While all of Washington, Wall Street and the Babbling Class are counting every semi-colon in the House and Senate versions of the so-called stimulus package, it is useful to remember that regular people often do extraordinary things.
Case in point: the crew of US Airways Flight 1549 - the plane which landed in the Hudson River who appeared with Larry King on CNN last night.
It was a welcomed change from the frenzied point-counterpoint of what is good (not much) and what is bad (quite a bit) in H.R. 1 and what the Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's bank bailout package might (not much) or might not (quite a bit) do.
A hundred years ago, when Newt Gingrich was Republican Whip in the U.S. House and I was his press secretary we talked about whether there might be a way to make the Whip operation more efficient. Newt, being Newt, suggested a asking one of the airlines for an official checklist which their cockpit crews use prior to every flight.
The idea was: Let's don't reinvent what we need to do every time we need to do it. Let's establish procedures and simply repeat them each time.
On Larry King, pilot Chesley Sullenberger and first officer Jeffrey Skiles calmly recounted what they did from the point that the plane ran into a flock of (probably) Canada Geese which caused both engines to shut down.
While Sullenberger was trying to assess whether he could get back to LaGuardia Airport, or make it to nearby Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, Skiles described how he went through the Engine Restart Checklist including, essentially rebooting the system to see if the engines would come back up.
They didn't.
Sullenberger determined that the physics of the situation - airspeed minus altitude - meant the aircraft didn't have enough energy to get to either airport and told air traffic control he was going to land in the Hudson River.
Continued... |