The man for the hour: Captain Sullenberger
The universally acknowledged hero of yesterday, who made the Flight 1549 story one of a controlled landing rather than a plane crash, is US Air pilot Chesley Sullenberger
No one who knew Sullenberger (known as “Sully”) was the least bit surprised at his ability to guide the wounded plane to an unprecedentedly safe water landing in the Hudson River on a bitterly cold afternoon. If anyone could do it, this man could.
And now he’s got something new to add to his already-lengthy resume (see the second page, as well), a mix of ingredients that made him the perfect man for the hour.
Like many pilots, Sullenberger had a love of flyiing from youth. But it wasn’t just flying that interested him—it was also the psychology of meeting a crisis:
…he is a visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley’s Center for Catastrophic Risk Management, which studies safety, infrastructure, and preparedness in accidents and natural disasters.
To top it all off, he was a certified glider pilot, helpful training for a situation in which he had to control a plane with its engines knocked out.
It seems, in retrospect, that Sullenberger’s entire life was a preparation for this crisis, and a reflection of his determination to meet it successfully if and when the time came. Yesterday that time arrived—and the preparation paid off for Sully, his passengers, and the unknown New Yorkers on the ground who might have been dealt death from the sky if Sullenberger had been any less ready.
I read that amid the chaos to get off the plane after the controlled crash men were yelling ‘women and children first.’ It is nice to know chivalry is not dead.
Sounds like a real-life version of A Prayer for Owen Meany.
Except this story has a happy ending.
What Captain Sullenberger is truly heroic and impressive. He deserves all the praise we can give him for saving those lives.
How soon before some Nimrod starts to over-analyze him, and starts to fling stuff at him?
What I love about this story is the way the passengers disciplined themselves into calm and compassion. I read about a passenger who slipped off the wing into the icy water after taking off her three-inch heels — but another passenger plunged in himself to yank her out. I read about another passenger, trapped in shoulder-deep water inside the airliner, who stripped down to his underwear so that he could swim more freely, and made it out of the plane to a dinghy full of shivering passengers who’d gotten out safely — and each of them, still out there in the river, not rescued yet, gave up some of their own warm dry clothing in order to get him covered. It’s such a cliche to say that this story reminds us of the good in people: but that’s the truth, it does. Under the shock and fear of this situation these people found within themselves what it took to take care of each other, when they might just as well have fought with each other to take care of themselves. The pilot walked the plane twice to make sure everyone was out, before getting out himself. There are still heroes in the world, more than 155 of them. I’m going to sleep soundly and happily tonight.
Mrs. Whatsit:
Great comment. Seconded. I have nothing to add.
What will be interesting is when he finally tells his story. I don’t think that being a glider pilot was that big of an advantage in this case. Gliders are meant to glide – 250,000 pound jets are not. Knowledge of aerodynamics and flying would tell us he had to go into a steep descent to keep the speed up in order to maintain control of the plane. The truly amazing thing was his ability to do that until just before he got to the water – when he would have had to pull the nose up and keep it up as long as possible while feeling for the water with the tail of the plane. Coming in any flatter and catching a wing or an engine at 150 MPH would have flipped the plane and chances of anyone walking away would have been negligible. And all this happened in three minutes. Even given the amount of training and simulator time all these guys go through I would venture to say that if had been any of a hundred well qualified pilots flying that plane instead of him the result would have probably been disastrous. Truly a situation of the right person in the right place at the right time. Nothing short of a miracle.
a wonderful outcome..
and fits “the hero motif” of joseph campbell
You broke a personal length record with that comment Art !
And guess what? I read it? 🙂
If you want to know how hard this is, check out the videos (no link, sorry, but it’s easy to find on YouTube) of Ethiopian Airlines flight 961 that ran out out of fuel during a hijacking and had to ditch in the Indian Ocean off the Comoros in 1996. Yes, it was a bigger plane (a Boeing 767 as opposed to an Airbus A320), but any dead-stick landing in an airliner is tough. The video shows the Ethiopian pilot came in with his plane at slight bank angle, and therefore caught his left engine in water. That led to the plane breaking up on impact. In the Ethiopian pilot’s defense, he was arguing with three (drunk and ignorant) hijackers, who thought he was just faking the fact that they were out of gas. They just didn’t want to believe he couldn’t make it to Australia, because the airline’s magazine clearly showed that Ethiopian Airlines flew there. Idiots. As a result, the pilot was unable to lower the flaps or raise the nose, and the plane hit at around 200 mph instead of the 150 mph in the USAirways incident. The hijackers died, along with 120 others, although the pilots and 50 others survived.
This is a wonderful story. Something tells me this pilot won’t feel compelled to write a book and get rich off of it.
And i kinda like Art’s rambling post. There was one a few days ago that if you played Dark Side of The Moon through headphones while reading it the whole thing synchronised perfectly!
when this happened I recalled seeing a story about another plane that lost both engines on a transatlantic flight but managed to glide in and land in the Azores. Link here to a Wikipedia gives pretty good account.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Transat_Flight_236
It’s nice to see some of the things our society used to value — Air Force Academy, fighter pilot, experience — coming to the fore.
Those who are not well informed in technical issues probably can not fully appreciate enormity of danger and brilliance of pilot performance. Aircrafts are very fragile compared to everything we can imagine. They are optimized to be as lightweight as possible, that is, to withhold only aerodynamical forces – but water is 600 times thicker than air! Free fall from 15 foot altitude into water would crush them completely. 150 mph is the minimal airspeed at which the plane is controllable, and collission with water at slightly bigger speed would be fatal, too: impact force is proportional to the square of speed. There is no margin of error in each of parameter of landing – angle of descent, vertical and horizontal speed, orientation of the craft in all three planes, timing and so on. For me this is a miracle, indeed: as a mechanical engineer by training and a specialist in fluid dynamics, I can not understand how this level of precision in pilotage is humanly possible.
Sergey — a couple of things
150 MPH is probably close to the minimum landing speed for this particular aircraft with that weight of fuel and passengers aboard. Obviously there are many aircraft (especially small private craft) that can land at much, much lower speeds.
As for it being a miracle and not knowing how it was possible ? I think of the old saying “coming in on a wing and a prayer.” I am sure while doing everything they could the flight crew was doing a lot praying as well. And it was a good thing because both were needed.