On January 15, 2009, US Airways flight 1549 made an emergency landing in the Hudson River after both engines failed due to striking a flock of geese. No, not seagulls. The pilot, Captain Chelsey B. “Sully” Sullenberger III, who with a name like that had to grow up to be a bad ass, saved everyone’s life on-board the Airbus A320.
You can be sure to expect a book deal, a movie, and plenty of medals for the pilot’s heroism. But who would have thought a video game would be made out of the ordeal? Fly over to the next page for details.
Atom.com, a site that specializes in web comedy, has created a free PC flash game called Double Bird Strike, which is spoof based on Flight 1549. Some may think, “too soon”? Perhaps, but seeing that thankfully there were no fatalities, other than the geese, it’s probably ok to make light of the situation.
The game is very straightforward and plays in three sequences of events. First you must navigate the plane using the left, right, up, down arrows on your keyboard to avoid the flock of geese as long as possible. Eventually, your left or right engine will strike a goose and you will lose one engine. You even get to see the bird get sucked through the intake and shoot what appears to be feathers and blood out the back. I have to admit, I laughed when it happened, but I’m sick like that. More geese populate the screen and you will at some point end up losing the second engine.
The final part of the game is landing in the river. All you need to do is follow the dotted line on the screen in order to score higher. I recommend not being inebriated since you may see more than one line.
Once you’re in the water you receive a rank of 1 to 5 stars, 5 being the best. The five categories from worst to best are: baggage clerk, flight attendant, air marshall, flight engineer and captain.
I really can’t see anyone other than PETA getting offended by this game. Overall, the game doesn’t suck…well except for the geese into the engines. It was a humorous way to spend about 1 minute of my time, since the game takes less than a minute to play. You can even do nothing and watch your plane land itself, which I did just to see what would happen. Apparantly auto-pilot works.
Some other time killers, or wasters however you want to view it, I found on the site were Hunting With Palin, Bush’s Shoe Dodge and Angry Kid: Bored Game.
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There is no such thing as too soon. People really need to get over that. Nobody died, everyone is happy, let’s move on and make jokes.
@djdsf
There is such a thing. Fortunately, it does not apply here! =D
I agree with djdsf. Obviously some people were really shaken up over the incident (ie. those actually on the flight, those with family/friends on the flight), but there are jokes made in the mainstream about things that are much worse than what happened last week on Flight 1549.
To be honest, the pilot was a professor of mine when I went to Purdue, and everything the passengers have said about him is 100% true. I never thought about it when I was attending Purdue, but back then if I had my choice of pilots he would have been it, too.
Side note: he was the guy who taught me about the position that exists with most airlines wherein an employee is responsible for firing thawed chickens into running plane engines to see if they’ll still operate properly after a bird strike. I even saw the chicken cannon they had built at the Purdue airport! Funny how things work out …
it’s not a very fun(or long) game but it is neat how they did it.(damn birds!)