• Convincing Computer Animation Recreates Hudson Plane Landing

    Tuesday, March 10th, 2009

    Erick Schonfeld is a technology journalist and the former Editor in Chief of TechCrunch. At TechCrunch, he oversaw the editorial content of the site, helped to program the Disrupt conferences and CrunchUps, produced TCTV shows, and wrote daily for the blog. He joined TechCrunch as Co-Editor in 2007, and helped take it from a popular blog to a thriving... → Learn More

    The computer animation in this video recreates the flight path and Hudson river landing of US Airways Flight 1549. Although the details of the story are by now familiar to nearly everyone—the plane hit a couple of geese, which took out the engines, forcing the pilot to make an emergency landing on the Hudson, saving the lives of everyone on board—the animation captures the sequence of events in an extremely precise way. The animation is timed to the audio track from the traffic control towers,which really shows how little time there was for the pilot to act. The incident from strike to landing takes about two minutes (the audio has been edited a bit down from its original runtime of around four minutes).

    Maybe it is just because I live in New York City, but the incident continues to amaze me. I discovered the video on Facebook, after it was posted there by Pejman Nozad.

    (Hat tip also to Fortune‘s David Kirkpatrick, who brought the video to my attention by sharing it on Facebook.

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