Airline Safety: Precautions or Placebo?
I've been reading an online discussion of the recent successful ditching of an airliner in the Hudson. If I am following it correctly, this is the first time anyone has succeeded in ditching a large passenger jet. Smaller planes and propeller planes have been ditched successfully but it sounds as though the closest anyone had come before with a full sized passenger jet was a crash landing which some passengers survived.
This raises an obvious question. Very nearly every time you take off in an airplane, even for a flight entirely over land, you get a lecture about life vests, flotation cushions, life rafts, and the like. Is it almost entirely bogus? If, prior to this incident, nobody had managed anything better than a crash landing, was there any significant chance that those precautions would save lives or were they there merely to make passengers feel better?