[foldr]

You can't really "land" in the Indian Ocean in an airliner. There has (famously) been a successful ditching of an airliner in a river, but I don't think there has ever been a successful ditching in the open ocean. Here's the kind of thing you can expect to happen even in much more favorable sea conditions close to the shore:

https://www.reddit.com/r/CatastrophicFailure/comments/3f7fkk...

(There were a number of survivors in this case, though.)

[Sakos]

I don't know why I thought a controlled landing of a plane on water was generally possible. Maybe because of the pre-safety instructions where it sort of implies (maybe it's just me) that if a plane were to land on water, I could just put on a life vest, get the raft and get off. Looking at that footage and the death toll, feels like a miracle even that many people survived.

That makes me wonder if being able to land a passenger plane on water is ever a factor in its design.

[krisoft]

> I don't know why I thought a controlled landing of a plane on water was generally possible.

Because it is possible and foldr is incorrect in stating that it is not possible.

On the video he linked panicked hijackers were fighting with the pilots for the controls. Clearly that is not an ideal scenario for any kind of landing. Even more so for a tricky water landing one. But that is more of a reason to avoid hijackers fighting with the pilots, not proof that ditching is impossible.

Water landings are clearly not the preferred way to land. They are very risky. But they are also not as impossible as that comment makes them out to be. Here is a list of them from wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_landing

[foldr]

I didn't say that water landings in general are not possible (though they are difficult even under ideal conditions). I said that landing in the open ocean is not really something that has been done successfully in a modern airliner.

The closest example I could find in the list you link was the following. But it ditched a few miles from the coast and had much smaller engines than a typical modern passenger airliner. Also, it was a cargo flight with only the pilots on board, and the captain was seriously injured.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transair_Flight_810

[Sakos]

I'm looking at how many fatalities many of those incidents had and I'm not sure I'm convinced. They're not impossible, but the odds don't look great.

[DiggyJohnson]

Well that would be exactly right. I think people are confused because of some of the language you're using. Ditching is extremely dangerous and usually results in fatalities, but it's not impossible. There's a checklist for it.

[CalRobert]

It's definitely something that is considered, and the miracle on the Hudson included use of the A320's ditch mode if I recall correctly.

https://www.pprune.org/tech-log/358285-airbus-ditching-butto...

Looks to be in a few airbus models.

https://simpleflying.com/airbus-aircraft-ditch-switch-emerge...

If I recall correctly I've read that the bigger the plane the less likely it is to work but I don't have sources.

[Hnrobert42]

You are correct about the difficulty of ditching in the ocean. See Admiral Cloudberg's description of ditching a DC-9 in the Caribbean during bad weather. There were many survivors.

https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/down-in-deep-water-the-d...

[foldr]

Very interesting article. Worth noting that the position and size of the engines on the DC-9 would likely be more favorable for ditching than that of most modern airliners. The low and very large underwing engines generate a huge yaw force as soon as they contact the water, and it's very difficult to get both to contact at exactly the same time in a rough sea.

[tim333]

>Transair Flight 810, a Boeing 737-200 converted freighter aircraft ditched near Oahu and no one was killed though the plane was not well.

[stephen_g]

The video there seems to indicate that the hijackers flew that plane into the ocean (unless the commentary is inaccurate) so that is probably not as good a ditching as it could have been if the pilots had been flying… But yes it’s going to be a lot worse than the ditching on the Hudson in any case.