Darkest before the dawn: Flight 1549

I'm not the kind of guy who just hops right out of bed when the alarm goes off in the morning. It takes me a while to acclimate to the waking world. I'm the type that usually hits the snooze button 2 or 3 times before finally getting up. It turns out that, for me, a little morning time NPR is the very perfect thing to transition me from bedtime to awaketime. We have a radio that's set to come on every morning at 6:30 am, and we always have it set to NPR, where the sounds of Morning Edition greet us every day. The stories are almost always interesting enough to draw in my attention and thereby persuade me to stay awake. But its unobtrusive enough not to be jarring, like an alarm clock is. By 6:45 (er... 7), I'm out of bed.

This morning, we were awoken by the most compelling "good news" story I've heard in a long time (ranks right up there with "Obama wins"). It was the story of US Airways Flight 1549's emergency landing in the Hudson River, right outside of Manhatten. Link to NPR story here. What made this story so great is that it begins with a premise of great horror and tragedy, but ends with the incredibly unexpected and unbelievable "but everybody made it out unharmed!" And this just never happens. You never hear this kind of story. Every disaster is newsworthy, but every disaster ends in tragedy. Never does a disaster have such a happy ending. Here is a gallery of some great images taken at the scene.

As a bonus, we're presented with the hero of the whole thing, C.B. "Sully" Sullenberger, who did everything right, and saved the whole flight from certain death. Who was well-trained, proficient, and alert. And then the rescue crews, who had dutifully practiced their operations and executed them exactly according to plan. In an era where every figure in the news is presented as incompetent, thieving, ill-intentioned, and undeserving-of-his-post, the story of this perfectly executed rescue is more than refreshing: its downright incredible.

There is, of course, somewhat of a downer here, which is, good news never gets any media attention unless its somehow connected to some sort of disaster. I recall one scene from the (actually overrated) Michael Moore film Bowling for Columbine, where he compares Canadian and American TV news. While the Canadian news featured plenty of "good news" (new speed bumps!), American news was focused on all the bad things that happened that day and the dangers lurking in the corners (escalators of death!). Like it or not, Americans have an appetite for disaster, for spectacle. Perhaps our intensely capitalistic culture is to blame: news is a product, just like anything else, and the networks compete by attempting to one-up one another with shocking, "must-see" news stories. Whatever the case, its a shame that we are so hung up on the disasterous and the tragic that we miss the good, non-"event" news that surrounds us all the time.

Whether it takes a disaster to get us interested in a happy event or not, I imagine that this story has provided people across the country, and across the globe for that matter, with a positive, uplifting, inspirational story to begin their day, their weekend, the rest of their lives. Maybe it will serve as a small reminder that things can go right, that people can do good and noble things, and that, with determination, potential disasters can end up right-side-up after all.