Chesley B. Sullenberger III, the pilot who safely landed a passenger plane in the Hudson River in 2009, said the crash in the Potomac River on Wednesday night came at an “exceptionally safe” moment in aviation history but showed “how vigilant we have to be.”
“We’ve had to learn important lessons literally with blood too often, and we had finally gotten beyond that, to where we could learn from incidents, and not accidents,” Captain Sullenberger said in an interview Wednesday night.
Before Wednesday, there had not been a fatal commercial plane crash in the United States in almost 16 years.
But the U.S. airline industry may again be forced to learn from tragedy, after a commercial airliner carrying 64 people collided in midair with an Army Black Hawk helicopter and then plunged into the dark, frigid waters of Potomac River.
The plane, a Bombardier CRJ700, collided with the chopper on descent into Reagan National Airport, which is just a few miles from downtown Washington and is considered one of the country’s most challenging airports to navigate.
Reagan Airport requires additional training for pilots who operate from it, Captain Sullenberger said. It fields heavy traffic and has short runways. It was built in the late 1930s.
“It hasn’t changed much since then,” he said. “Of course, we’ve added technology to it. But a lot of the technology is old.”
The airport may not have been the only challenge for the American Eagle Flight 5342 as it approached Washington on a flight that originated in Wichita, Kan.
The descent was also at night and over water, two factors that could have made avoiding the helicopter harder, Captain Sullenberger said.
“Nighttime always makes things different about seeing other aircraft — basically all you can do is see the lights on them,” said Captain Sullenberger, 74. “You have to try to figure out: Are they above you or below you? Or how far away? Or which direction are they headed?
“Everything is harder at night,” he said.
It was a sunny January afternoon in 2009 when Captain Sullenberger landed an Airbus A320 in the Hudson River. That plane went down after a large flock of Canada geese knocked out both of its engines shortly after takeoff. All 150 passengers and five crew members were safely rescued from the icy waters, as emergency crews and ordinary boats that happened to be nearby hurried to the scene.
On Wednesday night, the waters of the Potomac River might have hurt visibility, Captain Sullenberger said.
“There would have been fewer ground lights visible over the water than over land at night,” he said.
“It might have made it a little bit harder to see,” he added. “But that’s supposition. We don’t know.”
The National Transportation Safety Board said early Thursday that it was at the scene of the crash and was investigating.
Captain Sullenberger said he hoped that the cockpit voice recorder, the in-flight data recorder and air-traffic control radar data might provide insights.
“I’m just devastated by this,” he said, adding, “We have the obligation to learn from every failure and improve.”
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