I haven't seen anyone post about this story yet.

http://tinyurl.com/5mfx85

Two Swedish citizens (one was an Australian and the other Danish by birth) lost both engines, one shortly after the other, on a trans-Atlantic ferry flight, south of Baffin Island. I have to say, when I first heard the reports, I thought the SAR guys would be lucky to find the bodies; I was amazed to hear that both men had survived.

They landed on the ice, but it wasn't strong enough to support the weight of the aircraft; they managed to scramble out, but the aircraft sank immediately taking their liferaft with it. They were able to scramble to firmer ice, and were picked up, after 18 hours in -20 C temperatures, by a fishing boat that had joined the search.

First of all, good for them for surviving. Their survival suits kept them alive, and the pilot presumably did a good job of putting the plane down on the ice. (A SAR spokesman said that 'if the two men from Sweden had been forced to land on water their chances of survival "would have been very, very much lower."'

My first question, though, would be "What good is a life raft if you can't get it out of the plane in time?" Presumably, the idea behind having a life raft is to use it if you have to land in the water; these guys had more time than that, but still barely managed to get themselves out.

Second question: what would you have done if you were one of the two pilots? (I'm not asking what you would have done differently, because the story doesn't contain enough detail on what they actually did.)