Brad... Thats the general consesus with all the pilots I know. What they USair crew did was nothing that any normal airline crew wouldn't do.
+1000. In my USAF flying career, I shut down engines 17 times, was hit by lightning twice, had dual runaway trim (the MOST scary incident--it was hard to control the jet until we figured out what was going on), pressurization problems, low pich stops hanging up on landing, compressor stalls, etc--not to mention how many times student pilots tried to kill me in the T-38.
I, like every other professional pilot, was trained to and was expected to handle these situations. And no, I didn't have ice in my veins. In fact, I'd bet the pilot of the US Airways jet was scared. It's just that we work very hard at doing the right things while we are scared.
In USAF pilot training, we purposely kept kids in high stress situations. Everything they did was graded and the consequences for failure--even on ground training, was severe. We piled on as much stress as we could during even ground EP training. We'd make them stand up, and if they made one error they were 'dinged' for it, often to the point of being grounded for the day and a big red mark put by their name on the scheduling board for all to see.
We didn't do this to be @ssholes, we did it so they got used to being scared and performing well anyway.
