pratt & whitney
As a lapsed private pilot, I’ve been asked a couple of times for my take on the recent airplane crash in the Hudson river near New York City. Here it is, in a nutshell: It’s second nature for the pilot. I mean, those are the kinds of scenarios you train over and again for in the simulator and can manage in your sleep. That said, I still can’t really imagine exhibiting the kind of piloting finesse demonstrated in that particular plane–an Airbus A320-200–on account of the sidestick controller it uses (as opposed to the traditional yoke). Think about controlling something that massive with small wrist movements of one hand… It would just feel totally unnatural. The F-16 was the first plane to use the sidestick, but in its case it seems a little more reasonable, given that the F-16 is a much smaller, highly-maneuverable fighter. Honestly, the sidestick’s inclusion on every modern Airbus–even the A380 (!!)–is a major reason for me to favor Boeing products. The latter just seem much more pilot-friendly. The comments of several airline pilots I’ve talked to corroborate this.
As far as what caused the plane’s engines to fail, there’s no way for an engineer to design an engine to withstand that kind of event. Jet engines are routinely tested for birdstrike resiliency, but that test basically consists of a cannon firing a dead chicken (or equivalent) at an engine running on a test stand. Both engines ingesting multiple birds during a high-power setting on climbout is an unreasonable thing to expect the engines to withstand. So I don’t fault the engineers in the least for their design decisions. It was just bound to happen, I think, and I’m glad it turned out the way it did.