FTW.

A brilliant answer to a fucking stupid question. I can't believe she didn't see some variation on that answer coming.

"Um, Katie - I was a little busy trying to fly the airplane."

If he is an atheist, he should come out and say it. I think it would bother lots of Christians, even those on the plane, if they knew that a cootie spreader saved their lives.

What Christians cant stand is that atheists are capable of doing good and the thought of someone doing good without believing in poof logic, frightens them.

I am not sure exactly what he claims to be as the pilot. But he also commented in his hometown speech that "circumstances and training lead us to the outcome".

I love that admission that reality took priority over superstition. The reality is that any sane person is not, in that situtation going to want the pilot to stop what they are doing to solicite the help of an invisable friend. I am glad his attention was on the controls and not on some fictional being.

Well, I don't know if he is a theist or not and google was no help on that matter. Even so I could make the bold conjecture that he is one.

However, I don't see how that would modify the fact that he did something that few people will ever be called on to do and fewer still will actually manage to pull off correctly. And he did so without any help from the magical sky daddy.

Then, having done what he did, he does not choose to make a public comment attributing what he did to any source past the basic fact of the matter. He is really good at his job and that is all that matters to him and to the people who are alive today because of that basic fact.

Well Brian, when I hear people flipping that word around too damned much, I like to remember that “miracle” was the name of the horse in the Roman Empire part of History of the World part 1. That may be poor help by itself but once you get to the point where you can define a miracle as something other that supernatural, then you can call something that really is extraordinary a miracle with no god strings attached.

So where does that take us? Well, I have a couple of friends who are professional pilots and they tell me that pretty much the whole community of pilots hates the Airbus A320 with a passion. You see, they have one of the most intricate flight control systems in the skies. In theory, they can fly themselves from beginning to end. Just put a GPS coordinate in and the plane can take off, fly to the correct city and interface with ground control for landing with no human intervention.

Now this could be a good thing in some cases. For example, if the pilot dies in flight, there will be no 70's made for TV movie cliché where the stewardess call out over the intercom to see if anyone knows how to fly. Or if such a system was used in Boeing 767 jets, then LGA ground control would have been able to prevent the worst part of 9/11.

Sadly, the system does more harm that good. In theory the real pilot should be present as a safety feature and let the plane take care of itself until something bad happens. In reality, the engineers took into account the fact that pilot error is the leading cause of accidents and they granted the avionics the ability to “second guess” the pilot. However, they failed to provide an emergency switch that can shut the system down.

So, when the worst happens with one of those beasts, the pilot is not simply trying to bring the plane down safely (which is nearly impossible to do in a water landing at the best of times) but he is also doing that while fighting the avionics which have hard coded instructions on how to fly an airplane.

So if we allow the idea of a miracle that is really only an extraordinary feat,then yah, we are good to go. He not only did something that was so hard that most professional pilots can't manage such a task but he did it while the avionics were actually trying to kill everyone on the plane.

I was visiting my mother and she was watching that. All I said was, "That guy is the man." Holy shit he was awesome. Couric was asking all the middle America questions for the audience, you could tell, and his answers were fantastic.

At one point she asked him something like, "did it feel like slow motion?" and he said, no, it felt just like three minutes, and I wish I did go into slow motion, because then I would have had more time to think. Then she asked him if he was relieved to land, and he said no, because the job wasn't done.

It wasn't until he heard that everyone survived that he relaxed. That is what I call the man.

You must not have heard. It's a federal regulation that there be at least one atheist pilot on board in case of rapture.