R. Stacy McCain has an extensive roundup on the emergency landing today in the Hudson River by the pilot of a passenger aircraft.
No, that won’t make me fly US Airways again. But I’ll still send the pilot a drink voucher if I ever find out who he is.
Meanwhile, American Solutions thinks our problems with air travel in this country can be ameliorated with enhanced air-traffic control that uses GPS technology. This may or may not be the case, but the folks at AS also have a great set of links to various articles on making air travel suck less, and some proposals for fixing American travel infrastructure in general—including the possibility that high-speed rail could: (1) connect cities to airports more effectively (particularly if airports will need to grow, and therefore will necessarily be farther away from city centers), and (2) eliminate a lot of the short flights (less than 500 miles) that some say are clogging our airports and delaying longer flights.
My small contribution to this problem is to stop flying on airlines that suck a lot; hence, my personal boycott of US Airways, which has messed me over too many times.
I made it a point to book Virgin America to Washington, D.C. this February for CPAC (the indispensable bloggers’ stop that cheerful curmudgeon David J. Linden refers to as “your waterboarding convention’; the entire exercise is actually an excuse to go to Baltimore and eat his food for a couple of days every year after CPAC. David does most things very well: one of them is cooking. And his wife is so smart and beautiful—and his kids so engaging and cute—that the trip always cheers me up, no matter what challenges I’m facing back here in Los Angeles at any given time.)
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
I’m pretty sure that advanced GPS and satnav, and bigger FAA budgets, aren’t going to do a helluva lot about happening to hit a big enough flock of geese, just right, to cause both engines to have a big enough goose dinner that they BOTH shutdown on takeoff.
Sometimes shit just happens.
Chesley B. Sullenburger III
I suspect you won’t be the only one buying him drinks.
Charlie: I see I was unclear! It was more like this thing happened, and I went on with the “while we’re on the subject of airline travel . . . ”
I have no quarrel with this event; I love happy endings!