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New York's heart leapt to its throat, as news broke that a plane had gone down in the Hudson River hard by Manhattan's Midtown district. The images were chilling—a U.S. Airways Flight 1549, an Airbus 320 leaving New York's LaGuardia airport en route to Charlotte, N.C., floating in the drink, surrounded by a bevy of police boats and tourist craft, as passengers were ferried to safety, some of them huddled on the wings. Initial reports indicated that the plane may have hit a flock of geese—known to pilots as a bird strike—and lost engine power. Miraculously, the Federal Aviation Administration reported that all passengers had deplaned safely.
To explore some of the issues at hand, Newsweek.com sought out Mark Hosenball, an investigative correspondent for NEWSWEEK magazine, who has covered numerous plane crashes over the course of his career.
Newsweek.com: Government sources are reporting that the plane went down after colliding with a flock of geese. How common is that, and how do pilots train to avoid hitting the birds?
HOSENBALL: "Bird strikes," as they are known in aviation jargon, are a familiar problem for pilots and airport operators. In the (fairly distant) past, investigators even included bird collisions as possible causes of major accidents. Because they're located beside the water, New York's Kennedy and LaGuardia Airports are particularly susceptible to hazards posed by birds on flight paths; a collision with a large bird like a goose (or, worse, a flock of them) can cause serious damage to even a large aircraft.
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Have there been problems with engine power outages in this particular type of plane before?
The model of plane which crashed, an Airbus 320, is heavily dependent on computers to operate its control systems. Like all Airbuses, the A-320 has a generally very good safety record, and the plane's systems are designed for relative simplicity in operation. In the air, the electricity to operate the computer systems is produced by generators powered by the jet engines, so if the engines spool down, then the plane can quickly become crippled. The aircraft model is certainly not notorious for regular engine power outages.
How does the plane stay afloat? How long can it stay up—i.e., how much pressure was there on rescuers to get folks off before it might sink?
The fuselage is made out of aluminum and usually pressurized with air before takeoff, which should make the plane quite buoyant—almost like a submarine—if it lands on water without the skin having been punctured. It sounds like the pilots of the New York flight managed to land the plane so gently on the water—even despite the likely malfunction of most of their controls—that at least initially the fuselage remained unbreached, allowing an extended time for the people on board to be rescued. Passengers should have been able to escape by the normal doors or perhaps through emergency exits, which are often located over the wings. The bitterly cold weather and water temperature probably complicated rescue efforts.
Is there a danger that the fuel lines will crack and create a pollution problem in the Hudson?
The plane's wings are essentially giant fuel tanks and if the plane just took off from LaGuardia, they would have been full of fuel. There is probably a significant pollution hazard to the Hudson, unless rescue crews can some how get in there quickly and drain the fuel from the wings into tankers.
What does this incident say about the overall safety of the American aviation industry?
For the last several years, the American airline industry has been remarkably—almost astonishingly—safe. Those few accidents that have occurred—such as the recent incident in Denver where a jet ran off the runway—have resulted in few if any fatalities or even serious injuries. The last major deadly plane crash involving an American carrier was the November 2001 crash, in Howard Beach, Queens, N.Y. near JFK Airport, of an American Airlines A-300— an older model airbus—which investigators believe was caused when the pilots didn't respond appropriately to turbulence caused by the wake of another plane due to possibly faulty training procedures. Even abroad, where most experts believe safety procedures are less stringent than in the U.S., pilots have become so skilled that most or all passengers have often been able to survive accidents in which the aircraft itself was a total write-off.
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