The Miracle on the Hudson, a NEW perspective! - Mentour Pilot

an airbus a320 is taking off from laguardia airport in new york runway 04 and only a few minutes into the flights they encounter a large flock of birds now several birds get ingested into the jet engines making them unusable and the pilots find themselves with only a few minutes to save themselves and everyone on board this is the amazing story of the miracle on the hudson u.s airways flight 1549 and i'm going to tell it to you from my perspective [Music] now before i start this video guys i want to make a huge shout out to my patreon crew now i wouldn't be able to sit here and create this kind of content for you guys if it weren't for the support that my patrons are giving me every month all right you are really really important for the work that i'm doing and if you are sitting here right now thinking well i want to be part of the inner core of the mentor pilot crew and i want to support him then use the link up here i am grateful for any support that i can get so this story that i'm going to tell you today guys is probably one of the most heavily publicized stories for the last few decades there have been hollywood movies made about them there have been tens of articles in different publications all over the world but what i am going to give you is the insight from a pilot's perspective i am going to tell you this story based on the final report of this incident i have linked to the final report down here it's almost 200 pages of great content if you're interested in reading it and any other sources that i'm using are also linked to in the description of the video so u.s airways flight 1549 or their official call sign cactus 1549 took place on the 15th of january 2009. there were 150 passengers on board including one infant in the lap of his mom and five crew members the captain of the flight was captain chesley sullenberger a very experienced ex-military pilot and assisting him was an equally or almost equally experienced first officer called jeffrey skyles the aircraft is an airbus a320 equipped with two cfm56 engines this flight was the last flight on a four day kind of route for the crew so they were basically going home and this was the second flight on the day of the same aircraft on the cvr the cockpit voice recorder um since this was such a relatively short flight meant that you could follow the whole cvr recording from when the pilots were doing a pre-flight and you can tell that the preflight was just normal it's actually a little bit spooky looking at the preflight from a pilot's perspective because you can see how how these guys obviously had no clue about what was going to happen they were joking around some minor mistakes were being made with the load sheets that was being you know corrected by ground load control there were some issues with jeff's transmission button on his side that they were talking about putting into the tech log and kind of minor things like that so the aircraft tax it out for takeoff runway 04 in laguardia airport in new york everything looking completely normal the first officer jeff skyles was the pilot flying for the leg he was the one that's on actually fly the aircraft and taking care of the radios and doing the pilot monitoring work was captain sully sullenberger now before we go into the actual flight there's a couple of things that i want you to know all right the first thing is about first officer jeffrey skyles so jeffrey or jeff was a very highly experienced first off so he had more than 15 000 hours and he'd flown on many types before including the 100 and the boeing 737 but he had just started flying the airbus a320 in fact he had just done his skill test on new year's eve 2008 only 16 days before this flight and he had only clocked about 37 hours on the day of the accident right this is going to be important in the way that he deals with his role during this incident the other thing that i want you to to know about is this aircraft right in the fleet of u.s airways at the time you had airbus 320s that were equipped for extended over water uh use and aircraft that were not right the difference between the two was that the aircraft that were you know equipped to fly over water had life vests for all of the passengers on board but they also had special emergency exit shoots that could be used as emergency rafts if needed and those were connected both on the forward to emergency exit and the aft to emergency exit so just out of pure luck this aircraft on this day even though they were not scheduled to fly over water was one of the aircraft that was equipped for extended over water use at time 15 24 54 because actually the seconds are are important here um cactus 1549 received their take-off clearance on runway zero four they started rolling down the runway everything looking fine jeff made a normal takeoff and at about 700 feet they changed controller from the power controller in laguardia to the departure control controller in the new york area captain sully checked in on the radio he stated that it was a 700 feet climbing to 5000 feet and the controller read back that he was clear to continue to climb to 15 000 feet which was then acknowledged now about two minutes into the flight you can hear on the cockpit voice recorder how captain sully calls out birds followed almost immediately by the sound of some kind of muffled thumps on the cbr and the sound of the engines rolling back the aircraft is now at 2815 feet and about four and a half nautical miles north northeast of their take-off runway in laguardia now what has actually happened at this point is that the aircraft has impacted with a flock of migratory canada g's okay a canada goose is a large bird right it can weigh up to about eight pounds and that's important because during the certification of the airbus 320 and the cfm56 engines they have been certified to be able to take birth strikes but the birds used during the certification for testing purposes only weighed about two to two and a half pounds so a canada goose is almost three times bigger than the birds used for certification during examinations of the engines after the accident it was found that at least two canada g's was ingested into each engine one of them seemed to have hit the outer part of the fan and then subsequently been thrown out through the bypass duct but at least one goose in each engine went straight into the engine core damaging the inlet guide vanes and also damaging quite a lot of the the first part of the low pressure compressor now these damages in themselves would have made sufficient damage to the engines to flame them out and to make them unable to start up again but of course the pilots up in the front of the aircraft had no idea about the damage that the engines had suffered now immediately after the bird strike the cvr the copper voice recorder is picking up the first officer jeff skyler saying oh oh and captain sully is saying we have one no both engines are rolling back okay it's important because the quicker that you realize what's happening to you the quicker you can start acting on it and you would definitely feel if you're doing the climb out in a boeing 737 or an airbus 320 and you lose both engines the aircraft will feel like it's basically almost hitting a wall right it loses all momentum forward so to figure out that you have a problem with both engines would probably be fairly easy to do but what happens next is really impressive and that is only two seconds later captain sully says i'm starting the apu and i have controls the fact that he's taking controls is normal there's normal procedures by u.s airways at the time that the captain takes control during a situation like this letting the first officer become the pilot monitoring and dealing with subsequent checklist but what's really impressive is that he had the clarity of mind to start the apu now this was not part of any memory items it was not part of a curate checklist he just did this from memory because he realized the situation that they were in and the fact that they are very close to the ground and they're going to have very little time and it's going to turn out the fact that he started the apu this early is going to have a huge effect on the rest of the flight only 10 seconds later captain sully who's now the pilot flying on the aircraft calls for the qrh the quick reference checklist to be actioned by jeff skulls and he also sends out a mayday mayday mayday message to air traffic control stating the type of emergency have and that is turning back to laguardia the mayday part unfortunately is not heard by atc because another aircraft is transmitting at the same time um but this hall the fact that this whole procedure that what we've heard up until now only taking about 12 seconds shows a very high level of situational awareness on behalf of the flight crew only a few seconds later jeff skyles is starting to work on the checklist okay now remember how i told you that jeff skyles had just finished his typewriting course yeah you can kind of tell that here because for anyone who has been out of the simulator for a while or has only done maybe you know some recurrent training every six months it would take a while to kind of get your wits around you and to find the correct checklist but it only took jeff scott a few seconds and that's likely because during the typewriting course you practice a lot of different malfunctions and you deal a lot with the quick reference handbook so he would have very quickly realized what he was looking at that had a dual engine failure and reached for and started actioning the failure dual engine failure checklist on the quick reference handbook now worth pointing out here as well is that as jeff and sully are now starting to deal with the consequences of this bird strike they're still heading away from the airport and during the subsequent investigation it was shown that if they had immediately after they realized that they lost both engine started a turn back to laguardia they would have had a chance to land on the runway they departed for or runway one three however that is not humanly possible right the way that we are trained as pilots is that when something happens you do not react straight away because the likelihood is that if you do that you're gonna make a huge mistake the way that we are trained is to fly the aircraft make sure it's flyable look at the problem we have and only react with kind of our backbone reactions if something is required to keep the aircraft flying right and this is what the crew is already doing you know the to think that they would just realize that bird strike dual engines turn that is not possible in fact i think that these guys are reacting with lightning speed at this point from all the the kind of experience i have from watching people in the simulator the fact that they within the first 20 seconds have gotten the apu started and started working on the on the correct checklist and gotten a mayday call in is amazing work right but it also means that their options are diminishing the further away you go from the airport without engines the smaller the chances that you're going to be able to return and this is clearly seen because at this point sully is now talking to our traffic control the reason that sully is doing the radio and not jeff skyles is that normally when we have an emergency the pilot who's working on the checklist concentrates on working on the checklist the pilot is flying also does the radio if he or she feels that they have the capacity to do so now air traffic control who knows what's happening is trying to give options to cactus 1549 they're telling them basically that all of the runways on laguardia is open sol is indicating that he probably won't be able to do that now sully is now most likely weighing in on his options okay he knows that the aircraft reached a maximum altitude of about three thousand feet before they started to descend he knows that he needs to keep his speed fairly stable and he's watching out for different things to do remember that they are flying over one of the most densely populated areas in the world here over new york city and any turn he would do to try to get back to laguardia would also force him to fly in over manhattan okay now something that you learned during your flight training is that if you have no engines and you're turning you're losing more altitude than if you're flying straight ahead so solid would know that if he decides to make a turn back to laguardia he's going to lose so much altitude that he will be out of choices then all right either he reaches laguardia or he is going to have to land short of the runway potentially in a very densely populated area and that is not a nice situation to be in in fact the only thing that he sees is either looking straight ahead where he sees teterboro airport uh but realizes quickly that tituba is just too far away it's nine miles away or so and then he sees this nice open strip which is the hudson river so at a fairly early stage you can hear through the communication with that traffic control how sully is starting to kind of leaning towards going down into hudson and that is likely because he understands that he doesn't have any other real options at this point during the descent now sully is obviously flying the aircraft looking out for where he's going to go and jeff skyles is working hard on the checklist okay he's reading through checklist item but checklist item but something that becomes clear at this point is that the dual engine failure checklist for the airbus a320 was not made for a dual engine failure just off the takeoff in fact this checklist was made for what was thought to be the most likely scenario which is an endian failure or dual engine failure at high altitude so it includes things like you know increase speed to 300 knots in order to windmill the engines to be able to start them they have a quick discussion about this jeff basically says it says increase speed to 300 we don't have that and sully responds to no we don't and because a lot of the checklist is basically not made for the situation they've found themselves in they are going to or he is going to have to work through the checklist just doing what he think that he can do and this is not a nice situation to be in um for any pilot at any point but what we have to look at here and something that they they do great is that they keep the roles divided right sully is concentrating on flying the aircraft looking after a plan where to land and jeff is trying to do his absolute best to use the checklist to restart at least one of the engines because if they can do that they can get the aircraft flying again and get it back onto a runway rather than into the hudson at time 1529 so this is just about two minutes after the engine failure sully takes up the pa mic and calls this is the captain brace for impact okay this is crucial because remember up until this point there hasn't been any discussion with cabin crew they would have noticed that something's wrong that had gone very very quiet inside of the cabin but they don't know how much time they have but by solid calling this they know you know brace for impact normally comes just before you impact the water so it would indicate to the cabin crew that they have a no time available emergency on their hands and they need to communicate to the passengers to basically just go into brace positions for potential emergency landing now another thing that is worth pointing out here is that during the descent captain sully who is now probably looking out the windows most of the time is gradually losing speed during the subsequent investigation he stated that he thought that he was following what's called green dot speed which is a safe speed to follow and that he only reduced back to the to the f speed the foxtrot speed which is the approach speed when they had flaps out but in fact the speed had been steadily deteriorating all the time as he is now descending and as they're descending in they're also getting a lot of different warnings right they're getting beeps from the aircraft telling them about the different failures that are being associated with the dual engine failures but they're also getting a tcas warning because as they're now descending in over central new york there's loads of helicopters around they trigger some tcas warnings but also crucially they're getting ground proximity warning systems warnings gpws warnings okay now if they would have had the ditching checklist which is a separate checklist that checklist actually tells them to turn off the gpws warning system because they're not supposed to get this kind of spurious warnings warnings that doesn't help them but since they're reading through the dual engine failure checklist that is not telling them to do so and another thing that is really important to remember here is that when the airbus 320 is constructed it is constructed to kind of layer different warnings on top of each other depending on how crucial they are and the gpws warning is considered to be one of the most important warnings it's basically telling pilot that they're about to fly into a mountain so any warnings that could be sounding at this point is going to be muted by the gpws warning so the fact that they're getting terrain terrain terrain pool up warnings mutes other warnings and in this case the speed speed speed warning that they would have gotten that solid would have had if it weren't for the fact that the gpws warning system was constantly sounding so he is now getting lower and lower and lower on speed around 15 29 20 so about two and a half minutes after the initial engine failure first officer jeff skyle start to realize that he's not able to restart the engines he still continues he still start you know move around the switches according to the checklist but he's also indicating to sully that you know this doesn't seem to be working and just about 20 seconds later sully asks for flaps right just give me flaps uh jeff gives him flaps 30 seconds later um jeff calls out that okay you have flaps and it gives them a speed readout you have 170 knots you're 250 feet have you got any power indicating that you know try just to put the trust levels up see if any of them would respond even though it doesn't look like it nothing obviously is coming out you have then asked you have flaps 2 do you want more and sully responds that no we will stay we'll stay with flaps 2. this was discussed during the subsequent investigation whether or not this was the right call to do sally said that he had in his experience uh choosing flaps three rather than flaps two would just give more drag and flaps too would get give him a better kind of noise attitude as it was hitting the water and that was you know agreed to by the investigation committee as well so at this point they're now coming very close to the water and sully is starting to prepare for the flare but remember how i told you that the speed was low well it turns out that below 200 feet they're actually 15 to 19 knots below the sl speed which is kind of the lowest speed that gives you margin to stall and remember how i also told you that it was important that sully had turned on the apu well it turns out that if he hadn't turned on the apu the only power that the aircraft would have had would have been from the ram air turbine and if that's the case the airbus 320 goes into alternate law and in alternate law and subsequent direct law the aircraft will not have the alpha floor protection that it has in normal law the airbus 320 if you're in normal law which is when the computers are you know fully functioning even if the pilots try to stall the aircraft the aircraft will not let them right but if you are in alternate law or direct law it will do what the pilots tells them so here as pyl as sully is now coming closer to the water he asks jeff do you have any ideas jeff turns back and says no not really and this is also a show of great airmanship and great crm the fact that before you know you face anything like this before you have the ultimate risk of going into the water here you see is there anything that we've forgotten to do is there anything else that we can do you're utilizing the the crew to its maximum capacity now as sulley is now getting closer to the water he tries to flare but because of the alpha floor protection because the speed is so low the aircraft does not flare as much as he wanted to he has the stick all the way back but it still flies into the water with considerable force the last thing that we can hear on the cbr is sully saying okay let's brace the aircraft hits the water with a force that is above the certified landing and water force and because of that there is some quite significant damage to the aft part of the aircraft which is what hits the water first the left-hand engine gets broken off um but the aircraft continues to just slow down into the water and then settles down because there was some quite significant damage to the earth part of the aircraft the water entered the aircraft there and kind of sinks the aft part of of the aircraft down the in the certification of of the airbus 320 it's supposed to be able to stay afloat so that you could use all of the emergency exits because remember it is equipped with these slide slash dingies in both the forward and the aft emergency exit because it's now sinking down into the water the cabin crew is doing an absolutely amazing work of redirecting the passengers from the aft part of the aircraft who is now sinking down into the water towards the overwing exits and towards the front exits the evacuation of the overwings is going slower than normal because people are not jumping down of the wings that they would do normally instead they're kind of crowding out on the wings so some of the passengers from the aft part of the aircraft um finds the way to watch the forward emergency exits and exits onto the jingles there fortunately there is enough room for all 150 passengers and five crew in the dinghies and on the wings and that's where you have these amazing pictures uh where the passengers are all crowded on the wings and in the forward part now air traffic control has done a great job as well they've been talking to the port authority in new york who's been sending out boats so within minutes the boats are there picking up the passengers because it's freezing most of the passengers are wet and if they wouldn't be so close to these ferries um there is a likelihood that there would have been fatalities here now the flight crew uh they are unharmed after they have settled down into the water sully and jeff goes back into the cabin and actually does a sweep of the cabin to make sure that all of the crew and passengers are out before they uh they themselves leave the aircraft through the forward emergency exits now guys i cannot over emphasize what a fantastic feat this is all right and what i'm going to do is i'm going to summarize this with the end of the ntsb report and what they came to when it comes to the conclusion of this accident they say the natural transportation safety board determines that the probable cause of this accident was the ingestion of large birds into each engine which resulted in an almost total loss of thrust both engines and the subsequent ditching in the hudson river contributing to the fuselage damage and resulting unavailability of the aft slide rafts were one the federal aviation on the administration's approval of ditching certification without determining whether pilots could attain the ditching parameters without engine trust two the lack of industry flight crew training and guidance on ditching techniques three the captains resulting difficulty maintaining his intended airspeed on final approach due to the task saturation resulting from the emergency situation contributing to the survivability of the accident was one the decision-making of the flight crew members and their crew resource management during the accident sequence two the fortuneous use of airplane that was equipped for an extended overwater flight including the availability of forward slide rafts even though it was not required to be so equipped three the performance of the cabin crew members while expediting the evacuation of the airplane and four the proximity of emergency responders to the accident site and their immediate and appropriate response to the accident so with all of this in mind the fact that they were flying that aircraft with that flight crew that cabin crew on a day that the weather was fine and that they managed to land on the hudson river close to where the boats were and they were rescued so quickly i think all of that together really really defined why this was called the miracle on the hudson now guys as a result of this there were more than 30 different recommendations for what needs to be done for example there was a recommendation that was went out that pilots needed to be trained for these kind of emergencies low altitude the fact that there was a possibility to lose both engines soon after takeoff and the you know basically be trained to be able to do a ditching without engine power it had not been part of the training program up until now and that is not only for the airbus fleet it went over to us in the boeing fleet as well we're also doing this kind of training now because of this incident there was also other recommendations um about emergency exits for example about the checklist being harmonized so that for example you know the loss of thrust of both engine checklist would lead into a potential ditching checklist which would include turning off the gpws warnings so that you could get the low speed warnings and many many other things like this and this is a great example on how an incident led to improvement in safety throughout the aviation business [Music] okay [Music] thousands okay 15.9 newton's fourth rate of contact on maintain one five thousand eight eight one five thousand cactus 1549. so so laguardia okay uh you need to return a low body turn left heading up two two three two two zero sorry stop you to park who's got emergency returning oh it's 15 29 he uh bird strike he lost all engine he lost the thrust in the engines he's returning immediately cactus 1529 which engines he lost thrust in both ends as he said got it back is 15 29. we can get it for you do you want to try to land 1913 we're able we may end up in the hudson 2760 turn left zero seven zero zero seven zero twenty seven sixty high cactus fifteen point nine can be left traffic to runway three one not able okay what do you need to land is 15.9 runway 4 is available if you want to make left traffic to 184. um what's over to our ride anything in new jersey maybe cheater barrel okay yeah off your right side is peterborough airport do you want to try to go to peterborough yes peterborough uh empire actually laguardia departure guy emergency inbound hey cactus 1529 over the george washington bridge wants to go to the airport right now bunco era project did you need assistance uh yes yeah it was a bird strike can i get them in for uh runway one one way one that's good cactus 15 29 turn right two eight zero you can land right away one at two borough we can't do it okay which one way would you like at peterborough i'm sorry again cactus one thousand yeah two tango alpha he's at 900 feet of beam the north hudson he's uh looks like he's descending into the hudson river tango alpha looks like this may be an incident here roger keeping my eyes out two things is 12 o'clock and two and a half miles kind of excited to tank lawfully roger cactus 15.9 radar contact he's lost you also got newark airport off you two talking about seven miles oh i think he said he was going in the hudson cactus 1529 if you can uh you got uh roadway uh two nine available at newark i'll be two o'clock in some months going down ankle outside two tango off roger hit the water roger [Music] as always guys i would love to hear if you have any questions about this what you think about this uh put them in down here below or go to the mentor aviation app or my discord server and once again a huge thank you to my patreons that made possible for me to make you know videos like this have an absolutely fantastic day and i'll see you next time bye [Music] you

Channel: Mentour Pilot

Views: 501,875

Rating: 4.944345 out of 5

Keywords: Miracle in the Hudson, Cactus 1549, US Airways 1549, Airbus A320, Bird strike, Aviation incident, New York, Mentour Pilot, Mentour Pilot accidents, Fear of lying, Fear of flying help, Jeff Skiles, Chesley Sullenberger, Sully, Sully Sullenberger, Miracle on the Hudson, Boeing 737, Pilot life, Aviation facts, aviation explained, Aviation accidents explained, Air crash investigations, Aviation news, Breaking news, Boeing 737MAX, Boeing 747, Airbus A330, Airbus A350

Id: Cv_48qFhoO4

Length: 34min 58sec (2098 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 15 2021