Smackie the Frog

I’m sure you all know about the airplane that crashed yesterday into the Hudson river in New York. It is really incredible that everyone on board survived, and it is incredible that the plane was able to make a water landing in one piece.

I’m pretty sure that not everyone here is as huge an airplane nerd as I am, but you might have seen footage from a few years ago of a 767 attempting to make a water landing in Africa, and things did not go nearly as well, and there was a large loss of life, although there were also survivors. It is incredibly difficult to land an airplane on water, and especially so if the engines are below the wings, because they are going to hit the water before the rest of the plane and pull it down and around in ways that aren’t good. So the fact that the pilots were able to land that plane is pretty amazing.

That having been said, while the pilots and crew are going to get all of the praise, which of course they deserve, I’d like to point out who I think the real heroes in this instance are. The engineers who designed the plane and the avionics in the plane. And let me tell you why.

One, they designed a plane that was able to withstand a crash landing into water without breaking up. I know that you may think “Oh, water. That is soft,” but it isn’t. Water is hard, and landing in water is very violent. And that plane held together in once piece, and floated so that the passengers could get out. Kudos to the team that designed that.

And then there are the avionics guys. The #1 heroes, in my book. It probably isn’t common knowledge, but there are two competing views on how airplanes should be controlled. They are “fly-by-wire”, and the old way of cables and hydraulics. Airbus uses fly-by-wire, Boeing the other way. Basically with fly-by-wire the pilots controls are sent to a computer, which processes them and then sends signals to the various control surfaces that control the plane. With the other method (which I’m sure has a name that I can’t think of right now), the control stick is physically connected to the control surfaces, so when the pilot turns the wheel, he is actually turning the ailerons himself.

The argument for fly-by-wire is that you can set limits and do other fancy stuff. So for example, you can keep the plane from stalling, or rolling over, and you can do nifty stuff like if you lose control of the tail, you can still control the plane with the remaining control surfaces and differential thrust. This is possible because there is a computer standing in between the pilot and the controls. The argument against this is basically that the pilot isn’t in complete control, there might be a time when he needs to do something that the computers won’t let him, and computers are “tricky and misbehave”. Personally, I think that this fear of computers is stupid, and even Boeing, in their newer planes, is adopting some fly-by-wire.

Anyway, what does this have to do with yesterday? Well the plane that crashed yesterday was fly-by-wire. And there is a feature where in a situation like this, all the pilot has to do is pull back the control stick all of the way, and the computers will guide the plane to the smoothest possible landing. So the pilot would just have to pull the stick back, and the computers will find the best possible angle to provide the best possible landing. Yesterday some code that some amazing programmer wrote landed a plane, with the help of a pilot, and saved 150 lives.

So while the pilots and crew deserve our praise, so do the people that designed this plane and these systems to be able to handle a situation like this. And no one will ever mention them on TV or in the newspaper, and that’s a real shame.