Highest Duty

by Chesley B. Sullenberger

  The third vessel to arrive, the NY Waterway ferry Yogi Berra, captained by Vincent LuCante, rescued twenty-four people.

  One woman slipped off the wing and into the river, and two other passengers risked falling in themselves as they pulled her back up. When it was time to get her on a ladder, she was unable to move her legs from the cold, and she fell off and had to be helped on again. Others also fell into the water trying to get up the ladders. It was pretty harrowing. Then there was the release of emotions. When passengers finally made it onto the ferries, some of them hugged the deckhands.

  One ferry captain was Brittany Catanzaro, just nineteen years old, whose regular job was to transport commuters from Weehawken and Hoboken, New Jersey, to Manhattan. Her ferry, the Thomas Kean, the fourth vessel to arrive, had been pointed away from us when we landed, but she turned it around and headed our way. She and her crew members pulled twenty-six passengers off the wings. All the ferries had to be careful and slow down, especially as they approached those who were standing on the wings. If they threw off too big a wake, passengers could have been knocked into the water. Maneuvering near the aircraft was difficult, especially with the strong current, and required great ship handling to prevent bumping the plane.

  An NYPD helicopter arrived, and I watched a diver being dropped from it into the river. The downwash from the rotors was strong; spray from the surface of the river got into our eyes. That was cold water mixed with a cold wind. The police diver rescued a passenger in the water near one of the wings.

  Jason’s Cradles, hammocklike maritime rescue devices with cloth webbing and similar to ladders with rungs, were lowered from the boats to us in the rafts, and passengers started climbing up. At one point, there were fears that the stern of a ferry might puncture a raft, so it had to move away and reposition itself. One elderly female passenger did not have the strength to climb onto the deck of the boat. The hammocklike part of the Jason’s Cradle had to be used with pulleys to get her on board.

  When it came time for the Athena, a Block Island ferry used by NY Waterway and captained by Carlisle Lucas, to rescue those in our raft, I shouted, “Injured and women and children first!” Others on our raft passed the message up to the deckhands. It seemed like we were all on the same page.

  I wasn’t just being chivalrous. Because women and especially children weigh less than men, they would be more susceptible to hypothermia. They would also lose physical strength more quickly. So it made the most sense to get them onto the boats sooner.

  As things turned out, though, it wasn’t logistically easy to help the women and children first. Because the raft was so full and movement within it so difficult, those closest to the end of the raft, nearest the ferry, were taken off first.

  In the stress of the moment, there was an efficient kind of order that I found absolutely impressive. I also saw examples of humanity and goodwill everywhere I looked. I was so moved when deckhands on ferries took off the shirts, coats, and sweatshirts they were wearing to help warm the passengers.

  As a boy, I had been upset by the story of New Yorker Kitty Genovese and the bystanders who had ignored her. Now, as a man, I was seeing dozens of bystanders acting with great compassion and bravery—and a sense of duty. It felt like all of New York and New Jersey was reaching out to warm us.

  WHILE WE were on the river, Patrick, the controller who had overseen our flight from his post on Long Island, was relieved of his position and invited to go to the union office in the building. He knew, as did his superiors, that he shouldn’t finish his shift, guiding airplanes still in the sky. Controllers are always asked to step away from their duties after major incidents.

  Patrick was understandably distraught. He assumed we had crashed and that everyone on the plane had perished. “It was the lowest low I had ever felt,” he later told me. “I was asking myself: What else could I have done? Was there something different I could have said to you?”

  He wanted to talk to his wife but feared he would fall apart if he did. So he sent her a text: “Had a crash. Not OK. Can’t talk now.” She thought he’d been in a car accident. “Actually, I felt like I’d been hit by a bus,” he said. “I had this feeling of shock and disbelief.”

  Patrick was secluded in that office with a union rep who kept him company and talked him through it. There was no TV, so he couldn’t see coverage of the rescue. In case we had a bad outcome, his union rep didn’t think Patrick needed to see it in those early moments.

  Over and over again, Patrick played in his mind his final exchanges with me, assuming they were my final words. He had heard the distress in pilots’ voices during lesser emergencies he’d dealt with in the past. As he would describe it, their voices became “almost like a quiver.” He thought about my voice, and how it seemed “strangely calm.”

  At that point, he didn’t know what I looked like and didn’t know anything about me. He just knew we had spent a few riveting minutes connected to each other, and now he assumed I was gone.

  He was told he couldn’t leave the facility until the drug testers came to take a urine sample and do a Breathalyzer test. This is standard procedure for controllers—and pilots, too—involved in an accident. It’s part of the investigation.

  Patrick sat in that union room, consoled by the union rep, for what felt like hours. Then a friend poked his head into the room and said, “It looks like they’re going to make it. They’re on the wings of the plane.”

  Patrick later told me that his relief was beyond words.

  ONE OF the passengers was sitting near Jeff and me in the raft. Like so many people, he was drained and emotional. But he wanted me to know that he appreciated what the crew and I had done to bring the plane down safely.

  He took my arm. “Thank you,” he said.

  “You’re welcome,” I told him.

  It was the simplest exchange between two men at an extraordinary moment, but I could tell it meant a great deal to him to say it. It meant a great deal to me to hear his words, and for Jeff and Donna, near us, too.

  The cold air and wind were not immediately debilitating. But as we all waited for our turn to be rescued by the ferry Athena, a lot of us were in pretty rough shape. Many couldn’t stop shivering.

  I made sure I was the last person off the raft, just as I had wanted to be the last person off of the plane. I don’t think there are any written guidelines suggesting that the captain be the last to leave a plane or any other vessel during an emergency. I was aware of the maritime tradition, but that wasn’t the reason I did it. It was just obvious to me: I shouldn’t be rescued until all the passengers in my care were attended to.

  The rescue went quickly, all things considered. The deck of the ferry was about ten feet above the raft, so it took some effort for passengers to make their way up. By the time it was my turn to climb up the ladder, I was so cold that I could no longer use my hands. I had to stick my forearms through the rungs. I couldn’t grasp anything with my fingers.

  From the deck of the ferry, standing with seventeen other survivors from Flight 1549, including Jeff, I looked back at the airplane. It continued to slowly sink lower in the water, as it drifted south toward the Statue of Liberty surrounded by a small trail of debris and leaking jet fuel.

  Standing there, I realized I still had my cell phone on my belt. Though my pants were drenched, the phone was dry and working. It was my first moment to call Lorrie.

  We have two landlines in the house and she has a cell phone, but I couldn’t get through to her on any of them. She wasn’t answering because she was on one of the lines, talking to a business associate. She saw my number come up on her cell phone, but at first she ignored it.

  Given all the ringing, she told the person she was talking to: “Sully is calling every line in the house. Let’s see what he wants.”

  She answered the other line, saying, “Hello.”

  Hearing her voice, not knowing what she knew or didn’t know, my first words were meant to reassure her: “I wanted to call to
say I’m OK.”

  She thought that meant I was on schedule to fly back to San Francisco that night.

  “That’s good,” she told me. She assumed I had already landed Flight 1549 in Charlotte. I saw she needed an explanation.

  “No,” I said. “There’s been an incident.”

  She still wasn’t getting it. She didn’t have her TV on, so she was unaware of the nonstop coverage of the incident that was all over the national cable networks. She assumed that I was trying to tell her my flight was delayed, and that I might not make it home.

  And so I told her straight, almost as if I was giving her bullet points. “We hit birds. We lost thrust in both engines. I ditched the airplane in the Hudson.”

  It was a lot for her to digest. She paused and asked her first question. “Are you OK?”

  “Yes,” I told her.

  “OK OK?” she asked. Obviously I had survived. She was asking if I was OK in a broader sense.

  “Yes,” I said. “But I can’t talk now. I’m on my way to the pier. I’ll call you from there.” I felt pretty emotional hearing her voice; I could have used her consoling words. At the same time, there was so much to tell her and no time to do so. I wanted the kids to know I was safe, too. Until I could get back to them, they’d be hearing everything from the news reports on TV. But at least I had made contact.

  After my call, Lorrie lay down on the bed in our bedroom. She wasn’t crying, but she was shaking really hard. My call had been a shock. She called a close friend and said, “Sully just crashed an airplane and I don’t know what to do.” Her friend told her, “Go get your girls.” So she got the girls out of school and brought them home.

  WHILE STILL on the ferry, I began running through my mental checklist of other things I should be doing. I knew that US Airways was well aware of the incident through Air Traffic Control, but I thought I’d better give the airline a sense of the situation from my end.

  Every flight has an airline dispatcher assigned to monitor it. The dispatchers work at their computers in a large, windowless room at the US Airways Operations Control Center in Pittsburgh, and they each track many flights at the same time.

  I called Bob Haney, who was on duty that day as US Airways’ airline operations manager, and after a few rings he picked up.

  “This is Bob,” he said. His delivery was clipped, and there was an intensity in his voice.

  “This is Captain Sullenberger,” I said.

  “I can’t talk now,” he told me. “There’s a plane down in the Hudson!”

  “I know,” I said. “I’m the guy.” He was momentarily speechless. He couldn’t believe that the pilot from the aircraft in the Hudson, a scene he was watching on TV at that moment, was calling his desk phone. Given the gravity of the situation, we quickly began discussing the matters at hand. But I’d later smile at the memory of how he tried to cut me off at the beginning of our conversation with breaking news. “There’s a plane down in the Hudson!” Yes, I knew about that.

  The Athena docked at Manhattan’s Pier 79, let us off, and then went back one more time to the plane to make sure no one was left behind. By 6:15 P.M., it would return to duty shuttling commuters back and forth across the Hudson, its seats still wet from the soaking Flight 1549 survivors.

  As soon as I stepped onto the pier at the ferry terminal, I was met by US Airways captain Dan Britt, our union rep at LaGuardia. He had seen the television coverage at his home in New York, put on his uniform, and come down to be with me and Jeff.

  I asked him to help me get answers and updates, and we both started making calls, verifying that the injured were being treated. I walked over to Doreen, who was on a gurney and was being treated by an EMT. She was the most seriously injured, with a gash in her leg, and would remain hospitalized for several days. I gathered together the rest of the crew, and included our two other airline pilot passengers, American Airlines first officer Susan O’Donnell and Colgan Air’s Derek Alter, who had given his shirt to a passenger in the raft.

  Some passengers had been taken to the New Jersey side of the river and the rest came to New York, so it was hard to keep track. I desperately wanted a tally of all those who had been rescued, but I was still unable to get any kind of confirmation. The authorities kept asking me for the manifest. On domestic flights, the crew is not given one. US Airways would spend some time constructing one from the electronic records of the flight.

  Police were everywhere, and a high-ranking police officer told me that Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly wanted me to go see them at another location. I had to decline. “I have responsibilities here,” I said. And so Mayor Bloomberg and Commissioner Kelly ended up coming to the ferry terminal to ask me a few questions. I was too concerned about the passenger issues to have a real conversation with them. I gave them a short update and that was it. “I made sure everyone was off the airplane,” I told them. “We’re trying to find out if they’re all accounted for.”

  Much discussion took place about where the crew and I should go next. Eventually we were taken to the hospital to be evaluated and have our vital signs checked. All the while I kept asking and asking, “What’s the total?”

  After we were examined in the emergency room and were told we were all OK, we were left just standing around, waiting for confirmation, waiting for news, waiting to find out where we would go next. There weren’t enough chairs for all of us in the examination room, but I didn’t feel like sitting anyway. It was stressful, just waiting, not knowing the outcome, standing there in my wet uniform and my wet socks. I wouldn’t have a chance to get into anything dry until midnight.

  In the hour or two that followed, three more doctors came in. They didn’t really have any medical reason for stopping by. They probably were just curious to get a look at us, given that we were all over the news. At one point, a doctor in his mid-forties stopped in and looked me right in the eye. I could tell that he was trying to get the measure of me, trying to figure out what made me tick. He didn’t say a word for fifteen or twenty seconds. Finally he spoke. “You’re so calm,” he said. “It’s incredible.” He was mistaken. I didn’t feel calm at all. At that point, I was feeling numb and out of sorts. I just couldn’t relax until I knew the count was 155.

  Finally, at 7:40 P.M., more than four hours after we landed in the Hudson, Captain Arnie Gentile, a union rep, came in and gave me the word. “It’s official,” he said.

  I felt the most intense feeling of relief I’d ever felt in my life. I felt like the weight of the universe had been lifted off of my heart. I probably let out a long breath. I’m not sure I smiled. I was too spent to celebrate.

  It had been the most harrowing day of my life, but I was incredibly grateful for this ending. We hadn’t saved the Airbus 320. That was ruined. But the people on the plane, they would be returning to their families. All of them.

  16. STORIES HEARD, LIVES TOUCHED

  I AM USED to it now.

  I open a letter and five one-dollar bills fall out. “Mr. Sullenberger, Great job! I’d like to buy you a beer, albeit a cheap domestic one.”

  A fax arrives: “In this crazy world, it’s good to know that chance still favors the prepared mind. Good job, Captain!”

  A letter comes with an illustration of Snoopy in an exhilarated dance pose. The caption: “Oh Happy Day!” The letter writer is a woman from New Jersey. “We on the East Coast are still scarred by 9/11. It seemed all in the tristate area lost a family member, a friend, a neighbor, a coworker. Your splash in the river made us feel elated, serene, and happy!”

  I have gotten thousands of messages such as these since Flight 1549. I have received ten thousand e-mails from people who tracked down my safety consulting business online. Another five thousand e-mails arrived at my personal e-mail address. I don’t know much about Facebook, but my kids tell me I have more than 635,000 fans there.

  I’ve heard from people on every continent except Antarctica. And almost every time I’m at the mall or in a r
estaurant, strangers come up to say they don’t mean to bother me, but they just want to say thank you.

  While a few of these correspondents had loved ones or friends on Flight 1549, the vast majority did not. What happened on that airplane touched them deeply enough that they felt compelled to reach out to me and my family. Some tell me that after hearing about our flight, they found themselves reflecting on a seminal moment in their own lives or thinking about a person who inspired them. Others ended up reviewing the dreams they had for their children or feeling renewed grief about losses they’re still trying to understand.

  I have become a recipient of people’s reflections because I am now the public face of an unexpectedly uplifting moment that continues to resonate. Hearing from so many people, paying attention to their stories—that’s part of my new job.

  I’ve come to see their thankfulness as a generous gift, and I don’t want to diminish their kind words by denying them. Though it made me uncomfortable at first, I’ve made a decision to graciously accept people’s thanks. At the same time I don’t strive to take it as my own. I recognize that I have been given a role to play, and maybe some good can happen as a result.

  It’s not a role that I had ever experienced before. I spent a lifetime being anonymous. I was proud of my wife, proud of my kids, but I lived a quiet home life. My work life was also mostly hidden, conducted on the other side of a locked cockpit door.

  But now I am recognized everywhere, and I have people coming up to me with tears in their eyes. They’re not sure why they’re crying. Their feelings about what the flight represents, and then the surprise of meeting me, just cause a swell of emotions. When people seem so grateful to me, my foremost feeling is that I don’t deserve this attention or their effusive thanks. I feel like a bit of an impostor. And yet, I also feel I have an obligation not to disappoint them. I don’t want to dismiss their gratitude or suggest that they shouldn’t feel the way they do.