WARSAW, Poland - The Polish pilot hailed for landing a Boeing 767 jetliner on its belly after its landing gear failed stepped into the public eye Wednesday looking stiff and uncomfortable, and insisted that all the talk of heroism "is exaggerated."
Capt. Tadeusz Wrona set the jetliner down so gently that many of the 231 people on board thought it had landed on its wheels - until they saw fire, sparks and smoke rising from beneath the aircraft as it slid down the Warsaw airport runway.
The 54-year-old pilot for the Polish national carrier LOT deflected the praise, saying he merely did what he was trained to do.
"We knew we could make no mistake and that the contact with the ground should not be hard," Wrona told a news conference in Warsaw. "I am absolutely sure that each of us (pilots) would have done it the same way, and that the result would have been the same."
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In the United States, video of Wrona's landing Tuesday immediately evoked memories of the "miracle on the Hudson," when Capt. Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger landed a crippled US Airways jet in the Hudson River in 2009 and saved 155 lives.
His voice shaking at times as he struggled for words, Wrona said he felt "a huge relief" when he knew everyone aboard the flight from Newark, N.J., had reached safety - and he wondered whether he might have executed the landing even more effectively.
"When I stopped on the runway, I still was not sure that everyone was safe because smoke and some burning from friction appeared on the ground," Wrona said. "I felt huge relief when the head flight attendant reported that the plane was empty."
LOT says the plane suffered "a central hydraulic system failure," that caused all three sections of the landing gear - the nose gear and the two main underwing gears - to fail. Such a complete undercarriage failure was unprecedented for a Boeing 767 and highly unusual overall, according to aviation data and experts.
Sullenberger said the Warsaw incident brought back memories of his Hudson splashdown, and praised what he called a "great outcome."
"This required great piloting skill," Sullenberger said in an interview on CNN on Tuesday.
Several Facebook pages sprang up to express admiration for Wrona, with some calling him a "superhero." "Fly like an eagle and land like a crow," they proclaimed, playing on the word "wrona," Polish for crow.
Yet Wrona tried to play down his feat with humor.
"I heard that a passenger in the back complained about feeling a bump," he said, eliciting laughter from reporters.
