As well as finally confirming that a plane can land on water the miracle landing on the Hudson finally proved to me something that has been bugging me for years: a jumbo doesn’t skim like a pebble when it hits the blue stuff but ploughs on through until it slows to a halt . . . with the necessary piloting skill of course.

One other myth debunked is that tying your life jacket on correctly in the event of an emergency is nigh on impossible and probably not really needed. It’s not clear from the above photo, but just about everyone I saw vacating the airbus on the day of the landing had a brightly-coloured lump of orange plastic fluffed up around their neck.

The question that I’m sure everyone wonders when watching the cabin crew perform their ritual donning of the life jacket is whether it’s gonna be worth it? I fear that future attention spans during hostess demonstrations are soon to be even shorter than they were. Hudson has shown that you can get away with a rudimentary glance — just at the point when the captain urges you to do so — before returning to your iPod/magazine/beer for a snooze . . . as long as you ditch into water and you can make it to an exit you”ll be fine. If however, you have to perform a ‘hard; landing on solid ground then it’s a different matter and I would argue that a well inflated, correctly tied life jacket with the whistle popped out ready to be blown is the least of your worries.


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