Jay Joseph, retired US Airways captain, former instructor for Airbus, talked to NewsChannel 36 anchor Dave Wagner shortly after Flight 1549 went down in the Hudson River

- What we're looking at right now is the recovery efforts and the aircraft sitting in the water

- In the short amount of time that the crew had available to them it looks like they did an outstanding job for its unanticipated arrival in the water, survivors is a very good thing, it leads credence to the quality of the crew members to be able to accommodate those extraordinary set of circumstances

- In all types of flying, birds do present a threat, particularly at the lower altitudes. Flocks of birds have the capacity to what we call fod, foreign object debris, and actually shut an engine down by blocking air flow or distributing air flow inside an engine and causing the plane patterns for the engine to continue to run and inevitability something like this - at low altitudes with a lot of birds - can be catastrophic and that may very well be the case. I would caution everyone at this point it's extremely early to even guessitmate what occurred, other than the obvious call that the pilot and co-pilot may have made regarding birds.

- The training for engine failure for any set of circumstances regardless of what the cause, US Airways has an outstanding training program and they train very rigidly with regard to engine failure, single engine operation, fuel engine failure. Anybody's best day is not very good.

- Low altitude, low energy settings with regard to airspeed of the airplane and catastrophe failure of engine or components best case scenario can be very, very difficult. I will say this operating in out of LaGuardia airport or Reagan, one of the shorter, more density airports, US Airways fly out of, also incorporates noise abatement procedures which complicates the normal take off procedures and then on top of that, throw in an engine failure, it's very, very complex operation.

- Given the set of circumstances and how much power the pilots had remaining on the aircraft, they may not have had a choice on where the airplane went. It was just a matter of maintaining control of the aircraft to be able to get it down in the water as they did and with that amount of time and that set of circumstances, it looks like he did an outstanding job

- There're procedures in place for ditching the aircraft. They are obviously not inheritably made to float for that specific reason, but they will given the proper set of conditions and the practices and protocols to ditch the aircraft depending on how well controlled it was. And in this case it looks like it was very well controlled so that being one of the preconditions, a controlled impact is one thing and then low sea state on the bay, would have been in their favor. But again I can't overemphasis these folks didn't have a lot of time to prepare, so it looks like they did a really good job

- It looks like it was a very well controlled impact and it looks like they really sprung into action to save lives and that's exactly what those flight attendants do in the back of the airplane. They are the safety supervisors, so it looks like a good team effort, good teamwork in a tough set of circumstances

- I'll tell you the sage advice that they give, the safely briefings before each flight are life savers. They truly are and they are first and foremost safety supervisors in the back of the aircraft so anybody anticipating a water landing right out of New York LaGuardia's airport, I would say the chances that nobody on that airplane was thinking that, but as it turns out that's what happened. Obviously some folks were listening and the flight attendants were very well prepared.

- In most cases, water landings don't fare this well. There's an airbus accident off the coast of Africa not long ago, was part of a hi-jacking, but it was a pretty good example of an uncontrolled landing on the water and this looks as though the crew did an outstanding job

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