Hudson River Opportunity

On Jan 16, 8:57*am, Andy wrote:
On Jan 16, 9:48*am, "kirk.stant" wrote:

Well...one could also suggest that all airline pilots should attend
the Air Force Academy and then gain experience flying F-4s - a jet
that (from personal experience) requires a high level of airmanship
and stick and rudder skills!

I noted that he did not have a seaplane rating and that one probably
would have been useful. *He landed downstream though, perhaps he had
no other option with the altitude available. *I don't know the Hudson
but it must have a fair current as the Airbus is reported to have gone
4 miles downstream before it was secured.

My only experience with the F4 was in a sim at Yuma. *I crashed it
twice on approach before I understood what the shaking pedals meant

Andy

It looks like he landed downwind as well. Everything else being equal
I'd probably prefer to land upWIND and downSTREAM to minimize the
relative speed between the aircraft and the water (in this case he got
the latter, but not the former). Given the reported 3,200' of altitude
when the bird strike happened it would seem he had few options. If
you look at the flight trace it appears from where the plane ended up
that they had enough to get to LGA runway 13 or TEB runway 24. But
perhaps the trace ends after the 4 miles of downstream drifting Andy
mentions. TEB and LGA are 10nm apart and the Airbus was roughly
between the two (a bit north) so if they were at 3200 feet when the
power went out they'd need a glide ratio of less than 10:1 to get to
the closer of the two. I don't know the glide angle of an unpowered
A320, but given the need to overfly densely populated real estate (in
one case midtown Manhattan) you gotta figure the Hudson looked pretty
attractive.

9B