The 6 most badass pilots to ever stare down death!

[wtfisgoingon]

I often read Cracked I think its pretty funny and kills time when I am on the road. When I saw this article I thought it might be of interest to a few people off the forum here. Some pretty amazing situations!

 

http://www.cracked.com/article_19212_the-6-most-badass-airline-pilots-to-ever-stare-down-death.html?wa_user1=1&wa_user2=Weird+World&wa_user3=article&wa_user4=feature_module

[JozMk.II]

I liked number 2; sad of an outcome as it may be, that they were able to get the plane down with the majority of the crew alive is miraculous. Kudos to the crew of United Airlines Flight 232; I don't know if I could have even done in a simulator what they managed in that dire situation.

[Avilator]

I liked number 2; sad of an outcome as it may be, that they were able to get the plane down with the majority of the crew alive is miraculous. Kudos to the crew of United Airlines Flight 232; I don't know if I could have even done in a simulator what they managed in that dire situation.

 

I read that they actually tried exactly what they did in a simulator, and even with multiple different crews and multiple attempts, they could not replicate the results.

[wtfisgoingon]

I also listened to a few youtubes of black box recordings from various situations, the level of calmness is incredible!

[EtherealN]

Aye, shortly after the Hudson one I was listening to the traffic and it's amazing how calm they are.

 

We had a similar accident in sweden back in the 90's, known as the "Miracle at Gottröra". Basically, an MD-80 lost all engines right after takeoff from ARN and "landed" in a field after plowing through a forest, plane cracking into three sections - everyone survived (though a few had serious injuries, with one broken back that was permanently wheelchair-bound after that). In the voice recording there's a dead calm "Nu havererar vi i marken här" which roughly translated becomes "We're crashing into the ground here now."

 

Hilarious endpoint to it: there was a house next to the field where they ended up, and after they got everyone out they went over there to get hold of a phone to call the emergency services and give an update. In the house was two teenagers who had been asleep and failed to be woken up by a passenger plane crashlanding right next to their house. :D

 

The cause of the accident was established to be two-fold: ice ingestion into both engines and an undocumented AP system overriding crew attempts to manually re-light.

 

 

 

Pictures like that and no fatalities is impressive.

Edited May 30, 2011 by EtherealN

[EtherealN]

I also listened to a few youtubes of black box recordings from various situations, the level of calmness is incredible!

 

There are exceptions though. When I took my radio certification the class got to listen to a few recordings that explained the value of clear pronounciation and good language skills. It was a conversation between TWR and an Air China plane, and the TWR guy totally lost his cool trying to get the point across that the Air China plane should stop and wait for clearance from Gate control before taxiing into the aprons.

 

Two people dropped out due to the language requirements alone, actually.