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Flying is the safest mode of transportation. Hard to believe? According to the BBC, air transport is six times safer than travelling by car and twice as safe as travelling by rail. But, after the miracle landing of a US Airways Airbus 320 on the Hudson River earlier this year, many people are wondering about the turbulent safety record of flying...and crashing.
Chelsey B. “Sully” Sullenberger is being called a hero because his superior flying skills helped him safely ditch a plane into the water with no casualties. On January 15, 2009, US Airways flight 1549 departed from New York City en route to Charlotte, North Carolina. Less than two minutes after taking off, Sullenberger radioed air traffic control claiming that the plane had hit a group of birds and had lost power to both its engines. The pilot only had seconds to decide where to land the plane and decided on ditching it in the Hudson River. Everyone on board evacuated the aircraft using the slides and were ferried to safety by nearby boats. The plane remained floating for many hours after that.
Sullenberger is only the second pilot in history to have ditched a plane into water with no fatalities. Every other plane that has made a water crash landing had resulted in fatalities. But there are still a lot of miraculous crash landings in aviation history. Below are just some examples of miraculous landings.
Gimli Glider
On July 23, 1983, a Boeing 767 jet, Air Canada flight 143, ran out of fuel at 41,000 feet, halfway through its flight from Montreal to Edmonton. The aircraft was able to glide safely to the Gimli Industrial Park Airport in Manitoba. All 69 people on board survived. The subsequent investigation revealed a chain of human errors that caused the plane to run out of fuel. In addition, maintenance crews and the pilot miscalculated the amount of fuel on the plane through a misunderstanding of the recently adopted metric system, which replaced the Imperial system.
Running On Empty
Air Transat Flight 236 was on a route from Toronto to Lisbon, Portugal on August 24, 2001 when it ran out of fuel over the Atlantic Ocean with 306 people on board. Halfway through the flight, a warning sounded in the cockpit that the right engine was dangerously low on fuel. Thinking it was just a computer glitch, the pilot continued to fly the plane. When the warning sounded again a few minutes later, the pilot decided to switch on the cross-feed valve, which would send fuel from the left engine to the right engine. Since the pilot had no idea that there was a fuel leak, all the fuel that was transferred to the right engine leaked out of the plane into the ocean. The second engine went out, drained of fuel. Miraculously, the pilots were able to glide the plane to safety in the Azores. Everyone survived.
Miracle In Toronto
Air France Flight 358 departed Paris without incident on August 2, 2005, heading for Toronto Pearson International Airport. Upon landing, the plane skidded off the runway and landed in a ravine 300 metres from the runway and only metres away from a busy highway. It burst into flames. Amazingly, all 309 people aboard the flight survived, jumping out before the flames engulfed the plane. The bumpy landing was blamed on a severe thunderstorm that included torrential downpours and very strong winds. Obscured visibility and strong wind shears forced the pilot to land the plane too late and overshoot the runway.
Dragged Down
On July 12, 2000, Hapag-Lloyd flight 3378 took off from Chania, Greece en route to Hanover, Germany. Soon after taking off, the pilots realized that the landing gear had not fully retracted. The pilot decided to shorten the flight and divert it to Munich, after the crew calculated how much fuel they had using the Flight Management System. They had not, however, taken into account the half-raised landing gear, which added drag and caused the engines to use up more fuel. The plane ran out of fuel with 20 kilometres to go and the pilots were able to glide the plane and re-divert to Vienna. The plane touched down 500 metres short of the runway. All 150 passengers survived, exiting by the emergency slides.
A Rare Event
It is extremely rare for a plane to crash land. The main reason why crash landings frighten us is that a single plane incident can result in many fatalities, whereas a car crash, which happens hourly around the world, may only have one.
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