Highest Duty

by Chesley B. Sullenberger

  I also considered the fact that, no matter what, we’d likely need a serious rescue effort. I knew that the water rescue resources at LaGuardia were a tiny fraction of those available on the Hudson between Manhattan and New Jersey. It would take much longer for rescue workers at LaGuardia to reach us and then help us if we tried for the runway and missed it.

  And even if we could remain airborne until we were over a runway, there were potential hazards. Jeff would have had to stop trying to restart the engines, and instead turn his attention to preparing for a landing on a runway. I’d have to be able to appropriately manage our speed and altitude to try to touch down safely.

  We had hydraulic power to move the flight control surfaces, but we didn’t know if we’d be able to lower the landing gear and lock it into position. We might have had to use an alternate method—one in which gravity lowers the landing gear—and that would require another checklist for Jeff to attend to.

  We would have had to be able to align the aircraft’s flight path exactly with a relatively short runway, touch down at an acceptable sink rate, and maintain directional control throughout the landing to make sure we didn’t run off the runway. Then we’d have to make sure the brakes would work, stopping before the end of the runway. Even then, would the airplane remain intact? There could be fire, smoke inhalation, and trauma injuries.

  I also knew that if we turned toward LaGuardia and were unable to reach the airport, there would be no open stretch of water below us until Flushing Bay. And even if we were forced to ditch in that bay, near LaGuardia, and land in one piece, I feared that many on the aircraft would perish afterward. Rescuers there have access to just a few outboard motorboats, and it probably would have taken them too long to get to the aircraft, and too many trips to carry survivors to shore.

  The Hudson, even with all the inherent risks, seemed more welcoming. It was long enough, wide enough, and, on that day, it was smooth enough to land a jet airliner and have it remain intact. And I knew I could fly that far.

  I was familiar with the Intrepid, the famed World War II aircraft carrier that is now the Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum. It is docked on the Hudson by North River Pier 86, at Forty-sixth Street on the West Side of Manhattan. On my visit to the museum a few years earlier, I had noticed there were a lot of maritime resources nearby. I’d seen all the boat traffic there. So it did occur to me that if we could make it safely into the Hudson near the Intrepid, there would be ferries and other rescue boats close by, not to mention large contingents of the city’s police and ambulance fleets just blocks away.

  Patrick, the controller, was less optimistic about ditching in the Hudson. He assumed no one on the plane would survive it. After all, flight simulators that pilots practice on don’t even have an option to land in water. The only place we train on ditching is in the classroom.

  Before Patrick could even get back to me, he had another plane he had to attend to. “Jetlink twenty-seven sixty,” he said, “turn left, zero seven zero.” Then back to me, still trying to steer me to LaGuardia, he said: “All right, Cactus fifteen forty-nine, it’s gonna be left traffic for runway three one.”

  I was firm. “Unable.”

  From everything I saw, knew, and felt, my decision had been made: LaGuardia was out. Wishing or hoping otherwise wasn’t going to help.

  Inside the cockpit, I heard the synthetic voice of the Traffic Collision Avoidance System issuing an aural warning: “Traffic. Traffic.”

  Patrick asked: “OK, what do you need to land?”

  I was looking out the window, still going through our options. I didn’t answer, so Patrick again offered LaGuardia. “Cactus fifteen twenty-nine, runway four’s available if you wanna make left traffic to runway four.”

  “I’m not sure we can make any runway,” I said. “Uh, what’s over to our right? Anything in New Jersey? Maybe Teterboro?”

  Teterboro Airport in New Jersey’s Bergen County is called a “reliever airport,” and handles a lot of the New York area’s corporate and private jet traffic. Located twelve miles from midtown Manhattan, it has more than five hundred aircraft operations a day.

  “You wanna try and go to Teterboro?” Patrick asked.

  “Yes,” I said. It was 3:29 and three seconds, still less than a minute after I had first made Patrick aware of our situation.

  Patrick went right to work. His radar scope had a touch screen, giving him the ability to call any one of about forty different vital landlines. With one movement of his finger, he was able to get through to the air traffic control tower at Teterboro. “LaGuardia departure,” he said, introducing himself, “got an emergency inbound.” Later, listening to the recording of the conversation, Patrick could hear the distress in his voice. But he remained direct and professional.

  The controller at Teterboro responded: “Okay, go ahead.”

  Patrick could see on his radar screen that I was about nine hundred feet above the George Washington Bridge. “Cactus fifteen twenty-nine over the George Washington Bridge wants to go to the airport right now,” he said.

  Teterboro: “He wants to go to our airport. Check. Does he need any assistance?” The Teterboro controller was asking if fire trucks and emergency responders should leave their stations immediately.

  Patrick answered: “Ah, yes, he, ah, he was a bird strike. Can I get him in for runway one?”

  Teterboro: “Runway one, that’s good.”

  They were arranging for us to land on the arrival runway, because it was the easiest to clear quickly of traffic.

  Patrick was doing several smart and helpful things in dealing with our flight, which, in retrospect, leaves me very grateful. For starters, he didn’t make things more complicated and difficult for Jeff and me by overloading us.

  In emergencies, controllers are supposed to ask pilots basic questions: “How much fuel do you have remaining?” “What is the number of ‘souls on board’?” That would be a count of passengers and crew so rescue workers could know how many people to account for.

  “I didn’t want to pester you,” Patrick later told me. “I didn’t want to keep asking, ‘What’s going on?’ I knew I had to let you fly the plane.”

  Also, in order to save seconds and not have to repeat himself, he left the phone lines open when he called the controllers at other airports, so they could hear what he was saying to me and what I was saying to him. That way he wouldn’t have to repeat himself. The improvising he did was ingenious.

  Patrick’s conscious effort not to disturb me allowed me to remain on task. He saw how quickly we were descending. He knew I didn’t have time to get him passenger information or to answer any questions that weren’t absolutely crucial.

  The transcripts of our conversation also show how Patrick’s choice of phrasing was helpful to me. Rather than telling me what airport I had to aim for, he asked me what airport I wanted. His words let me know that he understood that these hard choices were mine to make, and it wasn’t going to help if he tried to dictate a plan to me.

  THROUGH ALL my years as a commercial pilot, I had never forgotten the aircrew ejection study I had learned about in my military days. Why did pilots wait too long before ejecting from planes that were about to crash? Why did they spend extra seconds trying to fix the unfixable? The answer is that many doomed pilots feared retribution if they lost multimillion-dollar jets. And so they remained determined to try to save the airplane, often with disastrous results.

  I had never shaken my memories of fellow Air Force pilots who didn’t survive such attempts. And having the details of that knowledge in the recesses of my brain was helpful in making those quick decisions on Flight 1549. As soon as the birds struck, I could have attempted a return to LaGuardia so as not to ruin a US Airways aircraft by attempting a landing elsewhere. I could have worried that my decision to ditch the plane would be questioned by superiors or investigators. But I chose not to.

  I was able to make a mental shift in priorities. I had read enough about safety and cognitive theo
ry. I knew about the concept of “goal sacrificing.” When it’s no longer possible to complete all of your goals, you sacrifice lower-priority goals. You do this in order to perform and fulfill higher goals. In this case, by attempting a water landing, I would sacrifice the “airplane goal” (trying not to destroy an aircraft valued at $60 million) for the goal of saving lives.

  I knew instinctively and intuitively that goal sacrificing was paramount if we were to preserve life on Flight 1549.

  It took twenty-two seconds from the time I considered and suggested Teterboro to the time I rejected the airport as unreachable. I could see the area around Teterboro moving up in the windscreen, a sure sign that our flight path would not extend that far.

  “Cactus fifteen twenty-nine, turn right two eight zero,” Patrick told me at 3:29 and twenty-one seconds. “You can land runway one at Teterboro.”

  “We can’t do it,” I answered.

  “OK, which runway would you like at Teterboro?” he asked.

  “We’re gonna be in the Hudson,” I said.

  Patrick had heard me just fine. But he asked me to repeat myself.

  “I’m sorry, say again, Cactus,” he said.

  “I simply could not wrap my mind around those words,” Patrick would later explain in testimony before Congress. “People don’t survive landings on the Hudson River. I thought it was his own death sentence. I believed at that moment I was going to be the last person to talk to anyone on that plane.”

  As he spoke to me, Patrick couldn’t help but think about Ethiopian Airlines Flight 961, hijacked in 1996. A Boeing 767260ER, it ran out of fuel and attempted to land in the Indian Ocean just off the coast of the island nation of Comoros. The aircraft’s wingtip struck the water first, and it spun violently and broke apart. Of the 175 people on board, 125 died from either the impact or drowning. Photos and video of the cartwheeling Boeing 767–260ER are easy to find on the Internet. “That’s the picture I had in my head,” Patrick said.

  Patrick continued to talk to me, but I was too busy to answer. I knew that he had offered me all the assistance that he could, but at that point, I had to focus on the task at hand. I wouldn’t be answering him.

  As we descended toward the Hudson, falling below the tops of New York’s skyscrapers, we dropped off his radar. The skyline was now blocking transmissions.

  Patrick tried desperately to find a solution that would keep us out of the water. At 3:29:51: “Cactus, uh, Cactus fifteen forty-nine, radar contact is lost. You also got Newark airport off your two o’clock in about seven miles.”

  At 3:30:14: “Cactus fifteen twenty-nine, uh, you still on?”

  He feared we had already crashed, but then we flickered back onto his radar scope. We were at a very low altitude, but because we had returned to radar coverage, he hoped against hope that maybe we had regained use of one of our engines.

  At 3:30:22 he said: “Cactus fifteen twenty-nine, if you can, uh, you got, uh, runway two nine available at Newark. It’ll be two o’clock and seven miles.”

  There was no way to answer him. By then, we were just 21.7 seconds from landing in the river.

  HAD WE lost one engine instead of two, Jeff and I would have had more time to analyze things and to communicate with the crew and passengers. We could have had the flight attendants prepare the cabin. We could have asked air traffic control to help us determine the best plan for our return. But on Flight 1549, there was much we couldn’t do because everything was so terribly time-compressed.

  Many of the passengers had felt the bird strike. They heard the sound of the birds thumping against the plane, and the disturbing bangs that preceded the failing of the engines. They saw some smoke in the cabin, and like me, they could smell the incinerated birds. Actually, more accurately, the birds were liquefied into what is referred to as “bird slurry.”

  I have heard the stories of what the passengers were going through while I was so occupied in the cockpit. Many would later write notes to me, sharing their personal recollections. Others gave media interviews that I found moving and haunting.

  There was former U.S. Army Captain Andrew Gray, who had completed two tours of duty in Afghanistan, and was traveling on Flight 1549 with his fiancée, Stephanie King. As the plane descended, Andrew and Stephanie kissed and told each other “I love you.” As they described it, they “accepted death together.”

  John Howell, a management consultant from Charlotte, thought about how he was his mother’s only surviving son. His brother, a firefighter, died at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. John later told reporters that as Flight 1549 descended, “The only thing I was thinking was, ‘If I go down, my mother’s not going to survive this.’”

  In 12F, a window seat just behind the wing emergency exit, forty-five-year-old Eric Stevenson was experiencing an awful feeling of déjà vu. On June 30, 1987, he had been on Delta Air Lines Flight 810, a Boeing 767, traveling from Los Angeles to Cincinnati. Shortly after takeoff, as the plane was climbing over the Pacific before turning east, one of the pilots had mistakenly shut down both engines. He had done this inadvertently because of the way the engine control panel was designed and the proximity of similar engine control switches. The plane began descending from 1,700 feet, while passengers quickly donned life jackets and expected the worst. Hearing some passengers crying around him, Eric decided to take out one of his business cards and write the words “I love you” to his parents and sister. He shoved it in his pocket, figuring he was likely to die and the note might be found on his body. Then just 500 feet above the water, the passengers felt a massive burst of thrust and the plane jolted forward with full force. The pilots had restarted the engines. The flight continued to Cincinnati, its cabin littered with life preservers. After that incident, Boeing redesigned the engine control panel to prevent a recurrence.

  That near-death experience led Eric to take a year off from work so he could travel the world, and every year after that, he found ways to solemnly mark the anniversary of the incident. He said it planted the seeds for his eventual move to Paris, where he continues to work as a marketing manager for Hewlett-Packard. It was while visiting the United States in January 2009 that he ended up as a passenger on Flight 1549. Sitting in 12F, looking out the window, he couldn’t believe he was on another airplane without working engines.

  And so he again took out a business card and wrote “Mom and Jane, I love you.” He shoved it into his right front pocket and thought to himself, “This will probably get separated from my body if the cabin disintegrates.” But he felt a measure of comfort knowing he had taken this step. “It was the maximum I could do,” he later told me. “All of us were completely at the mercy of the two of you in the cockpit. It was a helpless feeling, knowing there was nothing we could do about the situation. So I did the only thing I could do. With the plane going down, I wanted my family to know I was thinking about them at the very last moment.”

  As the plane descended, Eric didn’t feel panic, but he did feel the same sadness he experienced at age twenty-three, in that Boeing 767 over the Pacific. On our flight, he recalled, he had the same clear thought: “This could be the end of my life. In ten or twenty seconds, I will be on the other side, whatever the other side will be.”

  THE CABIN was very quiet. A few people made phone calls or sent text messages to their loved ones. I’m told some were saying their prayers. Others would say they were making peace with the situation. If they were going to die, they said, there was nothing they could do about it, and so they tried to accept it.

  Some of the passengers later told me that they were glad I didn’t give them too many details. That would have made them even more frightened.

  It wasn’t until about ninety seconds before we hit the water that I spoke to the passengers.

  I wanted to be very direct. I didn’t want to sound agitated or alarmed. I wanted to sound professional.

  “This is the captain. Brace for impact!”

  I knew I had to make an announcement to th
e passengers to brace. We’re taught to use that word. “Brace!” Saying it not only can help protect passengers from injury on touchdown, but it is also a signal to the flight attendants to begin shouting their commands. Even in the intensity of the moment, I knew I had to choose my words very carefully. There was no time to give the flight attendants a more complete picture of the situation we faced. So my first priority was to prevent passenger injury on impact. I did not yet know how well I’d be able to cushion the touchdown. I said “brace” and then chose the word “impact” because I wanted passengers to be prepared for what might be a hard landing.

  The flight attendants—Sheila, Donna, and Doreen—immediately fell back on their training. All the cockpit doors have been hardened since the September 11 attacks, so it’s more difficult to hear what’s going on in the cabin. Still, through that thicker door, I could hear Donna and Sheila, who were up front, shouting their commands in response to my announcement, almost in unison, again and again: “Brace, brace! Heads down! Stay down! Brace, brace! Heads down! Stay down!”

  As I guided the plane toward the river, hearing their words comforted and encouraged me. Knowing that the flight attendants were doing exactly what they were supposed to do meant that we were on the same page. I knew then that if I could deliver the aircraft to the surface intact, Donna, Doreen, and Sheila would get the passengers out the exit doors and the rescue could begin. Their direction and professionalism would be keys to our survival, and I had faith in them.

  From the cockpit voice recorder:

  Sullenberger (3:29:45): “OK, let’s go put the flaps out, put the flaps out…”