...Any landing you can walk away from, as the saying goes. The "Miracle on the Hudson" is the well known story of a potential air disaster that ended remarkably well, thanks to the skill of the pilots and crew, and a certain amount of luck. It's well known because it happened in a major media market, and a lot of it was caught on video.
But, there have been other cases where aircraft have come to grief far from the limelight, but the people on board managed to survive and be rescued. BBC Culture has taken note of an effort by Dietmar Eckell to document a number of crashes around the world, as part of a larger project looking at the natural landscape with battered remains of human activities leaving a surreal marker of what happened.
“My ‘restwert’ photography is about abandoned objects forgotten in nowhere. When viewers see a photograph of a plane resting on a mountain or a tank sitting on a coral reef they want to know what happened … ‘Restwert’ is German for ‘residual value’ – the material value is written off, but the beauty, stories, and associations they trigger remain. I document these objects before nature takes them back to preserve their memory.”
The BBC article has a selection of pictures from his "
Happy End" book of photos, and some discussion of his intent. He deliberately chose events where everyone was rescued, which had the effect of narrowing his selections down of course.
Here's the video for the successful Indiegogo campaign that funded publication of the book.
http://youtu.be/...