6 thoughts on “Summary of Captain Sully’s book”

  1. >> (Though the TSA does exercise some discretion, e.g., not asking Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab how he planned to celebrate Christmas in Detroit with no luggage or coat.)

    1) He did have luggage. Initial reports were to the contrary, but this has been proven false.

    2) I’m pretty sure the TSA isn’t checking passengers either in Lagos or Amsterdam. He had been flagged, however, and was scheduled to be questioned when he landed in Detroit.

  2. Was lucky to see Sully speak in person in Danville. He was pretty modest & suspect the book deals were pressured from different industries. More technical writing would be nice, but it wouldn’t make money in a country of free credit cards & no space program.

  4. Thanks, Elsa. It is a sloppily thrown-together book but has some interesting facts. I didn’t want my review to sound too harsh because the author is, after all, everyone’s hero.

  5. Did Captain Sully address the High Pressure Compressor Deterioration that could result in engine stalls (see emergency airworthiness directive http://bit.ly/ahuDCw for Airbus 320)? Statistically a dual bird strike at 100’s of feet of altitude leading to a catastrophic failure seems far less likely than a flaw in engine design; especially considering that a compressor stall had occurred on the *same* airliner just two days prior to flight 1549 (US Air did nothing except to acknowledge the stall – per the directive the only available corrective measure was a complete replacement of the engine).

    Even if this *was* a bird strike, how did our heroes explain failing to avoid a collision with a large organized flock of birds? And how did the birds fail to notice a big shiny airplane (presumably visible for miles) and managed to fly right into its engines?

  6. presidentpicker: Captain Sully did not mention the possibility of anything other than geese entering the engines as an explanation for why they stopped producing thrust (in Fly by Wire, Langewiesche explains that Canada Geese are much larger than the birds that a jet engine is supposed to be able to ingest without failing). Sully says that birds hit the airplane in a lot of other places besides the engines. He does talk about the impossibility of avoiding the birds, which had a relative rate of closure of more than 300 mph. The pilots saw the birds and, an instant later, were hearing the sounds of impact.

    I didn’t realize that there was anyone out there who doubted that the plane hit birds. In a plane with two engines, even if both engines have a design flaw, it is not typical for both engines to fail at the same time. And I believe that the NTSB recovered enough of the birds from the airplane to identify the species and the fact that they were migratory rather than local (see http://philip.greenspun.com/book-reviews/fly-by-wire ).

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