Saturday, January 17, 2009

Mystery on the Hudson... what REALLY happened!?!?!?

Okay everyone knows this story by now... A plane water landed in the Hudson River this week after it ran into a flock of birds after take off from La Guardia. The pilot did an excellent job of pulling off a water landing which is extremely hard to do. Luck was with them as well and thankfully everyone was okay! Great story... the pilot is a hero, passengers were shaken up, but are all alright, the 24 hour news channels get something to talk about for a week or 2... everybody wins right? End of story... Not quite... Evidently the press and FAA are now pretending this is a big mystery!!!

For Example:

I heard this on the radio today from NPR: NTSB Looks For Cause Of Hudson River Jet Crash

"Investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board were in New York City on Friday to find out what forced a US Airways jet to make a spectacular emergency landing into the frigid Hudson River minutes after takeoff. A minute into the flight, Sullenberger told air traffic controllers that birds had hit both of the plane's jet engines, but the NTSB warned the public against speculating about the causes of the accident."
Humm... I am no detective, but maybe I can help piece this together and save us all millions of tax dollars. I think the major factor might be that....BIRDS WERE IN THE F#$%ING ENGINES!!!! Planes generally don't fly too well when instead of pulling in air you are pulling in blood, sinew, bones, and feathers of a 30 lb animal. I hate to 'speculate' like that, especially when I have been warned against it. I hope someone from the NTSB doesn't scold me for my speculation. While I am prognosticating... let me go ahead and speculate that the sky is blue and the pope is Catholic. What, do they think Al Queda is training snow geese now? When they do the goose necropsy and find they have been fed a diet of hummus and baba ganoush instead of aquatic plants and grains then we might be on to something. Why is it taboo to speculate about this? Its ridiculous.
There is a big effort now to find the engines evidently.. they will give us "clues" as to what happened.
"Salvage crews discovered the engines were missing while trying to determine how to haul the jetliner out of the icy river. Those engines likely hold important clues needed to make as accurate a determination as possible on what exactly caused the plane to loose power soon after accelerating off the runaway at LaGuardia Airport in New York."
Again, I am no Columbo, but I am going to go ahead and guess that once the missing engines are located... they are probably going to find that instead of a normal functioning engine... which you find on normal planes.... you will find AN ENGINE THAT HAS BEEN DAMAGED BY A HUGE F#$%ING BIRD!! This isn't rocket science... Here are the facts... 1) Plane takes off from La Guardia... everything is going okay... 2) Plane hits a flock of birds flying in formation (probably geese)... 3) Engines are not working... and emergency landing is made.
Maybe I missed something here... but I am pretty sure there may be a causal relationship between fact 2 and fact 3. Or do they think the hitting a flock of geese is somehow unrelated to the icy crash landing? Also "Flight Recorder Underwater" in the headline... yeah generally when a plane is underwater..by definition, most or all parts of the plane are underwater also... and the black box is no exception to this rule.
Then I looked and saw this front page news on CNN; here is the headline: Pilot landed in Hudson to avoid catastrophic consequences Really? I just thought he liked the view of the Bronx from the the waterfront and wanted to share it with everyone. Or maybe, he thought there was a shortcut from La Guardia to Charlotte through the center of the earth with an entrance in the Hudson River..... NO S#$T HE LANDED IN THE DAMN RIVER TO AVOID CATASTROPHE!! That is THE reason people land in freezing rivers... not because they want to be in the polar bear club, but because they have no other option but to land in the river!!
I will keep you all updated as this mystery unravels...
UPDATE 1/19/08 From the Saratogian:
"The probe into the crash-landing of a US Airways jetliner will take a year, and the lessons learned from the spectacular accident will last much longer, a senior investigator said Monday. "I think this one is going to be studied for decades," said Robert Benzon, chief investigator on the case for the National Transportation Safety Board."
"The way the landing itself occurred, the thought process that went through the mind of the pilots and the flight attendants. It's interesting stuff for us," Benzon said. "It's going to take a while to go through it, but this one's going to go down as a classic."
Wow! Geese + Plane = Crash landing... seems pretty cut and dry to me, but to to Robert Benzon, this is his Mona Lisa... his Great Pyramids... something to ponder over for decades!! Oh the mysteries of flight A320 will you ever be revealed!?! Its not like it was lost in the Bermuda Triangle... we know exactly what happened to this plane!! IT HIT A FLOCK OF BIRDS AND WENT DOWN!!! Get over it!!!

5 comments:

Roxanne said...

Wow, i had no idea there were questions about this thing....where have i been? why wasn't it obvious to me there must be a conspiracy behind this?

emily said...

I heard some analysis this morning with some additional questions. First of all, why didn't anyone know ahead of time that there was a flock of birds? Can't they use RADAR? Also, why didn't Sully Sullenberger just avoid the flock of birds? Just because he is in a plane going 200 mph doesn't mean he couldn't just steer around a huge flock of birds, right? And, why was Sully unable to return to LaGuardia, or land in New Jersey as the controller advised him to? There are just too many unanswered questions, if you ask me. This Sullenberger is no hero in my book.

Unknown said...

I love your commentary Jack. So insightful...maybe you could do this full time...maybe as a commentator for fox news. You could join the cast of fox and friends. Science is for the birds, get out while you're young.

Roxanne said...

Fox?! Ouch.

Donnie & Heather said...

I too was surprised by the amount of attention this story received. Pat the pilot on the back for doing his job, save the tax payers some money or use the money to devise a way to avoid birds...wait a minute, how about we use our eyes. Its so crazy it just might work.