Back in the day, there was a third crew member who was primarily tasked with navigation and monitoring systems.

Airlines decided it would be cheaper to cut that position and here we are.

Aviation is still much safer than back in the days where 3 or even 4 crew in the flight deck were standard. At some point the tradeoff between increased safety and increasing costs becomes unreasonable.

Manufacturers made planes that didn't need it, making their plane's TOC more attractive.

> Airlines decided it would be cheaper to cut that position and here we are.

It's not that easy tbh - the advent of digital monitoring systems, fly-by-wire and glass cockpits plainly eliminated the need for it.

On the other hand EASA is pushing for research into single-pilot operations [1]... now that is nuts.

[1] https://www.easa.europa.eu/en/research-projects/emco-sipo-ex...

"here we are."

Here where precisely? Civil aviation is extremely safe in 2024, and this crash made worldwide news precisely because crashes are now very rare in the developed world.

If you demand 100 per cent safety, you are bound to be disappointed forever. Not even walking is 100 per cent safe.

I’m reading from aviation experts that the fundamental heuristic of “aviate, navigate, communicate” may have been forgotten as a result of panic following the bird strike incident (two minutes prior to the landing attempt). How should this principle have been executed in this situation?

Panic is understandable momentarily, but any professional pilot should be able to overcome that within a few seconds, and remember their training, which in an emergency is something like aviate, identify the problem if possible, and run checklists. Panic doesn't solve anything, and there's a comfort in having checklists and procedures to run. Something must have gone very wrong in training or with the plane for this to happen.

There's a standard short checklist for landing that includes flaps and landing gear. There may also be an emergency landing checklist that would also include those things.

The voice recorder and flight data recorder almost certainly survived. We'll know more after those have been recovered and analyzed.

I don’t want this to come across as second guessing a cockpit that I wasn’t in, but speaking generally, recover the aircraft to a flying condition (aviate), if not on a stabilized approach with high certainty of continuing to be (mostly aviate and some navigate), go around and hold at a safe altitude (A&N) while you run the checklists and assess the aircraft state (A) and tell ATC what your intentions are (communicate).

I don’t know what the exact state in that cockpit was, but the video of the aircraft sliding down the runway sans gear at a speed that looked well higher and well longer than normal touchdown suggests that they didn’t have a stabilized approach at the end, whether for good or bad reasons is something for the investigators to figure out.

the airplane is perfectly fine to continue flying for a while on one engine so their momentary shock should not have been an issue. they've trained extensively for this kind of scenario and should probably have gone around if the bird strike happened on final approach. like the other person said... the voice recorder almost certainly survived and will give more information as to the root cause.

It may have been both engines out and there was not enough time to turn on the APU for landing gear deployment. The belly landing was executed just fine but tragically it was the wall at the end of the runway.

it wasn't the wall that got them actually it was the poorly designed ILS embankment that should have been ground level. but yeah you're right it is somewhat probable that it was two engines out as the evidence comes in

Makes Chesley Sullenberger and Jeffrey Stiles look really good, doesn't it.