From the here’s-an-accident-report-I-can’t-wait-to-read file comes yesterday’s report of a Westwind ditching near Norfolk Island, in the western Pacific. As is often the case at a distance, there’s not enough detail yet available to illuminate why the Captain decided, after several attempts to land on a runway, to ditch in the water (in darkness) instead. Weather was cited as a controlling factor, but no detail is available yet.

The flight was reportedly carrying a critical patient from Samoa to Melbourne, with a fuel stop on Norfolk Island. To give you an idea of the distance scales in the Pacific, Norfolk Island is 1200 miles northeast of Melbourne and Samoa is 1600 miles east of Norfolk. This is not a region of the world which tolerates short-legged airplanes or poor fuel planning.

To shed at least some light on how this could happen, consider that the Norfolk Island Airport lies at an elevation of 371 feet. So it’s easy to imagine how a 200-foot overcast or broken conditions could make for zero-zero conditions at the airport, while below the overcast, visibility over the water could be good. Based on a little Web research, I can’t tell if Norfolk has an ILS, but it apparently does have a LAAS-type GPS approach.

Since this seems to be the week for discussing ditching, here’s a question: If confronted with the same situation—a land airport fully fogged in or open water with good vis, which is the higher survival percentage choice? For piston aircraft during the day, it’s almost certainly the water. At night, it creeps me out too much to hazard a guess, frankly.

Some years ago, I studied several hundred ditching events and interviewed some survivors. The conclusion of this research revealed that in piston-engine ditching, the successful egress rate was well into the 90 percent range and the survival rate is nearly as high. It’s lower in the open ocean, but still good.

So if you go for the water, chances of survival are nine in 10. I don’t have nor could I develop any data comparing the Westwind scenario—a do-or-die zero-zero approach, at night, to a land runway. That one’s pretty high up the creep-out scale, too.

If both the water and the land were equally fogged with near zero vis and an ILS were available, I’d take the runway, day or night. The reality is that if you have to and you can bring your A-game, you can fly a Cat I ILS to a little less than 50 feet. Even in the worst of conditions, that should be good enough to permit just enough visual cues to make the landing survivable, if not pretty.

Two mitigating arguments against the otherwise high survivability of the water are its temperature and the prospect of floating in the fog waiting for rescue. On land, you don’t have to tread 40-degree water and rescuers in trucks will generally respond faster than boats will.

Either way, it’s going to be a near thing. Evidently the Westwind crew got it right, because everyone survived.

FRIDAY A.M. UPDATE: I got an e-mail and a phone call on this accident raising this legitimate question: Wasn't the pilot required to have sufficient fuel to reach a filed alternate? The answer is undoubtedly yes and one presumes the alternate was not the ocean. Unknown is why the alternate wasn't used. As I said, I'm eagerly awaiting the accident investigation findings. This one's going to be interesting.

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The more I read about USAirways Flight 1549's dip in the icy Hudson River last winter and the more we beatify Chesley Sullenberger, the more I think there's not much more to learn from this accident; nothing below the surface, so to speak. The engines choked on birds, the pilots did a masterful job of ditching, everyone survived. It's that simple.

William Langewiesche's new book, Fly By Wire: The Geese, the Glide and the Miracle on the Hudson which I just completed this morning, doesn't change that view. There are now four books on this subject, according to Amazon, three of them with the word "miracle" in the headline. I'm surprised that Langewiesche's essay characterizes the outcome with this word, for to read his book you can only conclude that the Airbus 320 performed exactly as the engineers who created it designed it to and that Sullenberger and F/O Jeffrey Skiles did everything right. Why is this miraculous? Does not screwing up now merit religious overtones? If there's anything exceptionally fortuitous here, it's that everyone survived. The law of averages dictates some small number would die—just because. Stuff happens. But evidently, 10 to the 9th didn't come calling. (More like 10 squared, I guess.)

Langewiesche is an exceptional stylist with a flair for making lucid for a general audience the determinative minutiae of aviation, specifically the much-maligned fly-by-wire system used in the 320. "Much maligned" deserves qualification here. Boeing aficionados have fought a persistent rear-guard whisper campaign against the Airbus control system and to this day, every accident seems to re-ignite the dying embers of this argument, fanning it to new levels of white heat.

But a core contention of Langewiesche's analysis is that while praise was heaped upon Sullenberger and Skiles (deservedly), the airplane itself deserved a measure of credit. Accordingly, he artfully details the history and philosophy of the Airbus control system, including its tri-level slow-speed/high alpha control law architecture which gave 1549's pilots an edge they wouldn't have had in a Boeing.

"…Sullenberger and Skiles disarmed a bomb on a three-minute fuse. They did it by concentrating on the two really important matters—how to get the engines started, and where to land. They could have done it in a Boeing, too. But it was helpful to their immediate cause that they were working with the product of [Airbus design engineer] Ziegler's mind, in which computers took care of the menial chores, then conjured up a magic carpet for them to fly."

Although this book doesn't reveal any now-it-can-be-told factoids, it adds interesting texture to the story. For example, moments after the bird strike but before he took the airplane from Skiles, Sullenberger flipped on the APU. When he was asked later why he did this, he had no clear answer, other than to say it seemed like a good idea at the time. With aux power already flowing from the APU, Skiles was able to roll back the left engine—as the checklist directed him to do--to attempt a restart. Up to that point, the barely turning left had been providing the airplane's only electrical power, plus a warm breath of thrust. The right engine was crumped entirely. Had the left side spooled back without the APU on line, the airplane would have reverted to basic control law. Still flyable, but less optimal than the full control, protections and panel Sullenberger had to finesse the ditching.

As Langewiesche reports it, many of Sullenberger's replies at subsequent hearings were plain vanilla responses devoid of detail and perhaps partially calculated to favor the cause of the airline union of which he is a member. The investigation boards convened thus far have evidently been remarkable for their incuriousness on the part of the questioners.

In Sullenberger, we find a man who, for the space of three minutes and 31 seconds, was as focused and as engaged with a machine as it is possible to be, yet not much detail describing what drove his decision making and how the unique design of the Airbus may have shaped it has emerged. But there was one nugget. Here's his reply when asked by an Airbus representative how he picked an airspeed to fly.

"As we were not configured for landing...we didn't have a reference speed displayed on the PFD...so I chose to use a margin above VLS." In the Airbus, VLS is "velocity lowest selectable." With no stored configuration data for what he was about to do, Sullenberger had to guess and guess right the first time.

He did, although not perfectly. Airbus engineering analysis predicted that at full flaps, a pitch angle of 11 degrees and 3.5 feet per second descent would allow the hull to remain intact during impact. Ten seconds before impact, the descent rate was six times that, but Sullenberger—with help from the automation—pulled enough pitch to hit 11 degrees at impact, but at a higher-than-optimal descent rate. He split the difference. As the engineers might have predicted, the hull was damaged, but not so much to preclude complete evacuation.

Speaking of which, the cabin exit brought out both the best and worst in human nature, but probably more of the best. One man forced a woman to the floor during the exit, but prior to touchdown, another offered to take a woman's baby and brace the child against the looming impact, at no small risk to himself. "What more can be said of anyone?" Langewiesche asks.

The NTSB's accident report on 1549 will be done sometime after the first of the year. I'll be surprised if there are any eye-raising revelations, although I'm looking forward to reading the powerplant report to see what kind of damage those geese did. Oh, and for those who complain about the tree-huggers wailing about goose extermination around the New York airports, there's this bit: the ingested geese were determined to be from Canada, not the New York region. They were in their traditional Mid-Atlantic flyway.

If your curiosity about 1549 is insatiable, Fly By Wire is worth a read, if for no other reason than to inform what you think about the Boeing vs. Airbus debate.

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When I was crawling around Joe Shepherd's nicely restored Electra at AOPA Summit last week, it occurred to me that the new film Amelia would be worth a look. We saw it Saturday night in a near empty theater here in Florida. (I don't take that as disinterest in aviation so much as the topic of Earhart itself, which is a steady staple on The History Channel. Viewers may be bored by it.)

Overall impression? I'd give it an eight on a scale of 10. I'd give Hilary Swank a 10 for nailing Earhart's accent and mannerisms, something that taxes the actor's skill to the limit because it's so easy to see through it when it's wrong. The flying scenes were terrific and lavishly shot in South Africa. Hundred million dollar budgets yield that. Reviews I've read flag the film as having a weak script, and I agree. It dragged at points and some of the dialog was a little silly. There are rushed scenes, such as the air race segment and the forced Gene Vidal detours that spread the story too wide at the expense of depth.

Halfway through the picture, I found myself comparing Amelia to Billy Wilder's Spirit of St. Louis, which, 50 years ago, used the same flashback device to move the story along. That film had Jimmy Stewart in the lead. The studio didn't want to cast Stewart because when the film was shot in 1957, Stewart was 49 and, so the story goes, too old to play the 25-year-old Lindbergh. But Stewart prevailed and carried the role brilliantly.

One reason for that is that he was a pilot. He was just over a decade from having flown 25 combat missions in Europe and he remained in the active Air Force reserves until 1968, retiring at flag rank. Wilder shrewdly constructed shots that showed Stewart's feel for airplanes. Remember the scene where he was running up the engine wondering about moisture in the mags? Compare that to Swank's performance in the Hawaii crash segment in Amelia.

And in Spirit's famous mirror scene—shot sparely and played quietly—we got a glimpse inside airplane that both moved the narrative forward and gave us a tantalizing glimpse into the Ryan's technical innards. That scene alone is among the masterpieces of modern film craftsmanship.

Directors don't do that much anymore, if at all. They assume—perhaps rightly—that the audience is too shallow and distracted to want to think about how the laws of physics and aerodynamics work, how machines fit into that and how people operate them. Thus, in Amelia, we don't get to see what the panel looked like, nor we do learn that she had a hand in her demise because of poor planning and execution. Compared to The Spirit of St. Louis, Amelia is pretty, but shallow.

Another metaphor for modern life.

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As AOPA's Summit draws to a close today, I'm finally catching a breather and looking over my notes. Yes, the show was smaller than in past years, at least in terms of exhibitor numbers. It's hard to judge attendance—there were moments when I couldn't navigate the aisles in the convention center and moments when they were empty.

So should the name be "Summit" or "Expo"? I have to admit, I don't get Summit—it doesn't resonate with anything other than a meeting of pols or world leaders, and this convention is not that. It is and should be about members, their airplanes and the companies in the industry. They are the people who will make it live or die. My vote is to go back to Expo or pick another name if the association thinks it needs to reposition itself.

One thing that did work was the live coverage at the show. If you were in the convention hall, the center stage area had giant screens on the ceiling, plus repeaters all around the hall. At best, with their bloodless lighting and dull carpets, these convention halls can be a graveyard with lights. But the center stage idea livened up the joint and the programs were appropriate and interesting. Plus, I found myself exposed to the specter of the Inescapable Dave Hirschman. I was wandering the hall when he was interviewing someone and he was everywhere, following me his eyes—sort of like 1984, but in a wholesome, friendly sort of way.

The static area—now there's something that does need a name change—was anything but. And AOPA tried. They called it "AirportFest," but it didn't stick, as such things never seem to. The place was hopping and if you've never been there, Peter O. Knight Airport in Tampa is one of the best sites for this display. It's hard by Tampa Bay and right near downtown. Boats, cars and airplanes all come together and it is as pleasant a place to be in November as you can imagine. I found it interesting and upbeat and I'm hard bitten enough to make Dick Cheney look like Mary Poppins.

We did a video story on Joe Shepherd's Electra, which appears in the current film, Amelia. Bernard Chabbert e-mailed to remind me that it was his France-based Electra that appeared in the flight scenes, not Shepherd's. We should have noted that somehow in the story; Shepherd told us and he was clear that his airplane was used for static shots—there's that word again.

Chabbert flew his Electra to South Africa for 65 hours of aerial photography and a total of 165 hours of flying. Marooned in Luanda, Chabbert tells us avgas had to flown in via Twin Otter at a cost of $54 per gallon. Lessee, at 25 per side, that leg cost $2700 an hour, just for gas. The real Amelia flew her Electra 17,000 miles before it vanished. Chabbert's trip totaled 19,000 miles.

I had a terrific time interviewing Thom Richard for the Invictus video story. My idea of max zoot flying has always been anything below 100 feet and at Reno, they not only allow it, they expect it. The Formula One International class is something that an amateur racer can afford and that makes it all the more appealing. Check out Richard's cockpit-view vid of the race here.

I've seen some hardworking PR agents in my time, but the guy representing the Dominican Republic at Summit set new standards for dedication. In the press room, he buttonholed everyone in sight—did we want to interview the air minister for a story? Well, no…On the convention floor, he spotted my camera and media badge and tried again, suggesting I might like to meet the two stunningly gorgeous Latin beauties the DR had thoughtfully provided to staff the booth. Not that I wouldn't liked to have met them, but I was already two hours behind some deadline or another. To such depths has my beloved craft of journalism sunk that we now throw over the babes just to get a few seconds of fleeting video that's forgotten 30 seconds after it's viewed. This is progress?

One thing that is progress is Cessna's rollout of the 162 Skycatcher. I flew it for a video review and a full report in the December 2009 issue of Aviation Consumer. It was exactly what I expected it to be—solid, competent and no major warts that I could see in a short trial flight. Well, there was one surprise: the control stick emerges from under the panel, rather than being floor mounted. I'm not sure if I like that or not. I'm still chewing on that. One thing I am certain of: The Skycatcher will break the LSA market wide open. I don't see how any but a few smaller companies can compete with it.

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Anyone who has ever flown a long cross-country in an airplane knows that the cabin turns into a disorganized mess of charts, water bottles, headsets and snack sacks. Why is that? Give us a good reason and we'll send you a hat.

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