Flight 1549 (Capt. Sullenburger)

[Bubblehead]

I watch a recreation of Flight 1549 on Youtube showing video of take-off until the river crash. Apparently the accident with the birds did not occur until way past take off when gears and flaps were already up. Based on the communication between the pilot and the ground, the controller was vectoring the plane to the nearest available airport while the pilot/s were attempting frantically to restart the engines. Had the pilot been able to restart an/or both engines, was the intention was to make it to the airport even though the reliability of the engines operating was almost nil? Wouldn't it have disasterous had those engine fail while in the middle of the populated city? I think that it was very fortunate that things went the way they did because I think crash landing in the water was a much better choice. Thnk so?

[BSW727]

I think so too, and he made a good decision under terrible circumstances. It doesn't get any worse than that at low altitude in a 30 ton jet.

[machineman9]

I think ATC weren't quite sure about the extent of the issues... When someone says they are about to land in the water, you probably wouldn't want to believe that. Naturally you'd try and get them to land somewhere safer.

I'm hesistant to say they were lucky, as I don't want to take that away from the pilots, but the landing was very skillful. Any water landing for a plane not designed for it, is dangerous. Compared to crashing within the city, it was much better to land on the river. Even if the worst had come to the worst, the water landing would've caused less loss of life than if they were landing in populated areas.

[beaky]

This situation definitely would have turned out very badly, due to the high density of population and buildings, etc. in the area, if they had been a little lower or "dirtier" when the damage occurred... although in that case, "Sully" would probably have tried to ditch in the water immediately surrounding the airport (the upper reaches of the East River, where it connects to Long Island Sound).
And if they had continued to try to make two left turns to land on 04 at KLGA, it probably wouldn't have worked.
But it's not like the controller was making rash assumptions- he was only trying to assist the PIC of the flight- who has the final say in any case.

If you examine the transcript closely, you see that the Capt. was the first to come up with the idea of returning to KLGA... so, despite being told they'd lost thrust in both engines, the controller, figuring they knew better then he did what was possible at that moment, gave them a heading to set them up for an emergency approach for Runway 04 (which they had just taken off from).

But less than a minute later, the Capt. informed him that it would probably not work... he was already considering the river (that's a glider pilot for you...