Incredible Look at Hudson River Landing

By Jason Paur~Wired

We’ve seen a lot of simulations of U.S. Airways Flight 1549 going into the Hudson River, but a new video painstakingly compiled by an engineer offers the most comprehensive and compelling look yet at the airliner’s short but incredible flight.

When the plane went down in January, it didn’t take long before the internet was flush with videos of Flight 1549 landing in the Hudson. They appeared everywhere from YouTube to the evening news, offering a fascinating look at a flight that lasted less than six minutes and made Capt. Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger and First Officer Jeffrey Skiles household names.

But the latest work by Kas Osterbuhr, an engineer at K3 Resources who specializes in the visual presentation of complex data, goes one step further. It reconstructs the flight using vast amounts of material, including radar information showing the position of the geese that led to the Airbus A320 losing power. The result is an incredible series of videos providing an immersive look at the flight of Cactus 1549.

The main video (featured below) shows a 3-D simulation of the flight from the moment the brakes are released at La Guardia to the collision with the geese to Sully’s amazing touchdown. It shows the flight from several angles, including a constant cockpit view in the corner, as well as the plane’s air speed and altitude. The video also includes the audio between the crew and air traffic control and text of the conversation between Sullenberger and Skiles. It’s an up-close-and-personal look at the demeanor of both pilots.

Subsequent videos provide an overhead view of greater New York with radar returns for all the aircraft and bird flocks in the area. You can see there was more than one flock in the area and the birds that hit Flight 1549 were visible before the collision. Osterbuhr notes these types of radar returns often are filtered from controllers — they don’t see them, in other words — to keep the controllers focused on the aircraft instead of smaller things that often pose no danger to the planes. Smaller returns often are false positives anyway, and there’s a lot of work being done to develop a reliable avian radar system to warn airports, controllers and pilots of birds that may pose a hazard.

Osterbuhr says after 200 hours on the presentation, it turned from a project into an obsession. He spent many, many more hours on it and ended up with something so exhaustive it even discusses the physics of a Canadian goose hitting an airplane. They’re definitely worth checking out, and it’s worth scrolling through the presentation and reading the explanations behind the video reconstruction and data presented.

We’ve provided the main video, but there are several more available.

Image and video: Exosphere3d.com