Broken Airliners Seldom Mean Happy Endings

First I can tell you that I don’t have any idea what the Sam Hill happened in London the other day when the crew of that British Airways Boeing 777 crashed their airplane on the end of the runway during landing. There are plenty of rumors flying about and right now this is not the time or the place to speculate. I’ll leave that to others.

What I think is important – no, make that really important – is that despite the crisis that busted that airplane for good, there were injuries, but no deaths. I’ve been in the back of an airplane during a hard landing, so I’ll bet some of those injuries were probably not good, but again, no one died.

The people at British Airways – the pilots, the flight attendants, even the people who trained those people deserve a huge pat on the back along with a few atta boys – or girls – for doing what they were trained to do in a crisis.

All of us who have been through aircraft recurrent, or company recurrent training know that the one element that can never be added to the training is that sense of extreme urgency tied to unbelievable adrenaline flow that shows up only when the emergency is real. Their folks got everyone out of a broken airplane safely and we ought not to forget that.

Seeing what’s left of that 777 also reminded me of that old Timex watch commercial that used to run here in the states … “Takes a licking and keeps on ticking.” Let’s not forget to thank Boeing.