US Air Flight 1549

As a child I was deathly afraid of airplanes. I mean, screaming, yanking, get-me-out-of-here afraid to even get on one. Then I moved to a part of New York City right in the landing pattern of JFK airport, and after seeing plane after plane — 1,000 feet up and at times once every thirty seconds, I decided to get over my fear by learning all I could about them.

That led to my morbid hobby — plane crashes. What was it that caused an airliner to fall out of the sky? I’ve read books, researched cases and found Web sites of interest. Now, I love to fly (which helped me when I was at AOL and taking two flights a week from NY to VA).

The above (poorly recorded, I know) video is of a site that tracks air traffic in real-time (Google “Passur” or “Airport Monitor 2.0”). I found US Air flight 1549 and recorded it’s track above — all 4 minutes of its flight before it crash-landed in the Hudson River today at 3:30 PM ET — a mere six blocks west of the building where I work.

And in case you were wondering, I’d go on a flight today if I could, confident that it is indeed (and statistically proven to be) the safest way to travel. After all, what are the odds of this happening again so quickly?