Bird strikes:

Part (I.)
Bird strikes were in the news last January after Flight 1549 landed on the Hudson. In January and now more recently in June of 2009, there’s been talk on the radio of killing all geese "living" near airports. (I heard Mayor Bloomberg talking about the geese Friday June 19 on WOR710 radio station, I didn’t catch all of the interview). I know of no comment from PETA, the animals-rights organization which fights against cruelty to animals.

This is from a New York Magazine (Feb, 9, 2009, starting p. 30) article titled: "My Aircraft, Why Sully [the captain of flight 1549] may be the last of his kind." Underline for emphasis is mine, square brackets are mine.

The article begins with "Modern piloting is based on routines. hundreds of man-hours have been poured into analyzing every possible eventuality..." anyway, at the time of the incident,

"The skies were clear and calm... Sully saw the birds a second before they hit -- at 3:27 P.M., a huge flock of them. His first impulse was to duck. He heard them connect - thump! Then he smelled them. There was no mistaking it. Every pilot with enough flight hours has smelled burning birds. There's usually not much more to a bird strike than that -- maybe a little hiccup in the hum of the engines before the plane keeps on climbing. [then why the impulse "to duck?" What, precisely, does the writer mean by this?] But this was different. This time, the craft lurched, then there was silence. Sully had probably experienced something like that long ago, as a trainee, when his instructor leaned over, shoved the throttle into idle to mimic the loss of engine power, and asked: Okay, now what?" but this wasn't a lesson."

Toward the end of the article, we read that "David Sontag, a 74- year-old screen writer turned professor, was flying home ... on Flight 1549... From the back of the plane, in seat 23F, he had heard the bang a minute into the flight. From his window he could see flames coming out of one engine. The next five minutes were a blur of fear: the impact, the evacuation, waiting on the wing to be rescued.... Sontag believes Sully did one crucial thing that day that prevented a widespread panic: he didn't announce 'Brace for impact' until it was absolutely necessary. 'My feeling is he waited that long to keep people from freaking out,' Sontag says."head down

The article also laments (with considerable elaborations I won't quote) that "40 years and 19,663 flight hours ago, commercial-airline pilots were like gods. It was the age of Chuck Yeager and Pan Am....Where the piloting ranks were once made up of former Air Force jocks, many of them combat veterans, they are now filled mainly with civilians for whom flying is less an adventure than a job. 'Twenty years ago, we were a step below astronauts' says one former pilot. 'Now we're a step above bus drivers. And the bus drivers have a better pension.'...Sully has been in the business long enough to witness firsthand the domestication of the airline pilot.... The airlines liked miliary pilots, in part, 'because the government had done all the work for them,' says Don Skiados, who has worked closely with pilots for 40 years..."

"Points to Ponder:"

1.) After the Flight 1549 event, there was much talk about eradicating geese. Was the flight used as a pretext for extending the FAA's jurisdiction on the ground? Here, we read that bird strikes are very routine: "There's usually not much more to a bird strike than that," meaning the smell, "maybe a hiccup..." However, this time, we read about "flames coming out of one engine." One passenger could see only out of one window, so we don't know whether or not flames came out of the plane's other engine. In any case, one wonders: A presumably routine thing, the bird strike with "a little hiccup," suddenly caused a major failure -- not only stalling of 2 engines, but also a fire in at least one.

2.) The article raphsodizes about past and present pilots, and only says things to the effect that pilots ain't what they used to be. They've been "domesticated." The article does not say it, but this is probably due to increased number (and lesser average training time and quality) of pilots.

The article asks nothing about ground-maintenance people. Has there been a decline in their status (god-like or otherwise) due to increase in numbers?

And, is the FAA re-design meant to accommodate further "domestication?" Is "domestication" a code-word for "dumbing down?"

3.) Note the lowest of low opinion of passengers. The quote comes from a fellow passenger who may be a bit too full of himself and perhaps full of screen-plays with god-like pilots. Be that as it may, its excusable in someone who had just survived what Mr. Sontag survived. The writer's use of the quote is not excusable. It shows contempt toward passengers and toward the public.

I think everybody who ever experienced an occasion in which "timing is everything" knows that when you tell someone to brace for something, and the "something" does not come immediately, well, it's human nature to relax a bit, inhale, "sneak a peak," try and "get comfortable," and the like. All of these involve becoming un-braced! It's a teeny bit like blowing out candles on a birthday cake: You don't tell your friends to "Prepare to blow!" and keep them in that state of preparedness. It's One-Two-THREE! Since you can't quite go 1-2-3 in an emergency landing situation, you do the closest thing to 1-2-3, which is what Sully did.

To be fair, there was a report in a People Magazine article (Feb. 23, 2009) titled "The Right Stuff" to the effect that the plane filled with water "after a passenger opened the tail door." Was it indeed a passenger and not a crew member? And was the passenger probably told to open the door by someone claiming to know about planes? It seems that every aviation-related event brings out numerous people who claim to have been pilots or to have a pilot's license. In any case, stories I heard after the Sept. 11 attacks and its resulting evacuations, make it very hard for me to believe in the ease at which the public panics.

Part (II.)

A Jan. 30, 2009 post on Quiet Rockland’s website
http://ejectsturgell.blogspot.com/

says:

“Other News:

Quiet Rockland Feeds Information On “The Goose Coverup” To Fox News, Bill O’Reilly, And Geraldo Rivera – And Fox Runs The Story: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,483344,00.html

It Was Foreknown Defective-Engine Failure, And Not Geese, That Crashed U.S. Airways Flight #1549 Airbus Into The Icy Hudson River On January 15, 2009.
Quiet Rockland Was The First To Break This Story Publicly.
I wanted to update you on recent developments in the State of Connecticut's challenge against the Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) proposed airspace redesign over southwestern Connecticut. “
Excerpts from the text on that link:
Interview

WHERE IS HERO US AIRWAYS PILOT CAPT. SULLENBERGER?
• Monday, January 26, 2009

This is a rush transcript from "The O'Reilly Factor," January 23, 2009. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.
Watch "The O'Reilly Factor" weeknights at 8 p.m. and 11 p.m. ET and listen to the "Radio Factor!"
BILL O'REILLY, HOST: Continuing now with FOX News anchor Geraldo Rivera. Last week, the biggest hero in America was Captain Chesley Sullenberger, who successfully crash-landed a US Air jetliner on the Hudson River. Nobody was killed, an amazing achievement. But where is Captain Sullenberger? So what's going on? Why isn't he out there?
GERALDO RIVERA, HOST, "GERALDO AT LARGE": I don't know why he hasn't spoken up until now, but I do know that tomorrow in his {Danville, California] hometown…
O’: Parade.
…
R: ...he will get a hero's welcome.
O’: There's a parade.
R: And he should.
O': Right, right.
R: It's the most, as I said, the most incredible feat of aviation skill that has ever happened since at least Charles Lindbergh flew the Atlantic solo nonstop or Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier. This guy is a magnificent hero.
The bigger question as we see the emergency float being deployed there — and that's incredible video — the bigger question is: Why did those engines stall? Was it just the bird strike?
O': Bird strike, yeah.
R: A random bird strike? I hold in my hand what's called an Airworthiness Directive. All right, this [December 31, 2008 ] Directive … reads: "This Airworthiness Directive results from an Airbus A-321 airplane powered by a..." and it goes on to designate the engine, the turbo fan engines experiencing high pressure compressor stalls during climb out after takeoff. In other words, airplanes with that Airbus with the engines that that airplane had were suffering stalls…. during climb-out after takeoff. So now you have December 31, 2008, Airworthiness Directive, every Airbus of that sort has to be inspected, OK. That's December 31, 2008.
What happens next? January 13, 2009, Tuesday, … guess what? The same aircraft experiences compressor stalls. The engine stalls…. That is the same aircraft, this is Tuesday, that on Thursday Chesley Sullenberger…
O': Not the same plane…
R: The fuselage number is N106US….
R: ...pure coincidence that that same aircraft that on Tuesday, two days before…
O': Stalled.
…
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