Goose Bumps Over Flight 1549

Boy, we all needed this story, didn't we?

Markets collapsing, unemployment rising, mortgages foreclosing, everybody talking about cutting back on this and canceling that. Gawd . Everywhere, the news is bad. Except when it's worse.

Then, out of the sorta clear blue skies last Thursday, US Airways Flight 1549 lost a game of dodge 'em with a gaggle of geese 3,000 feet over the Bronx and zoomed right down into the smooth, gray waters of the Hudson River.

When's the last time we saw a headline like this?

Plane Crashes. Death Toll: Zero.

As one witness put it, "I never, in a million years, expected to see US Airways in the Hudson River." I'm thinking this won't be US Airways' new marketing campaign anytime soon, but it is kinda catchy.

Now, I don't mean to make light of how scary this was for the 155 people on board, especially because I am afraid of (a) flying and (b) water. I'm not too crazy about sudden changes in schedule, either, so the first thing I did after hearing about the crash was say a prayer and reach for my inhaler.

But everyone lived! Even the babies! Some of the passengers claimed it was no big deal, as if landing in a river were the most natural thing in the world to do on a flight to Charlotte, N.C.

"It wasn't that bad," one survivor called out to spectators.

It's like merging the last scenes of "It's a Wonderful Life" and "Field of Dreams" so everybody gets choked up and wants to play catch with an angel they used to take for granted. Or something like that.

There are real heroes, too, starting with the pilot, Capt. Chesley B. Sullenberger III. What a great name. He just calmly informed the control tower that he would fly over one of the most populated areas of the country and head for water.

And how about those flight attendants?

As passenger Darren Beck told The Wall Street Journal: "The flight attendants just kept chanting, 'Keep your head down, brace for impact, keep your head down, brace for impact.' They just kept saying that over and over again.

No one screamed? Goodness. Add all those passengers to the list of people I hope to grow up to be someday. Role model overload.

I do have a couple of niggling questions. For one thing, I don't understand how it is that Canada geese think they're a match for an Airbus A320. Do they not see all those other birds getting sliced, diced and scattered to the winds like a big pinch of Mrs. Dash?

The Web site AirSafe.com says that there were more than 56,000 bird strikes to civil aircraft in the United States reported to the Federal Aviation Administration from 1990 to 2004 and that this number represents only about 20 percent of the estimated total of such collisions. Because we can't survey birds, we have no idea how many have witnessed one of these encounters and decided that hey, maybe they should move to the suburbs. You'd think the noise alone would drive them away.

There's something else that puzzles me. Time magazine reported that the type of aircraft involved in this accident has an engine designed to sustain damage from a bird weighing all of 4 pounds. The average goose, however, weighs about 10 pounds.

Bird Strike Committee USA offers this illustration: A 12-pound Canada goose striking an airplane going 150 miles per hour at liftoff generates the force of a 1,000-pound weight dropped from a height of 10 feet.

First of all, how impressive is it that somebody actually can figure that out? There are so many jobs out there for which I am not even remotely qualified.

Secondly, is it just me, or is it a tad troubling that nobody's figured out this little design glitch? If we know there are geese flying into airplanes, shouldn't we require that engines be built to sustain impacts from these fatsos?

Oh, but I quibble.

Today let's just celebrate that on a cold winter's day in January, 155 people crashed into the Hudson River — and lived to tell the tale.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and the author of two books from Random House: "Life Happens" and "… and His Lovely Wife." To find out more about Connie Schultz (cschultz@plaind.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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