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Wow, the picture at NYTimes.com has more detail of everyone standing on the plane waiting to be rescued. Amazing. Here's hoping nobody got wet- it's 23 degrees F out and the water is 43 degrees F.
It seems like there was time for everyone to get off. . .and from the feed, well they aren't saying but I am cautiously optomistic that there are no fatalities.
It's wonderful to see that the laws of the sea and of human decency still apply. It's also wonderful to be reminded that, despite the degrading aspects of air travel and the coffee-tea-or-milk nature of the job, flight attendants are absolute champs when the shit hits the fan.
Muddgirl: The Times says "The last fatal crash of a scheduled airliner flight in this country was in Lexington, Ky., on Aug. 27, 2006, nearly 30 months ago."
Times also reports all on board survived. Lets hope that's still true tomorrow.
Those photos are amazing. I couldn't agree with stet more and would add *that* is why being a commercial airline pilot is not like driving a bus.
both Mr. Blandings and my brother-in-law have flights taking off that time-ish and the "Plane crash lead" always takes too long to get to the airport. Neither is in NYC, btw.
I couldn't agree with stet more and would add *that* is why being a commercial airline pilot is not like driving a bus.
I used to drive truck. I see bus drivers perform on a regular basis feats of automotive awesomeness that blow my mind. And I feel very strongly that dealing with flying a plane is less of a challenge than wrangling a shitload of passengers while also doing your job. Your everyday bus driver, of course, does both. Pilots are awesome, but please don't discount the role of flight attendants when passengers survive plane wrecks or bus drivers in getting people safely from one place to another.
It's wonderful to see that the laws of the sea and of human decency still apply.
I actually think that there are specific requirements in both maritime licensing and vessel operation charters that require vessels within range that are not doing something of higher priority to respond to distress signals. You basically either relay the distress call (if you are not hearing the Coast Guard respond) or you stop other transmissions, monitor the channel silently and await instructions from the Coast Guard, who will tell you where they want you to proceed and what to do. If there is no response from the Coast Guard you're required to respond, and similarly, you're required to respond if you're the closest vessel or within range of reaching the site, until someone else gets there and relieves you of authority.
Not that it's any less wonderful - just that it's evolved even beyond the level of human decency -- it is the actual law of the sea, not just the romantic ideal of the law of the sea.
Oh, and also, I hope it's true that everyone got off all right. They're lucky lucky. That 43-degree water would be deadly at any time and especially so at today's temperature. Whew...that runway over water freaks me out every time. Same thing at Logan. I wonder how those people are feeling right now. Probably many different things at once.
I don't think I was discounting the flight crew; I believe I said that I couldn't agree with you more about how important the cabin crew was. I was just pointing out that that wasn't a crash; it was an emergency landing. A ditching. I have no idea how to fly a plane, but I do know that most people in this world vastly underestimate how complicated it is. my sources for this claim are my father who was taught by the Air Force to fly plans and more than one old family friend who was a combat pilot, as well as Salon's ask the pilot who is talking about this crash right now)
As for crash landings in water, pilots are not really taught how to ditch; most flight simulations do not involve ditching. Ditching--crashing your plane into the water because you cannot find a safe place to put it down--is not something you practice. And ditching is what made it possible to save everyone's lives in this event. Ditching is what kept that plane from falling on Brooklyn.
Yes, without an incredibly calm, collected and well-trained flight crew, the evacuation might not have happened. Or might not have happened so smoothly, and I was agreeing with you on that point completely. I was also simply pointing out that the pilot did an amazing thing.
It's like, you (or anything) transfers heat to water much more readily than you transfer it to air. It's why a drink chills more quickly in a bath of ice water than it does in a refrigerator.
Stick your hand in a bowl of cold water, and it'll get much more unbearably cold than it would in air of the same temperature.
That's my correct, albeit totally non-science-nerdy explanation.
First, water's much denser than air and so it conducts heat a lot faster. Meaning that if you, a 98-degree person, fall into 43-degree water, the water will conduct your heat away from you with far greater speed than air will until your body reaches the ambient temperature of 43 degrees (which is a big problem). This site says water cools the body 25 percent faster than air. Add to that the fact that, if you're clothed in 20 degree air, there is a layer of warmer air between you and the outer surface of the clothes that is keeping your body from losing heat as quickly to the air - the clothes are insulation. In the water, your clothes become wet, take on the same temp as the water, and lose the ability to store air and insulate, so they end up just robbing you of heat faster as they cling to your skin.
But that's just one part, the hypothermia part. The other part has to do with simple drowning. In very cold water, as your body loses heat, your arms and legs become totally numb and stiff. You're unable to move them properly and you can't feel anything. So as you try to swim, even if you know how to swim, you find that your arms and legs become clumsy and immobile. You really can't do anything with them, so you become like this ungainly hunk of stuff that flails a minute, then no longer has the energy to move your limbs at all, and from there it's just a matter of time until your reflexes make you breathe in and you suck in water. At that point drowning begins. Which is obviously not a hazard in air.
I once witnessed this happening to someone, on a nice 60-degree day in May, in water that was at 45. It was astonishingly fast and a real lesson in the danger of cold water. The general estimate is that a person who is suddenly immersed in 45-degree water or below, whether or not they're a swimmer, has about 5 minutes at most to save themselves or be saved before their chances of dying become fairly insurmountable.
When I've been sailing on big-crew boats, as part of our emergency equipment we had full-body and face-covering immersion suits that were meant to help people endure the conditions of being thrown overboard. We would have to don them during drills. They're coffinlike in themselves but certainly food for thought about the degree of protection our weak naked puny bodies need in a hostile element.
Oh, and when I witnessed the guy flailing in the cold water, it turned out OK because we were close enough to rescue him with a sailboat. But the whole thing happened really damn quick on a nice day and I've never forgotten that just cold water almost took his life. Not even all that cold in relative terms - not even below freezing, only as cold as your fridge. That's enough to kill us.
Yes, I'm sure we heard this in my classroom in the Bronx, two big boom sounds. My students were finishing their test and we all just stopped and looked at each other and made jokes about whether we should be getting under our desks or not (one young man noted how my desk was the largest, but I, of course, informed him that there was only room for one under there). We even looked out the window to see if we could see anything (they're old enough to remember 9/11 well). I reassured them with, "Well, it wasn't nuclear, cause we're all still here." They're used to my humor. I didn't know what it was, though, till I got home and saw the news. Glad everyone's okay.
The first news story I heard about this mentioned that everyone was safe - such a relief!
Agreed that cabin crew are teh awesome. I translated some health & safety documentation for cabin crew a few weeks ago and I was amazed at the detail it went into. I flew last week and I was more relaxed than usual, knowing that if any of my fellow passengers had a heart attack or took too much LSD (just two examples of the conditions they're taught to deal with), the cabin crew would know what to do.
I heard this morning that several of the passengers were treated for hypothermia (you can see in the picture that they tried to stay out of the water, but several are submerged up to their legs), and that there were two broken legs (I didn't catch if it was two passengers with one broken leg each or one passenger who was most misfortunate!)
photo by splunge
photo by TheophileEscargot
photo by Kronos_to_Earth
photo by ethylene
