I can’t stop reading about Flight 1549. You can’t even call it a plane crash — it was more an unplanned landing in the Hudson River.
It would be easy to spin the story to make it fit with my blog’s theme of transformation. The Times today has a story about how a brush with death can change survivors of something like Thursday’s miracle.
But I’ll be honest. Whether it fit or didn’t, it’s the thing I’m currently obsessed with. The captain of that plane had something horrific happen, apparently losing both engines above the most densely populated city in the U.S. He not only clearly assessed the danger he faced and the options he had before making a great decision about what to do, but then executed flawlessly. He put a commercial airliner down in the river, then walked the aisle twice making sure everyone was off before leaving himself — and he even thought to take the plane’s manifest with him, so he could check that all his passengers were accounted for on the ferries.
MSNBC has this first-hand account from one of the survivors.