Video: US Airways Flight 1549 Lands in the Hudson

The story of the landing of Flight 1549 in the Hudson River has been really powerful for me. The pilot of that flight, Chesley Sullenberger,  is my kind of hero. I'm thankful that neither a single death nor any major injuries occurred as a result of the landing, and the passengers tell a consistent tale of a calm, collected, women-and-children-first evacuation. That happened as a direct result of his cool head, his quick thinking, and a little bit of divine intervention. It could so easily have been otherwise.

At the time of the rescue, there were helicopters with video cameras all over the scene, and the rescue was pretty well documented. So why am I blogging about it now? Well, I knew it would only be a matter of time before a video of the landing surfaced, and I wanted to have something constructive to offer to my readers instead of another rehash of the events.

Here it is, courtesy of the U.S. Coast Guard, unedited, and no sound track. The splashdown occurs at 2:02, and if you stick around for a couple of minutes, you can see people emerge, fall off the wing, get pulled back up onto the wing by other passengers, and eventually get picked up by the ferries.

Back in the Saddle

Time to get back in the saddle. Of life, of school, on the bike, etc. We just returned from a very good weekend of the wedding of my brother in law Peter. It was a great time of family, friends, hanging out, sightseeing, monopoly, midnight pow-wows, etc. My wife, as usual, has posted her well-written and entertaining summary of the weekend, and I dare not compete or compare with my own version. I could go on and on about my nightmare travel experience with Continental and an unplanned and low-sleep overnight in Houston, but I'll spare you the details.
A much needed breather. The weather was actually cool, and I tried to spend a lot of time out it in to radiate the Texas heat out and see if I could lower my core temperature in preparation for the rest of the Texas summer. Unfortunately, thermodynamics does not work that way, and we're back in sweatland. For my ride in this morning, I actually was pretty much recharged, and the weather was not bad. I'm not sure how the ride home through the 40C heat will be, though.
Just one quick little funny about the airplane trips. For personal amusement, I have recently started counting the number of times that I hear certain phrases from the flight crew. The two most frequent ones, in my experience, are sentences that start with "Once again..." and "at this time". For the flight up, the score was tied at 4 and 4 because the captain spoke with unusually civilian jargon. The trip home, though was classic, with 7 instances of "Once again..." and 9 of "at this time".

PS, after a comment from my brother in law Paul, I'm switching RSS to full syndication so that those of you who use a blog reader get the whole thing and not just the first paragraph. Most of my ad traffic comes from searches on a few of my posts anyway, so it's not that big a deal. Enjoy!