Pilot praised for reaction to broken window
Print Edition
THE pilot who made an emergency landing in southwest China after a broken cockpit window sucked his co-pilot halfway out of the aircraft has been hailed as a “hero” by social media users.
Liu Chuanjian braved intense cold and a blasting wind to slow the Airbus A319 airliner from its original speed of 800-900 kilometers per hour to land in about 20 minutes.
All 128 people aboard Sichuan Airlines Flight 3U8633 survived the ordeal. The plane was bound for Lhasa in the Tibet Autonomous Region from southwest China’s Chongqing when the cockpit window shattered at about 9,800 meters.
The flight was diverted to Chengdu, capital of Sichuan Province.
“The windshield burst suddenly and a loud noise was heard, and when I looked to the side, I saw that the co-pilot was already halfway out of the window. Luckily his seatbelt was tied,” Liu said.
The plane was vibrating strongly and it was impossible to read the instruments, said Liu, a former flight instructor in the Chinese air force.
“I didn’t think about anything at all. I wanted to control the plane and land,” he told Sichuan Television.
By yesterday afternoon, more than 160 million people had viewed or participated in discussions about the pilot on the Twitter-like microblogging platform Weibo.
The most popular chat forum on the incident was titled, “My Hero Captain.”
“This is a miracle in the history of Chinese aviation, and shows the special psychological mindset of flight instructors,” one commenter wrote.
“Having watched the American film, ‘Sully,’ based on real events, this is even more shocking and exciting,” another commenter said.
He was referring to Chesley Sullenberger, a US Airways pilot who managed to save the lives of 155 passengers and crew in 2009 by landing his stricken airliner in New York’s Hudson River.
The safety director of the Civil Aviation Administration of China said yesterday that the plane “shed its right windshield” as it was flying over Chengdu.
“The windshield has not recorded any failures, nor did it require any maintenance and replacement work” before the incident, Tang Weibin said, adding that the windshield was part of the original aircraft.
The cause of the incident was still under investigation, he added.
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