Blue Water Ditching: Training Professional Crewmembers For the Unthinkable Disaster

Professional pilots have a doctorate level of knowledge surrounding aviation. They spend years learning all aspects of aviation from federal regulations, international regulations, communication procedures, emergency procedures, instrument procedures, flight manuals, company manuals, operating procedures, and finally techniques on how to do their job.However there is an emergency procedure which is trained around (crew members learn the beginning, and the end), but very seldom spend time dealing with the real time exercise of what is going to happen in a ditching. All crew members learn how to secure a bad engine. Or handle an electrical malfunction. Or control bleed air in a pneumatics problem. They also train how to exit the aircraft in the water in case of a water landing. And how to climb into rafts and in some cases how to climb into a basket for a helicopter pickup. But few crew members have ever worked through the scenario of engine failure at altitude to water contact.This book begins with the concept that no pilot is too experienced, or too old to learn a new lesson. The concept is best demonstrated by the work of Captain Al Haynes. Captain Haynes was the pilot in command of the severely crippled DC-10 which crash landed in Sioux City in 1989. 184 people survived the landing against all odds. Captain Haynes began a speaking career and many years later a Belgian captain, Eric Gennotte attended one of the talks. In 2003 Captain Gennotte is flying an airbus taking off from Bagdad. The aircraft is struck by a missile and the left engine is afire and portions of the wing are burning off. The airbus loses all hydraulics and control of the flight surfaces. Gennotte flies the jet using techniques taught by Haynes and brings the jet back to the airport for a safe landing.In 2009 we all saw video of a large passenger jet safely land on the Hudson River in New York. Visual proof that water landing can be done. The book also covers many of the other successful ditchings of the last 55 years.The book breaks down ditching training into four phases starting with home study or subjects covered at formal training. The last phases go into deep detail of the last 1000 feet before landing and down to the last 100 feet to contact. The author writes from his experiences of landing a Lake Seawolf in the off-shore environment during a USAF test program. Those experiences allow him to detail exactly what the pilot will see as the aircraft makes the last 1000 feet of the descent. This level of detailed training has never been published before.Pilots today are aware of the 406 megaherts emergency locator transmitter. In the chapter on SARSAT Systems they will learn how the transmitter talks to the satellites which talk to the ground stations which talk to the rescue coordination centers which talk to the mission command centers where rescue forces can be launched. And this system works worldwide to communicate with rescue forces on six continents.If an airframe goes down out over the wide open ocean or up north on an ice pack, who is going to pick up the crew and passengers? The chapter on maritime integration to search and rescue walks through the basic steps of how a coast guard or rescue forces can find a boat on the water to send to the rescue.Included in the book is a sample simulator scenario for training departments. One scenario builds to a quick reaction ditching (on-board fire) and the second scenario build to a drift down ditching (intense hail damage). The scenarios are built for realism and training value.Generic ditching checklists are for crews flying without a prescribed ditch checklist.The book concludes with a glossary of aviation definitions for the layman and the beginning pilots studying ditching. Professional crews crossing the ponds today are well versed in APU, CPDLC, HMG, GMDSS, EICAS, PACOTS, and RVR?but many readers will be lost in the jargon.

Captain Dave Montgomery has thirty years of professional flying experience, with over 8,000 flight hours transitioning seventy countries. In 1981, he joined the United States Air Force after spending his early life as a firefighter and police officer. In 1991, he served as one of six pilots for the operational testing and evaluation of the Lake Seawolf Aircraft. It was during these tests that he gained his valuable takeoff and landing experience in a myriad of offshore conditions. He is among an extremely small percentage of aviators who intimately know what a pilot can expect when landing offshore, and after four years of research, he has compiled many techniques, procedures, facts, figures, and recommendations into a single guide to prepare a pilot for a possible ditching. Montgomery retired from the Air Force with twenty-four years of service and now pilots for NetJets, the world’s largest corporate flight department. He currently lives near Seattle with his wife and two children.