Word: aircrafters
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...passengers and crew of U.S. Airways flight 1549, which was forced to make an emergency water landing in the Hudson River on Jan. 15, survived - making it the rare accident that airlines and the NTSB might look forward to investigating. Water landings (attempts to bring an aircraft down in a controlled manner on water) and water crashes (which are anything but controlled) are somewhat of a mystery to the engineers who design, build and study aircraft safety features and procedures. It's difficult to predict how an aircraft will hold up on impact and after crashing: will it break...
...also undergo training in flight simulators, according to Laura Brown, a spokesperson for the FAA. (They don't practice water landings in real planes for obvious reasons.) Most modern planes have controls that allow a pilot to close all air vents and openings in the plane to keep the aircraft buoyant in the water. Pilots are instructed to keep the nose up slightly, but not so much that the aircraft slams down roughly on contact. They also are supposed to keep the wings level to prevent one from being clipped by a wave, causing the aircraft to go into...
...Most commercial airlines are now replacing older three- and four-engine planes with more-efficient double-engine aircraft. Because these newer engines are quieter, birds are less likely to detect and avoid them. Worse still, fewer engines mean fewer backups should a plane and a flock of birds cross paths...
...just a civilian concern, either. In 1995, the U.S. military began re-evaluating its Bird Aircraft Strike Hazard (BASH) program after a $270 million U.S. Air Force E-3 Sentry struck a flock of 31 Canada geese during takeoff, causing a fiery crash that killed 24 service members. Solutions to the problem currently in use include habitat modification (planting specific types of grass that are distasteful to birds), aversion tactics (using dispersal teams, a.k.a. "goose guys," to scare them away) and lethal control (killing a specific number to reduce populations...
...Since 2007, has run a safety-consulting firm, Safety Reliability Methods, Inc., in addition to flying commercial aircraft...