrorist seagulls, not terrorist geese.

@chicago bureau: Psst, I think it’s Notlandung. Still hilarious.

@blogenfreude: A flock of seagulls? Like the one hit wonder ’80s band?

@SanFranLefty: “And I swam, I swam so far away…”

@flippin eck: I think FAA certification requires full evacuation within 90 seconds with some doors inoperable, and the flight crew doesn’t know which doors until the event happens. I’ve seen videos of these tests and they are hairy.

Now that we’re back to mocking things – this from D-Listed:

Bear Grylls, the fake survivor bitch who has that show on the Discovery Channel, has welcomed a new baby boy with his wife Shara. They already hate their child, because they named him Huckleberry Edward Jocelyne Grylls. Huckleberry. As in Hound. As in Finn. As in fucking Huckleberry. What is this boy supposed to do with that name? Travel along the damn Mississippi River and speak in a slow Southern drawl. Or grow up to be a pot of jam.

This isn’t Bear’s first time at the fucked up baby name rodeo. They named their second son Marmaduke. Marmafuckingduke!!! Yes, like that big ass cartoon dog! That is pure evil. These people have bear jizz for brains. Somebody seriously stop them from having more kids, because you know they will name their next one Boo Boo or Snagglepuss. I’m being serious.

@blogenfreude: No, no, no! I LOVE LOVE LOVE Bear Grylls. He will be Husband #3, and I was heartbroken when he recently injured his shoulder on some sort of charity expedition. I would name our children any funky thing under the sun if he were mine. Yes, yes I would.

w/r/t SD airport — I used to work at the Naval Hospital in Balboa Park, and you can read the make of tires on the planes at the Naval School of Health Sciences back stairway.

@blogenfreude: I used to amuse myself by counting my clones in the phone book every year. These days I should probably thank my parents for bestowing upon me a decidedly common name. That, and swipe the payroll check from the ABC correspondent.

@nojo: You’re Anderson Cooper?

@blogenfreude: @JNOV: Who are these people?

@Benedick: That would explain the gay male fascination with him.

@Benedick: I have no idea who he is, but my sheer horror at the Lisa Bonet naming fiasco compelled me to look at that post. His kid is fucked before he gets out of diapers. What a fucktard.

@IanJ: Word is that the danger in ditching an under-wing twin engine plane, is that if one engine or another “catches” in the water, it will cause either a sudden spin, as happened here, they refer to the “90 degree turn,” or else it will rip the wing off or flip the plane, there is a video on Youtube of a big old plane, I think a 707, attempting a ditch, I think it took place in South Africa, and it does just this, I think most everyone died on that one. I think with your fixed landing gear plane you are guaranteed to do a ground loop, isn’t that what they call the “head over heels” thingy, if you ditched.

Here’s what happens more often: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQ0mGkAHzwU

@Prommie: Woke up in the middle of the night with deadline ideas stirring and thought what a nightmare the US Airways ditch could have been. Flaming cartwheel, no survivors, Fox News playing the recording over and over again with the chryon screaming, “Hussein Obama’s First Victory for His Al Qaeda Collaborators?” for months on end, or until CheneyCo’s false flag attacks.

So the info on that youtube is that its a Boeing 767 that had been hijacked. It ran out of fuel, the pilots tried to ditch just 500 meters off the beach, the hijackers panicked and started fighting the pilots for control of the plane, right in the middle of the attempted ditch. The plane had no power to deploy flaps and slats, so is moving much too fast when it hits. Something like 50 out of 170 people lived, somehow. 1996.

@FlyingChainSaw: Cleared the GWB by 900 feet, they say, that woulda been something, hitting the GWB, huh? Talk about yuck.