Even when you do everything right, there are still dice rattling.

[dsrtao]

It seems appropriate to me to note that one of the reasons we are all talking so much about the successful river landing of US Airways 1549 is that it is so unusual.

• The captain was an airline safety expert who knew what he was doing.
  
• The crew did everything right.
  
• The plane was intentionally landed in water.
  
• And they were lucky.
  
• Nobody died.
  

Please take a moment to consider http://yarchive.net/air/airliners/dc10_sioux_city.html which is an account by the captain of United flight 232, which took off from Denver heading to Chicago in July 1989.

The captain had spent more than 33 years flying commercial aircraft, and had been a Marine Corps flight instructor previously.

He had a DC-10 flight instructor onboard.

They had 44 minutes between the explosion and the crash.

Sioux City Airport had drilled for a wide-body aircraft emergency two years prior, and had revised their disaster planning to consider this sort of scenario.

Everyone did a good job -- the NTSB said
The Safety Board believes that under the circumstances the UAL flightcrew performance was highly commendable and greatly exceeded reasonable expectations.

111 of 296 people died.


If you aren't good, you can't get much good luck. But even doing it all perfectly isn't a guarantee.

Comments

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

Good points.

And my own perspective: it's not a "miracle" when trained people do their job well.

[goldsquare.livejournal.com]

I think the point was that it is a "necessary but insufficient condition", mathematically speaking.

Dan, read "Drunkard's Walk" yet? I know a few people who have - but I'm the only nerd. They read it as one sort of book, I read it as another. It's about human perception of randomness, basically.

[dsrtao]

Thanks for the suggestion, I just put it in my library queue.

[the-nita.livejournal.com]

Yup - luck is as large a factor in success as anything else I know of.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

About Sioux City:

* The Sioux City incident was previously considered unsurvivable.

* The technique the crew came up with for steering a plane that had suffered a total loss of hydraulic power -- differential throttling -- had never been tried.

* Subsequently, flight simulator research and then research using a real plane demonstrated that it was a viable emergency technique.

* IIRC, It was used a few years ago to successfully land a DHL wide-body at Baghdad after it was hit by a SAM (which took out the hydraulic system).

* Airbus and Boeing are both looking into building it into their fly by wire flight control systems in future generations of aircraft (so that they do it automatically in emergency)

So yeah, the crew of UAL 232 deserve credit. The flip side of 111 people dying is that 185 people survived a situation previously believed to be 100% fatal.

Flight 232

[lauradi7.livejournal.com]

The basis for my favorite disaster movie
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104020/

I think it underscores the luck aspect - one of the incidents noted was of a married couple, sitting in adjacent seats - he was unscathed, she was killed. I guess when a large metal object breaks in half, a lot of shrapnel-like stuff is flying around.

Re: Flight 232

[elizabear.livejournal.com]

Huh. I have to admit I'm curious to see this, but I might not be able to deal - my high school calculus teacher died on that flight with his wife and two kids. In fact, I freaked out watching Die Harder just two years later.

Re: Flight 232

[lauradi7.livejournal.com]

The thing that stood out most in the docudrama was the necessity for teamwork - their first disaster drill was a total mess - the different entities (local military base, airport firefighters, etc) were not coordinated and the efforts were scatter-shot. After that they designated one person in charge, got the sequence of things in order, etc. It really made a difference when the real thing hit.
On a lighter note, if true (I suppose it could have been made up) - the student intern for the local newspaper who had been at the airport writing a fluff piece on "a day in the life of a regional airport" ended up being the first and primary journalist on the scene, and rose to the occasion.

[seawasp]

Until this one, I believe that there had NEVER BEEN an actual successful water landing of a real airliner. Ever. There were a couple of "oh, ALMOST pulled it off" events, but no actual successes. There were some professional pilots who believed it was essentially impossible.