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Captain Chelsey Sullenberger, the Flight 1549 captain who safely landed a US Airways plane into the Hudson back in January, tells CityRoom that a book about the plane's landing "'greatly overstates how much it mattered' that the plane he landed in the river, an Airbus A320, featured an automated cockpit." William Langwische's Fly by Wire credits the engineers behind A320's automation, but Sullenberger points out both engines were knocked out, "There are some situations where the automation will protect a pilot, but at the same time a highly automated airplane makes possible other types of errors, so it’s a mixed blessing. And greater knowledge is required to fly a highly automated aircraft."
Sully Has Problems With Flight 1549 Book
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It's the same media that NEVER mentioned Muslims' hatred of Israel as a possible motive for 9/11.
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Maybe it's Monday talking, but YAWN. So the guy landed a plane in the drink. I mean, that's super-great and all... but he's not The Greatest American Hero. Let's move on --
Oh, and Sully, listen, again, kudos... But we don't need 200 large-print pages about your life because of that one day 11 months ago.
actually, this same AIRBUS mechanism is a reason for many flights going down. There ISN'T a manual override. If the machine goes down, so do you.
I try not to fly on an airbus.
So, you were yanked out of your mother one day some years ago.
YAWN! Nobody ever needs to note your birthday, right? It's not like you did something of note, unlike Captain Scully.
Hey, I'm not writing a book about my boring life. If he can fill 200 pages with harrowing exploits, then great, I can see the interest. But it'll be "blah blah blah"* for a bunch of short chapters until he describes the half-hour it took to land the plane in the water.
*"I was a kid who liked airplanes, I went to flight school/was in the military, go to church, raised kids."
Yet here you are, commenting.
I fail to see your point. The point I'm making is that I don't think showering Sully with Superman status is quite deserved.
So you mean by Sully correcting what is erroneous information is people laying (more) Superman status on him?
I think this whole exercise is just you wanting to play party pooper, "just because".
Sully is setting the record straight. And it should be set straight because other people might think the Airbus automation is safer than it really is.
Unless the Airbus decided to land in the river by itself and made all the necessary calculations not to crack on impact, then it is irrelevant that the cockpit had automation built in.
By the way, there's a rule of thumb out there that some people swear by; "If it aint Boeing, I'm not going".
In this air show video (circa 1988) the Airbus A320's brilliant throttle control computer decides that the captain is clearly a moron for increasing thrust so close to the ground and it would rather land in the forest than obey the his throttle commands. Three people were killed and 50 injured.
That problem has long since been fixed, but the point is automation can cause as well as prevent accidents. The Air France 447 crash this past summer may have been caused by Airbus automation issues, as well.
Pilots have recreated the flight 1549 scenario in A320 simulators thousands of times since January, and most of them end with the engines catching on the water and flipping the plane over. Skill and luck deserve far more thanks for the 1549 success than Airbus.
"Pilots have recreated the flight 1549 scenario in A320 simulators thousands of times since January, and most of them end with the engines catching on the water and flipping the plane over."
Which doesn't mean at all that it'd happen that way in the real aircraft. It's just software; algorithms and data meant to model what would happen in real conditions. But since there's almost no data available on which to model a water landing, doing one in a simulator is just an educated guess.
This is true.
unlike sully, i've never flown an airplane so my opinion about it is null and void.
Someone made a dope documentary called 'Double Bird Strike!' @ http://www.vimeo.com/3783639