I'm fascinated by the story of the plane that went down in the Hudson River. It just seems too fantastic to be real. But that said, the thing that makes it so great is that the ending was overwhelmingly positive.
ABC News had an interesting factoid that surprised me. They said that the notion that most people in plane crashes die is a total myth, that in fact 95% of people in commercial airline crashes survive. It's probably that only the most spectacular and deadly crashes grab big headlines. Those and water landings.
I caught this on cnn.com yesterday afternoon 15 minutes after it happened and I, too, was overwhelmingly happy to see everyone get out alive. In fact, the only real injury I've read about is one person with two broken legs.
I read this morning the pilot was a fighter pilot in the 70's and is currently a safety consultant as well as a commercial airline pilot.
He did all the right things.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TRAVEL/01/15/usairways.landing/index.html
Yeah, I agree this was a great story.
But as I understand it, the 95% survival rate is for all plane incidents. The survival rate for actual crashes is about 76%. Still higher than you would think, but not as high as 95%.
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1872154,00.html?imw=Y