The country is still reeling from a devastating plane crash in Washington DC. Now, Captain Sully, who maneuvered the Miracle on the Hudson several years ago, is sharing his condolences about the crash.
Sully Sullenberger famously piloted a crashing plane to safety in 2009 after a bird strike. Appearing on Good Morning America, the captain described the latest crash as nothing but a tragedy. An American Airlines hit an Army Blackhawk while landing at Reagan National Airport, killing everyone involved.
"We have to realize how many things have to go right every day for us to have this now ultra-safe transportation industry," he said.
Sully continued, "Any lapse could potentially be fatal, even though we have a lot of safety layers in there," he added. "If all the dominos line up in the wrong way, we can have, on rare occasions, a catastrophic event — and it's important to know that given enough time, given enough flights, given enough flight hours, eventually whatever can happen will happen, unless we work very hard to prevent every incident from turning into an accident."
Sully Speaks Out
The pilot also mentioned that Reagan National Airport is a difficult one to land at. He said that pilots need a bit more training in order to safely navigate the area.
Sully said, "It's kind of a special safety airport that pilots need to have unique training on to fly in and out of if you're an airline pilot. ... [It] requires a bit more study to operate there safely because of the short runways, because of the proximity of other airports and because of the traffic level; it's a high-traffic, high-density area. And lots of different kinds of traffic that's mixed together." He explained that this makes things difficult.
However, Sully said that the risk of crashing is "infinitesimal." The retired pilot said that there's a lot of factors that go into keeping the airways safe. He said that people in the industry work everyday to keep others safe.
"We have a lot of people who work very hard every day and are very dedicated to keep us safe," he said. "We have thousands of people doing that every day — we just don't know who they all are."
