Saturday

It's minus-2 degrees and sunny.

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I hadn't really planned on doing a posting, this morning, but I'm sure that many blog-readers are waiting to read press coverage of yesterday afternoon's Dedication of the Waterville Post Office in memory of John P. Sigsbee. Here are links to articles in the Utica Observer-Dispatch and news items on WKTV Channel2News.

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ALSO:

Some - but probably not all - blog-readers know that my husband Dick (a.k.a. Rich) Brown, who passed away in 2007, was first an experienced Air Force pilot and then flew for Mohawk/USAirways for over twenty years. Several people spoke to me, yesterday, wondering what Dick would have thought about the Thursday afternoon emergency landing on the Hudson River made by the pilot of USAirways Flight #1549.

I happened to be in my car, listening to FoxNews, when the accident took place and actually pulled to the side of the road to listen. I knew right away that Dick wouldn’t have been at all surprised at either the cause of the accident - presumably a flock of Canada Geese - the pilot’s choice of the landing strip or the fact that Captain Sullenberger could adjust so rapidly to the plane’s loss of power while still using it’s airborne capabilities.

After all, it’s what pilots know how to do! They study; they practice! How? Long before they log any actual flight time, they spend weeks training in Flight Simulators, where every conceivable weather or mechanical condition can be and is replicated. Much of that training is repeated, without fail, every year.

I don’t know how many thousands of hours Dick logged in the air over his thirty-six year flying career. He certainly never had an “incident” like Thursday’s near-disaster (‘tho his plane was once struck by lightning and lost some “fairly important” systems) but I’m quite sure that had he been in the cockpit of Flight #1549 he’d have known what to do and would have done his darndest to manage it as well as Captain Sullivan and his crew did.

I’ve been surprised that the Copilot and Flight Attendants have not received their share of praise, for they, too - obviously - did their jobs well!

I had lunch, yesterday, with Gail Prentice, who spent many years as a flight attendant aboard USAirways planes. She reiterated everything that I had already known: flight attendants, like flight crews, go through months of training before they begin flying and then spend several weeks, every year, reviewing both normal in-flight and emergency procedures until they can - and probably do - recite routines in their sleep.

I asked her what the cabin crew would have been doing when the incident occurred and she said that, because it happened so soon after take-off, they would still have been strapped into their “jump seats” in the cabin. “The seats are very sturdy and our seat belts are actually total upper-body harnesses that keep you completely immobilized. Life preservers are located within easy reach inside the headrest.”

About Emergency Exit doors: whenever Dick and I traveled he always identified himself to someone at the ticket counter or gate and we were nearly always assigned seats in one of the exit rows. These seats offer the traveler extra legroom, which is nice, but that’s not the real reason he asked - or offered - to be placed there. The reason was that, in case of an emergency, the necessarily rapid opening of the exit doors takes someone with quick wits and a fair amount of strength. (Other people like these seats, too, and Gail and I laughed over occasions when either a young mother with an infant in her lap or an elderly woman had decided that THAT was where they were sitting and they weren’t going to budge for anyone! They insisted that they were quite able to manage the levers, etc., but they were finally shown to other seats, anyway.)

What I had NOT known was that unless a member of the flight crew - or whoever is opening any of the cabin doors - intentionally disengages the mechanism, self-inflating escape slides are automatically deployed. It takes no extra time or effort: it happens right away!

And it is those slides that, once released from the doorway, become floating life rafts. The boats will remain tethered to the aircraft until the tether is cut. “And someone has a knife?” I asked Gail, knowing that knives and scissors aren’t allowed in passengers’ clothing or carry-on luggage. “The boats come equipped with kits that contain everything from flares and first aid materials to mirrors and automatic locator devices," she said.

While I listened to her talk, I thought --- "I wish that everyone that I know who is afraid of flying were here right now." She never actually flew a jetliner, but in everything she said she reflected the same intense appreciation for a crew's practiced teamwork that my husband always did, and the pride that crews take when they have quietly avoided a potential disaster or when, at the end of each "leg," they can tell the passengers, "Welcome to (pick a city) and thank you for flying USAirways!"

I can't find the figures, right now, but news agencies have reported that in the past two years alone there have been something like two-billion airline passengers and in that time there have been no commercial airline fatalities in the United States.

One Email message that I received last night, referred to flight crews and read:

"We should thank them all!

God bless them."



The emailer added: " - and if you talk to Dick tonight, would you tell him that?"

Yes: I did. Thank you.

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