On 01/18/2009 02:22 AM, Erik Hofman wrote: > I still think the passengers where lucky to have such a skilled pilot at > the controls...
Not too long ago one of my relatives came up to me and said: Him: I've always thought you were incredibly lucky, and I wondered why. Now I begin to understand. I noticed just now when Mother asked you to turn on the oven, you looked in the oven before turning it on. That's interesting, because once I turned on the oven when there were some plastic bowls in there. I thought that was a horribly unlucky accident, what with the big fire and toxic smoke and all. Me: Yup. I've noticed that the more careful I am, the luckier I get. =========== The same sort of "luck" applies to pilots. The more they train, the luckier they get. It just cracks me up when the TV commentators say: It is a miracle that they were able to get everybody out of that plane in 90 seconds. Wow, 90 seconds. Can you believe that? It's a miracle. It turns out that the crew knew before they took off that they could get everybody out in 90 seconds. They know because they have practiced it. It is required by FAR 121.291. They invite a planeload of _untrained_ volunteer passengers into a plane inside a big hangar, serve them all dinner (because that's a worst-case scenario) ... and then they turn out all the lights and say "everybody out". The requirement is to get everybody out in ..... you guessed it ...... 90 seconds. Were the passengers of flight 1549 lucky to have a highly skillful crew? You can call it luck if you want to. My point is that the passengers on flight 1548 and flight 1550 were even luckier, in the sense that they also had highly skillful crews and didn't need to find out the hard way just how skillful. All these crews are lucky, if you want to call it that. They're lucky because there's a lot of crashworthiness and even ditchworthiness built into the airframe, and because the crews train like crazy, far in excess of the already-strict FAA requirements. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This SF.net email is sponsored by: SourcForge Community SourceForge wants to tell your story. http://p.sf.net/sfu/sf-spreadtheword _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
