Heroic Chinese pilot who saved 439 lives in near-miss drama by steering his plane out of danger is awarded £360k... as video shows just how close the incident was

Some would not have had the wherewithall to know exactly what to do and how expertly they had to do it. Flying is like driving: you have some idiot on the road who has a license, and you have Michael Schumacher....see the difference? "Just doing his job" means flying the plane and landing safely. Being smart enough to avoid this is above and beyond, when some idiot floats across his takeoff....

@Moonie Pinkslip, I fly almost every day. Nobody floated across his path, the offending aircraft would have been under instruction from ground control. An A320 at that point of departure would have been at full throttle anyway. My point is that doing what you have been trained to do is not heroic.

@The Wizard of OZ, if "doing what you have been trained to do" is not heroic under any circumstances (there are many incidences of near misses, when pilots avoided disaster despite directions from ATC. Are they not trained to follow directions from Air Traffic Control?), regardless of the split-second decisions required, regardless of the steely-eyed missile man nerves needed to guide the plane, regardless of the number of lives saved - then you consider Sully not to be a hero, as well? He just landed a plane on water, as he'd been trained to do. This pilot just accelerated at exactly the right moment, partly due to & partly despite his training. He took a plane already in take-off mode (as I understand it) & pushed it farther than his training would've prepared him for - violating the ATC directions that his training required him to follow - and saved over 400 lives. He's a Hero, like any soldier under fire who makes a split-second decision that saves lives. He is a Hero.

ashersophia.....in a nutshell, you got that one just right.

Read the article.

There's a whole article under the headline that includes the details - perhaps you could read that rather than skipping straight into the comments and asking?