Emergency landing over the ocean

Talk about coincidences.:(:(

http://forum.keypublishing.co.uk/showthread.php?p=1327968#post1327968

What can I say? :mad::(

Paul

Talk about coincidences.:(:(

http://forum.keypublishing.co.uk/showthread.php?p=1327968#post1327968

You need to avoid budget airlines. Fly with a mainline airline or a flag carrier and they’ll get you to your final destination. It may be on a ship, but they’ll get you there! 😀 :diablo:

Paul

So long as it’s not via the Suez they will, I have no need for meetings in Somalia :p

You mean I wouldn’t make it to my meeting? I’m gonna check if another airline will guarantee not to ruin me day if we have to land on water….:diablo:

Loch Lomond Seaplanes do a lovely service from the River Clyde in Glasgow…;)

You mean I wouldn’t make it to my meeting? I’m gonna check if another airline will guarantee not to ruin me day if we have to land on water….:diablo:

You need to avoid budget airlines. Fly with a mainline airline or a flag carrier and they’ll get you to your final destination. It may be on a ship, but they’ll get you there! 😀 :diablo:

Paul

Face it

If you’re going to “land” on water it’s going to seriously ruin your day….

You mean I wouldn’t make it to my meeting? I’m gonna check if another airline will guarantee not to ruin me day if we have to land on water….:diablo:

Hopefully there’ll never be that circumstance though.

That I certainly hope as well.

Paul

Yes Paul I phrased that wrong, what I meant to say was hijacked aircraft landing on water…

Hopefully there’ll never be that circumstance though.

I always assumed that the life jacket was just for the passengers benefit but I once had a tour round Air China’s operations base at Beijing and we saw a group of cabin attendants in the ditching simulator preparing to dumped in the swimming pool

Very true Paul.

Chopper does a bit of air safety in this video. !!Warning!! – contains bad language from the start, (the F word) please don’t view if you’re easily offended 😀

“Don’t assume the crash position, assume the f**kin worst !” :D:D:D

Well without the risk of going off topic, Ronnie Johns does a good job at ripping off Chopper, with all the “humour” aside there is some irony in the video, some of it rings true 😉

Chopper does a bit of air safety in this video. !!Warning!! – contains bad language from the start, (the F word) please don’t view if you’re easily offended 😀

He is lampooning Mark “Chopper” Reid.. a very infamous underworld figure here in Melbourne..He is known to have murdered several underworld figures and he is famous for cutting off his own ears while in prison

Very true Paul.

I guess there are no hard and fast rules to any of this because each case will have different circumstances, whether or not there is a good outcome is down to a whole lot of luck I guess.

Symon

I think you’re right, water seems more comforting than the ground, personally I’d head for the beach, preferably not a packed Bournemouth beach in the middle of summer though 😉

Chopper does a bit of air safety in this video. !!Warning!! – contains bad language from the start, (the F word) please don’t view if you’re easily offended 😀

To the non-experienced flyer, or those who don’t spend as much time looking in to it as we do, I would hazard a guess that people would be more ‘comfortable’ landing on water than an attempted landing on ground (away from a runway). Perhaps as the seas/oceans offer almost unlimited ‘unobstructed’ landing space. I think it is a good thing all flyers don’t realise the immense difficulties of a water landing.

For a long time I have considered the life vests as almost a ‘novelty item’ intended to reassure people. Though I don’t deny they have and will remain useful in certain instances.

I always advocate people listen to the safety briefing given by the cabin crew, but it’s a common misnomer to think you are going to survive should we “land” on water.

That’s exactly what myself and LBARULES were saying yesterday morning flying to AMS when we heard “in the event of landing on water”. 60 ton 737’s and similar aircraft simply do not ‘land’ on water!

That bit of the safety demo always amuses me!

Paul

Face it

If you’re going to “land” on water it’s going to seriously ruin your day, if the surface tension of the water isn’t broken before impact then you may as well fly into cumulo granite.
Even if you survive the impact (very unlikely), you will be dead within 2 minutes anyway, unless you’re lucky enough to be “ditching” (used in the loosest sense of the term) in relatively warm waters, which at this time of year is most unlikely.

There was a story of a worker who survived the 1,000ft fall from the Sydney Harbour Bridge during it’s construction after many of his colleagues fell to their death, purely because he dropped his hammer first which broke the surface tension of the water. Apparently the only man to fall and survive.

I always advocate people listen to the safety briefing given by the cabin crew, but it’s a common misnomer to think you are going to survive should we “land” on water.
Oh, and PLEASE don’t inflate your life jackets inside the plane 😉

1. In didn’t? By my calculations if they hadn’t changed to a NAT track further south than initially planned, they wouldn’t have made the Azores – very lucky. By flying the specific NAT Track which they did it enabled them to be closer to airports which could accommodate them (ETOPS), and so saved the aircraft, and lives of all the people on board. As i’m sure you’re aware, the incident was caused by incorrect maintenance – which could still happen, but if the correct pilot judgement was taken, the aircraft wouldn’t have run out of fuel, or at least not as early as it did. Since the incident, airbus has updated the checklist for suspected fuel leaks (closing the cross-feed valve on the overhead panel) so a similar incident should not occur.

That wasn’t what I meant. ETOPS regulations are there to get you back to land if you have one engine inoperative, not two. There was a huge element of luck involved in the Azores incident. Even a slightly different wind could have made the difference between them making it or not, and having been to The Azores and flown into/out of Terceira where the A330 landed, I know that really isn’t an airport where you want to go off the end of the runway. My point was that circumstances will occasionally arise and they’ll lead to totally unpredictable consequences. That’s been the case since the dawn of aviation, and it always will be the case. The more we know the less accidents will occur, but something will always take us by surprise every now and then.

You’re absolutely correct about the circumstances of that incident; action has been taken to try ensure it never happens again, but surely you know enough about aviation to be aware that making a statement like “I very much doubt there will ever be an airliner that has to ditch on water in the near, if not long future” really is a bit silly!

Paul

You’re assuming an ETOPS rating gives a complete guarantee nothing will ever happen, Sam, and that simply isn’t the case. ETOPS didn’t make the slightest bit of difference to the Air Transat A330 as its fuel drained away over the Atlantic. Nor did it make the slightest bit of difference with the 1996 hijacking.

Paul

1. In didn’t? By my calculations if they hadn’t changed to a NAT track further south than initially planned, they wouldn’t have made the Azores – very lucky. By flying the specific NAT Track which they did it enabled them to be closer to airports which could accommodate them (ETOPS), and so saved the aircraft, and lives of all the people on board. As i’m sure you’re aware, the incident was caused by incorrect maintenance – which could still happen, but if the correct pilot judgement was taken, the aircraft wouldn’t have run out of fuel, or at least not as early as it did. Since the incident, airbus has updated the checklist for suspected fuel leaks (closing the cross-feed valve on the overhead panel) so a similar incident should not occur.

2. The security levels on aircraft, and on the ground have been drastically increased recently, so there shouldn’t be the opportunity for people to hijack aircraft, never mind actually taking it. The 763 hijackers were rather stupid anyway, if they’d have done any research, they’d have known that with fuel quantities (+ reserves) for that flight, they’d have never got anywhere close to Oz.

But doesn’t ‘the water’ help to absorb some of the destructive forces generated on impact and terrible as it may be, is it not safer to hit the water rarther the ground ?

Seemingly this is why there were survivors in the Florida Everglades L-1011 crash in the 1970’s…

Hit water in the correct way and it can sometimes help soften the blow.
However, water cannot be compressed, and it’s mass means any impact upon it after a certain speed is as devastating as hitting contrete.
Check out the state of Bluebird when they finaly raised her as a reference and look what happens to powerboats when they fall foul of aerodynamics and the odd wave.

From my understanding of it all; The choppier the water, the more peaks and troughs you have which means the more chance you have of the nose “digging in” because of the waves. This would be like flying into a brick wall, causing the fuselage to be massively over stressed and tear apart.
The calmer the water, the flatter it is and the easier it is to make a controlled, slightly nose up “landing” where, if all things are equal, the engines tear off the wings as designed, leaving an intact fuselage to float. The calm water would then aid in floating the chutes and rafts and of course the embarkation of these devices.

I openly invite correction by those who sit up front for a living as I could well be wrong.

And you are probably not that safe with calm water if you are approaching at some speed.

The Ethiopian B767 being a case in point where one engine ‘dug’ into the water and next thing it was pretty well cartwheeling. Luckily, it happened not that far off the beach otherwise the death toll would have been much higher.

To be fair, that crash landing is not the most brilliant reference, though it is one often used.

I read that the hijackers decided the Captain was lying to them about having no fuel and was just forcing the plane down. So they struggled to take control of the aircraft in the last few, and very important, hundred feet or so. The struggle caused someone to knock the yoke (or perhaps deliberately turn it left so as to fly away from the island) which pitched the left wing down a few degrees, enough so that the left wingtip and engine made contact with the water first. The rapid deceleration of that side of the plane caused it to cartwheel and break up due to massive structural overload.

Before that struggle, witnesses say the plane was on a perfectly level approach, commenting that, for all intents and purposes, it looked like a normal landing.
Had the struggle not happened, the aircraft would probably have made a text book belly landing on the shallow water. Both engines would have hit the water at the same time, causing a balanced deceleration. The aircraft would likely have remained instact.

as I alluded in my last sentence.

Anything but a calm water body and your pretty much toast anyway.

And you are probably not that safe with calm water if you are approaching at some speed.

The Ethiopian B767 being a case in point where one engine ‘dug’ into the water and next thing it was pretty well cartwheeling. Luckily, it happened not that far off the beach otherwise the death toll would have been much higher.