... they did a great job but I think they'd be very uncomfortable if they read some of the "hero" comments on here; this was a well planned, methodically executed emergency landing with the gear in the up and locked position. Great professionals for sure...
As Stu commented earlier, real heroes hate to be labeled as such.
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Polish Pilot Rejects Hero Label After Crash Landing Boeing Jet(Bloomberg) -- The pilot who safely crash landed a Boeing Co. 767 on its belly at Warsaw's main airport rejected being labeled a hero as Poland's national carrier said flights from the capital may resume later today.
"Talk of heroes is an exaggeration," Tadeusz Wrona said at a press conference. "I'm convinced that any pilot would have done the same as I did."Wrona tried to extend the landing gear numerous times after an on-board computer indicated a hydraulic fault. He had flown the same plane some 500 times and had "never had any difficulty" with the wheels, he said.
Warsaw's Chopin airport remained closed after the plane operated by Polskie Linie Lotnicze LOT SA landed on its fuselage yesterday on the main runway. None of the 231 passengers and crew on the flight from Newark, New Jersey, were injured.
LOT is losing 12,000 passengers a day while Warsaw's airport is closed, Pirog said. Most financial costs from yesterday's events are covered by insurance, he added. The airport services about 400 flights and transports 25,000 passengers daily, airport spokesman Przemyslaw Przybylski said.
"This is all part of a pilot's training, but they knew the routine, the airport was ready and everybody walked away, which is how you measure the success of these things," said David Learmount, a former Royal Air Force pilot and safety editor at Flight International magazine. "It's a rare event. You could fly every day of your life and it wouldn't happen."
businessweek.com/news/2011-11-02/polish-pilot-rejects-hero-label-after-crash-landing-boeing-jet.html