Sully

by Captain Chesley B. Sullenberger, III

  Flying into Las Vegas, in the clear desert air, you can see the Strip from a good distance even in the daytime. At night, it’s a line of some of the brightest lights on the continent, beckoning from eighty miles away.

  Seattle is a gorgeous city to fly into. When I was a pilot at PSA, I would sometimes fly up to Seattle from Los Angeles, and I knew by memory the volcanoes in the Cascade Range heading north—Mount McLoughlin, Mount Bachelor, the Three Sisters, Mount Washington, Mount Jefferson, Mount Hood, Mount Adams, Mount Rainier. Each mountain would loom into view, one after the other.

  I’ve flown over a lot of places in America—Montana, Idaho, the Dakotas—where you travel great distances without much evidence of human habitation. It’s a lonely kind of beauty, but it can tug at you. I also like flying on the East Coast, where the population density is striking. There’s a constant stream of lights between Washington, D.C., and Boston. From the air, it has almost become one continuous megalopolis.

  Flying down to Ft. Lauderdale, I like passing over Cape Canaveral and seeing its three-mile-long runway. What a thrill it would be to land the shuttle there. Florida trips also have reminded me of how easily nature can tear apart hundreds of miles of human development. For years after a spate of hurricanes in 2004 and 2005, thousands of homes in South Florida had blue tarps covering their roofs. It was sobering to fly above that checkerboard carpet of blue squares, to see the destructive powers of wind and rain.

  In the early 1990s, when I was lower on the seniority list, I had to pilot a lot of red-eye flights. On so many of those red-eyes, I got to see the northern lights again and again. Especially in the wintertime, there were nights when for the whole trip, west to east, the lights would fill the entire northern horizon. To me, these lights—formed by charged particles colliding in the earth’s magnetosphere—looked like curtains billowing gently in the wind, with their folds swaying in and out. Sometimes, the lights were a deep magenta or cherry red. Other times, as the lights were cycling, they were lime green. Rather than looking like a curtain, these green lights sometimes looked like an old TV with the vertical hold not adjusted properly and the lines on the TV rolling from bottom to top. I felt privileged to be in a place, night after night, where I could see such scenes.

  A few years ago, my schedule included regular trips to Bermuda, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, and Antigua, which were a lot more fun than landing in Charlotte for the 141st time. I loved approaching the islands during daylight. We’d come in over shallow turquoise water, with the white, sandy beaches and lush green mountains ahead of us.

  I USED to fly from Albany, New York, to LaGuardia, and we’d pass over West Point, a trip that would often jog memories for me. One winter, when I was a cadet at the Air Force Academy, I was sent to West Point for a week as part of an exchange program. On that visit, everything there felt gray to me: the stone walls of the old buildings, the winter sky, the cadets’ uniforms. I ate in the cavernous cadet dining hall, where I was told that General Douglas MacArthur made his last visit to West Point. He had come back to his beloved alma mater in 1962 to give his famous “Duty, Honor, Country” speech. Flying over West Point on winter days decades later, I’d find myself thinking about that speech and wondering what the current cadets were doing at that particular moment.

  My schedule takes me into and out of LaGuardia about fifteen times a year, and in my career, I’ve flown there hundreds of times. So I know the general landscape and landmarks of the area very well.

  In the New York corridor, when the weather is good, controllers often tell us to fly toward a specific landmark on the ground. This use of “reporting points”—especially important when pilots are flying visually in addition to using instruments—is less common in some other areas of the country, where the landmarks aren’t as large or well-known.

  “Direct to the statue. Follow the river,” controllers will tell us, which means fly toward the Statue of Liberty and then follow the Hudson. Or they’ll point us to the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, at the mouth of upper New York Bay. “Direct to the Narrows.”

  If time permits, I’ll allow myself to take a moment to appreciate the physical beauty of the New York landscape. Below me are millions of people in hundreds of thousands of structures. It’s pretty dramatic.

  On a cloudless day with good visibility, when I can clearly see “The Lady”—pilots’ shorthand for the Statue of Liberty—I can often make out the flash of flame in her torch. Passing over the statue, I’m reminded of how I used to love reading an illustrated children’s book to Kate and Kelly when they were young. The book was about the building of the statue, how the French people gave it to the United States as a gift, and about “The New Colossus,” the Emma Lazarus poem engraved on a bronze plaque at the base. I enjoyed that children’s book even more than the girls did, partly because I’ve always found that poem by Emma Lazarus to be so moving and evocative. I can recite much of it from memory: “. . . and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand glows world-wide welcome; Her mild eyes command the air-bridged harbor . . . I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

  When the girls were little and I was on a trip, I’d mail them postcards so they could get a sense of where I was. Sometimes, I’d also send postcards to their teachers to share with the class. I’d offer a few lines with my own observations about, say, the Liberty Bell in Philly or the famous statues of ducklings in Boston Public Garden. When I sent the girls postcards of the Statue of Liberty, I described the thrill I felt flying over it, and how I had thought of them and our shared bedtime book.

  I WISH I could bring Lorrie and the girls with me to see the country more often. One of the perks of working in the airline industry always has been our ability to have our families fly free or at a reduced fare. We can fly in coach without charge on US Airways if seats are available. On other airlines, we pay a percentage of the fare, usually between a quarter and half of the regular price.

  In past eras, pilots easily took their spouses and kids on vacations and impulsive sightseeing jaunts. These days, however, with low fares ensuring that airplanes are almost always full, it’s much harder to get seats. It’s yet another result of airline deregulation. Our employee travel benefits are now of limited usefulness.

  In 2001, for instance, I was able to get four seats on a flight to Orlando, so Lorrie and I were able to take the girls to Disney World. But then we had trouble getting seats on a flight home to San Francisco. We kept running back and forth to different terminals, schlepping all our luggage, trying to find a flight on any available airline.

  Kate, then eight years old, eventually had enough. “Why don’t we buy tickets like everyone else?” she asked. In her eyes, I wasn’t a big-shot pilot impressing her with my perks. I was a cheap, harried father making her pull her suitcase all over the airport.

  Mostly, we buy regular tickets for flights now, because the hassles and uncertainties of trying to use my employee travel benefits just aren’t worth it.

  I’d say our most memorable free trip as a family was to New York in December 2002, when the girls were nine and seven.

  I had a four-day trip scheduled, and each night had a layover in Manhattan. Impulsively, I called Lorrie from Pittsburgh.

  “Let’s take the girls out of school,” I told her. “I can get the three of you on the next red-eye to Pittsburgh, and from there we’re going to take a little surprise vacation.” It was an echo of the good old days, when my father would decide to pull my sister and me out of school for a trip to Dallas.

  Lorrie and the girls agreed to come. They arrived early in the morning in Pittsburgh, and I was waiting for them at their gate. I piloted the next US Airways flight to LaGuardia, and I was able to get them seats on my plane.

  I just loved having them on board. I did my usual welcome announcement, but with a twist. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is Captain Sullenberger, and Katie and Kelly, this is Dad. We are bound for New York’s LaGuardia Airport . . .”

  Lorrie later tol
d me the girls giggled when I said that. They felt like everyone was smiling at them. It was a nice moment.

  We got to New York and it was bitterly cold, but we had a terrific time. We took a ferry by the Statue of Liberty. It was just fifteen months after the attacks of September 11, and the statue was still closed to visitors. That night we went to see 42nd Street on Broadway.

  The next day I piloted a flight from LaGuardia to New Orleans and back, and Lorrie and the girls stayed in New York. They went to Macy’s and visited Santa Claus. They took a sightseeing bus tour of the city. They went to Ground Zero.

  I made it back by nightfall, and we saw the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center, and went ice-skating. Then we got tickets for the Rockettes’ Christmas show at Radio City Music Hall. Kate and Kelly were wide-eyed at the splendor of the theater, and having taken dance lessons themselves, they loved how the dancers were arranged perfectly by height, and how they performed together as a chorus line with such precision.

  The next day I had to pilot a flight from New York to Nassau. As I was leaving LaGuardia, a major snowstorm began. I got the plane deiced and flew down to the Bahamas, where it was eighty degrees. As usual, I was only able to step out into the sunshine briefly, when I walked down the stairs to the tarmac. After a quick turnaround, we flew back to New York that afternoon.

  All the way back from Nassau, I checked the hourly weather reports for LaGuardia, and saw it was snowing in New York and visibility was down to a quarter of a mile. The forecast was that conditions would improve at our arrival time. But as we got closer, it looked like we might have to divert to Pittsburgh, our alternate airport.

  When we arrived in the New York area, the visibility improved slightly, allowing us to land on a plowed but still-snow-covered runway.

  As I was walking through the terminal, I stopped to look at the TV monitors showing the scheduled arrivals. In column after column, every flight from every city, A to Z, had the same notation: “canceled,” “canceled,” “canceled . . .” But when I got to the Ns, there was one flight, from Nassau, showing an on-time arrival. My flight.

  Turned out, I was in the right place at the right time, and was able to arrive just as the weather improved. I got to the hotel when Lorrie and the kids were just about to go to dinner. I was struck by the sight of Kate and Kelly, standing in the lobby wearing beautiful wool winter overcoats with velvety collars. Kelly’s was red. Katie’s was green. They looked like pretty little dolls, dressed up for a walk in snowy Manhattan. I was grateful to have made it back to the city to see that vision of them, walking through the lobby and then into the night.

  For the rest of our stay, Lorrie and I dragged the girls around—onto subways, into cabs. Everywhere we went, Kate and Kelly were two short suburban girls, lost in a sea of taller, city-savvy adults. By the end of the trip, Kate told us, “This has been a lot of fun, but I’m tired of all the hustle and bustle.”

  We were able to get four seats on a flight back to San Francisco, and this time, I sat back in coach with them, and we all looked out the window together, watching the continent go by.

  FOR A pilot, LaGuardia is a more challenging environment than the average airport. The volume of traffic in the New York area makes it a complicated airspace, with so many planes vying for slots to take off or land. There are three major airports in close proximity—JFK, Newark, and LaGuardia—plus smaller facilities such as Westchester County Airport in White Plains and Teterboro in New Jersey. The radio frequencies are busier than those in many other places in the country. A great many voices are in your ears, and there’s a lot going on around you that you need to be aware of.

  Another issue is that at LaGuardia, the runways are short and surrounded by water. So you pretty much have to nail your landings, since there’s not a lot of extra room if you don’t. When landing, you want to put the airplane on the runway in the right place, because you’ll need to have enough room to stop. You aim for the “touchdown zone,” which begins a thousand feet beyond the start of the runway.

  In the winter, of course, there are often weather conditions to be concerned about. And you have to be ready for flight delays as you wait your turn to get your plane deiced.

  Still, despite all this, I enjoy flying out of LaGuardia. I like the challenge of it, and especially the view from the air—Central Park, the Empire State Building, the gorgeous homes and boats out on Long Island. I kind of enjoy the passengers out of LaGuardia, too. They often have a seasoned manner about them, and they’re not always as tough as they seem.

  It’s true that a lot of passengers who board in New York can be very direct. They’ll push the limits. But veteran flight attendants know that the way to deal with them is to be self-assured and push back a little. If passengers are firmly told the boundaries, they’re generally OK with them.

  When a passenger asks for two drinks at once, a flight attendant might smile and say, “Just a minute. I’ll get to you. It’s not all about you, you know! Didn’t your mother teach you that?” If the flight attendant has the right, humorous delivery, a lot of passengers smile back and accept it. Flight attendants have told me: “When you want someone to turn off his computer for landing, you can ask him nicely, or you can say, ‘OK now, that’s enough of you and that laptop!’”

  On midweek US Airways flights from “LGA,” there are a lot of business travelers, and they can be savvy fliers. I often fly from LaGuardia to Charlotte, which has become a major banking center. So I might have a dozen or more bankers on each of those flights. There are always rows and rows of other frequent fliers, too, people who fly so often that they have a pretty good knowledge of the airline industry, the responsibilities of the crew, and the role passengers might have to play in an emergency.

  In the case of Flight 1549, a Thursday-afternoon trip down to Charlotte, that would turn out to be fortuitous.

  ON JANUARY 15, 2009, the day of Flight 1549, the snow around LaGuardia had stopped earlier in the morning. It was cold and clear, with scattered clouds. Winds were out of the north, so we prepared to take off toward the north.

  We were flying an Airbus A320–214, built in France by Airbus Industrie. The particular plane assigned to us, delivered to US Airways in 1999, had logged 16,298 flights before our takeoff. It had been airborne for 25,241 hours. The left engine had seen 19,182 hours of service, and the right engine had served for 26,466 hours. The most recent maintenance “A check” (which is done every 550 flight hours) had been forty days earlier. The plane had its annual C check (a comprehensive inspection) nine months earlier. These are common statistics for planes flown by commercial airlines in the United States.

  With First Officer Jeff Skiles at the controls, we lifted off on the northeast runway, runway 4, about four seconds before 3:26 P.M. Along with the two of us in the cockpit, there were 150 passengers and our three flight attendants—Donna Dent, Doreen Welsh, and Sheila Dail.

  As soon as we passed the end of the runway, the local controller at LaGuardia passed us off to the departure controller, Patrick Harten, who works at New York Terminal Radar Approach Control (TRACON) in Westbury, Long Island. Fourteen minutes earlier, he had been assigned to the LaGuardia departure radar position, which handles all departures from LaGuardia.

  I radioed Patrick: “Cactus fifteen forty-nine, seven hundred, climbing five thousand.” That meant we were passing through seven hundred feet, on the way to five thousand feet. Complying with our departure instructions, we had turned left to a heading of 360 degrees. On the magnetic compass that’s due north.

  Patrick responded: “Cactus fifteen forty-nine, New York departure radar contact. Climb and maintain one five thousand.” He was telling us to climb to 15,000 feet.

  I responded: “Maintain one five thousand, Cactus fifteen forty-nine.”

  As we climbed through 1,000 feet, Jeff commanded: “And flaps one, please.” I repeated, “Flaps one,” as I moved the flap lever from the 2 to the 1 detent while Jeff lowered the nose, shallowing our climb as we accelerated
.

  Next, Jeff said, “Flaps up, please, after takeoff checklist.”

  I responded, “Flaps up.” I retracted the flaps, verified that all the items on the after takeoff checklist were done, and announced, “After takeoff checklist complete.”

  The takeoff portion of the flight was now complete, and we were transitioning to the climb portion of the flight by retracting the flaps. The flaps were needed for takeoff, but for our climb would only produce unnecessary drag. The airplane was in a clean configuration—with landing gear and flaps retracted—and we began our acceleration to 250 knots.

  We continued climbing and accelerating. That incredible New York skyline was coming into view. Everything so far was completely routine.

  13

  SUDDEN, COMPLETE, SYMMETRICAL

  WE’D BEEN IN the air for about ninety-five seconds, and had not yet risen to three thousand feet when I saw them.

  “Birds!” I said to Jeff.

  The birds were ahead of us, in what probably was a V formation. Jeff had noticed them a fraction of a second before I uttered the word, but there was no time for either of us to react. Our airplane was traveling at 3.83 statute miles a minute. That’s 316 feet per second. That means the birds were about a football field away when I first saw them. I barely blinked and they were upon us.

  There were many large birds, a dozen or more, and I saw them in outline, with their wings extended straight out horizontally. We were flying so fast compared with the birds that it looked as if they weren’t even moving. I just saw, in an instant, the cylindrical dark outlines of their bodies. I’d later learn they were Canada geese, weighing anywhere from eight to eighteen pounds, with six-foot wingspans, and as is their way, they were flying within sight of one another at perhaps fifty miles an hour.