Originally Posted by
hfly
I always found it very fishy that they did a huge Press conference etc. within 24 hours of the event hailing them as heros. No one does that in such a situation, so quickly, as all the facts need to be ascertained and it takes much more than 24 hours, and in this case more than a year to figure out what went wrong.
That seemed odd to me; at the very least offering a hostage to fortune. Nonetheless, it does seem most unfair. I do not doubt that the rumour is quite untrue, and I am quite certainly that in the same circumstances I would be sh*tting myself. As, I expect, would all the rumour-mongers.
There is no doubt that there was a huge amount of luck involved in this episode. Has a plane ever before had an unexpected total engine failure (for whatever reason) in the last moments of a flight and, the plane having crash-landed without ever reaching the runway, every man, woman and child on board (and on the ground) emerge virtually unscathed? There just happened to be a clear bit of land exactly where is was needed. If the engines had failed twenty seconds earlier it would have been a disaster, however good the pilots. How lucky is that? It is literally fantastic. Without that luck all the skill in the word would count for nought. Hence, I suppose, the rumours.
All deeply unpleasant.