Ramadesikan Gandarvakottai's blog

Nano Second Decision and Year Long Enquiry

Recently we saw the "Splash Landing" of an A 320 in the Hudson river. The process is not as simple as dumping the aircraft, it involves aligning the aircraft without any instrument support and hitching it whereby an aircushion is created in the last seconds of the aircraft using every bit of the Auxillary power. The aircushion is necessary jump, into water from 3000 ft is near death as can be noticed by people dying from jumping into Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.

It took nano second for the Captain of the aircraft to ditch into Hudson, now the year long review begins, the beauty of the review is that it took two days for the NTSB to confirm whether the wreckage had one or two engines. Now the so called enquiry will subpenoa FAA records, US Airways records , Airbus , and National Weather Service. The enquiry will accumulate a lot of records, will do simulation and finally issue a probable cause report covering everything and finally a chapte on crew lapses. Crew lapses give me a break, it is a tradition in enquiry reports to drag the crew over the coals.

Even in the Challenger disaster there was inadequate training of crew, whereas any untrained eye could have seen huge debris hittting the side on take off.

Blaming crew is easy and that is what everybody wants, FAA wants to wear emprorer's new clothes saying it runs perfect system, Airbus wil want save its skin despite its A 320 has had one of worst safety records. US Airways as a commercial operator will stop anything that affects its brand. So, finally it is blamed on the crew shortcoming, atleast in this case Captain lived to walk up and down the aisle twice checking everybody is safe before getting out, in many cases crew don't have the luxury living to fight for the truth.