You had a very heavy aircraft not designed to glide very far which suddenly lost power at 3000 feet, in what was most likely in a nose-up climb attitude. I think the Hudson was a no-brainer, as there was apparently not sufficient altitude / glide ratio to make a suitable runway. What was the time between bird strike and splash, three minutes? That isn't a long time to make decisions.
Having lived in New York City (Governors Island), I can't imagine a worse place in the US to suddenly go from powered flight to looking for maximum glide. This is not the first aircraft to put down in the Hudson -- there were several of these, although smaller aircraft, during the years I lived and worked along the river. In fact, it was those that didn't go for the water -- mostly helicopters -- that ended up making the local news, complete with film of the smoking wreckage on top of some Brooklyn building. I have a pretty high confidence factor (based on my Coast Guard experience) that a flock of birds going into the turbine blades will break enough stuff that the engines will stop producing thrust, regardless of what a computer does or does not do. I am somewhat amazed (but happily so) that bits of the turbines didn't do some other damage other than ceasing to produce forward thrust. On Sun, Feb 8, 2009 at 2:20 PM, Tom Hargrave <tharg...@hiwaay.net> wrote: > The argument was that it was a crippled airplane that may have been > flyable, at least enough > to return home and that the software turned off the engines. > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://okiebenz.com/pipermail/mercedes_okiebenz.com/attachments/20090208/33967651/attachment.html> _______________________________________ http://www.okiebenz.com For new and used parts go to www.okiebenz.com To search list archives http://www.okiebenz.com/archive/ To Unsubscribe or change delivery options go to: http://okiebenz.com/mailman/listinfo/mercedes_okiebenz.com
