Just back from seeing the movie, "Sully", with Tom Hanks as the heroic pilot

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

22. Me, too.

I'm recently retired from a major airline where I was an instructor, and I've taught an aviation safety/accident analysis course for almost 20 years, so I'm pretty familiar with the process, too. The most important thing about any NTSB investigation is their recommendations. The agency has no power to create or enforce safety regulations so it has to make recommendations to the FAA, which can then decide (after a complex rulemaking process involving soliciting comments from the public and anyone else, including the airlines) whether or not to adopt the recommendations. Their investigation into any accident is not for the purpose of assigning "blame" to anybody but to determine what, if anything, could or should be done differently if the same situation occurs in the future. In this case there were a number of recommendations regarding training, checklists and procedures for low-altitude loss of engine power and ditching. I know that the FAA quickly adopted many of these recommendations because we started teaching ditching procedures in the simulator. Realistically, ditching does not usually end well, especially if an airplane goes down in the ocean - the waves and swells are likely to cause it to flip over. But everybody knew that. The real improvement is probably related to checklist procedures for low-altitude loss of thrust.

My real point is that the NTSB are not the bad guys; they have no agenda to assign blame to anybody because that's not their function. They normally do an excellent job ferreting out safety problems that can be fixed; it's then up to the FAA and the industry to do the fixing. Having worked in the industry for many years I'm likely to find the movie annoying because of all the stuff they'll probably get wrong in order to create "drama." I sure felt that way about the movie "Flight" (the Denzel Washington movie about the drunken pilot flying impossible aerobatic manuevers), which had so many technical errors it was almost unwatchable except as a comedy.