In case you thought what Chesley B. Sullenberger did was no big deal

As if to underscore just how miraculous and impressive last month's successful water ditching of a U.S. Airways flight by Captain Chesley B. Sullenberger was, I am waking up this morning to news that a Continental Express flight has crashed in upstate New York, less than ten miles short of the runway at Buffalo International Airport. As I write this, all 44 passengers, 4 crew members, and one person on the ground have been killed. It appears that the plane hit a house nose down and made no distress call prior to the crash.

My first thought when tying together this horrific and tragic incident with the water landing of the U.S. Airways flight last month was "If you're Chesley B. Sullenberger, you're going to wake up today and say 'Oh, shit...and here I thought life was going to get back to normal.'" Because you can bet that every news organization in the country, or at least in the New York area, is going to be scrambling to get "Sully"'s take on this.

Before Sullenberger made the decision to ditch his plane in the Hudson last month, air traffic control had instructed him to go to Teterboro Airport. If Sullenberger had tried to make it that far, what I'm seeing today from outside Buffalo could very well have been the scene in East Rutherford, or South Hackensack, or Secaucus, or Lodi.

Of course not all conditions under which flights go wrong are the same, but it's easy for cynics like me to roll my eyes when I see the kind of relentless hype that we saw last week when New York City feted the U.S. Airways flight crew, no matter how deserved the celebration may be. And this morning, watching the wee hours announcer on MSNBC making the ridiculous reassurance that this does not appear an act of terrorism (as if terrorists are going to target a prop plane on its way to Buffalo) and that the widow of a 9/11 casualty was on board (any excuse to tie a plane crash to the 9/11 attacks), just adds to the eye-roll factor.

But today there are 49 families who are waking up to the most horrific, life-changing news it's possible to receive; and 155 luckier families who will be reminded today of just what that flight crew did for them a month ago.