Flight 1549

BBC carried the Key to the City live. Sullenberger will probably be the new "how an airline pilot SHOULD act" role model for the industry

If that had been me at the controls, the passengers would have heard this:

"gluk gluk gluk gluk <clink> glug glug glug glug folksh we're goin down an I'm hittin the bottle to deaden the inevitable pain ... I suggest you do the same <hic> an thanksh for flyin ... um ... whatever the hell this airline name is again ..."

 

While bird strikes on aircraft are common, Alaska Airlines seems to find other animals too. This past weekend, it was a brown bear. A few decades ago, it was a large fish:

Alaska Airlines flight hits bear on runway during landing

 

There are some airports where you have to do a low pass over the field to chase off the goats/deer before you land. They come for the grass. In Alaska I would think if you kill it, you keep it.

 

At even a airport like Dulles in the DC area, there is a car that goes down the runway to assure that animals or debris aren't lurking. My wife when she worked there, took the ride at 100 MPH plus.

 

I experienced that at Glenorchy Airport in New Zealand, back in the '90s, when a break in the weather prompted us to book a last moment flight into Milford Sound. Earlier driving plans to Milford had been scuttled by heavy snowfall closing the road.

But this isn't a field appropriate for commercial jets, like the one striking that Alaska grizzly. The pilot arriving (from Queenstown with another passenger) to pick us up did have to inspect the field from above in case grazing sheep had to be hazed off it. At that time, the terminal consisted of a dirt parking lot for about a half dozen cars (none others present), a porta-potty, and a single post on which were mounted a phone, a first aid kit, and a weather resistant box for the pilot to slip in a flight plan / passenger manifest.

From aerial maps, I see that it has now been greatly expanded -- fully graveled access road, an additional access road, parking at least quadrupled, some real sheds, and a 'marshmallow farm', looking like a storage space for plastic-wrapped round bales holding the crop harvested from or alongside the landing strip.