Originally Posted by
NWstu
I'm not saying that ditching is not fraught with all sorts of perils, but complicating the ditching was that the
hijackers grabbed the controls and fought with the pilots with the new objective of turning the hijacking into a suicide mission. The ditching might have gone better without the, ahem, distraction facing the pilot.
I think it was pointed out that any wing mounted aircraft is pretty much guaranteed to flip over ...that is just physics. In all of the cases pointed out where they were successful they had a much more "boat-like" profile. 727 (no wing mounted engines). Boeing 307 engines are mounted in the wing not under it. The issue is you have 2 giant cups grabbing the water (engines) and stopping while the rest of the AC continues forward end over end.