bellyflop

By now, everyone has probably heard about US Airways flight 1549 landing in the Hudson River, so I will not recap any of the significant details. What I will do, however, is thank a few people.
First, I want to thank Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, for keeping his cool, exercising inordinate skill, and successfully and safely landing a multi-ton brick on the Hudson River. And I say “landing” intentionally – all personnel onboard walked (well, floated, but small quibble) away with only minor injuries, and the aircraft remained afloat long enough for them to do so. Furthermore, the aircraft was effectively without power when it landed, making it probably the world’s largest, heaviest, and costliest glider in history… and airliners are not exactly designed to glide, much less land, powered or not, on water. Captain Sullenberger is undeniably a hero, and a master among pilots.
Second, I would like to thank the flight crew onboard flight 1549, for maintaining their bearing, keeping people as calm as they could, and successfully evacuating all 155 individuals onboard. Suffice to say, pretty much everyone back in the passenger cabin was worried, scared, or outright terrified, and yet the flight crew kept themselves and their passengers together well enough and long enough to deploy the rafts, evacuate the people, and get them to safety. These days, that degree of selfless determination is rare, but still eminently laudable.
Third, the engineers who designed the Airbus A320, the mechanics and technicians who built it, and the US Airways ground crew all deserve a hearty “thank you” for creating and maintaining an aircraft that was capable of ditching at sea without disintigrating, and staying afloat long enough to get everyone off. Considering how thin, fragile, and twitchy aircraft are, the quality of their craftsmanship shows through.
Finally, if you scroll through some of the photos available, you will see not only a massive police, Coast Guard, and fire department response, but also an amazing number of ferries and other civilian or corporate vessels in the immediate vicinity of the crash, rendering aid, throwing life vests into the water, and extricating people from the Hudson. All of those crews of all of those crafts deserve recognition for their efforts and amazingly fast response times.
Airliner crashes are thankfully not terribly common, and when they do occur, they rarely end nearly as well as this one did. Apart from the loss of an aircraft, this incident was amazingly free of injuries and death… thanks to those individuals I mentioned above.