Highest Duty (18 page)

In recent years, however, in a cost-cutting move, US Airways had begun printing these booklets without the numbered tabs on the edge of the pages. Instead, the number of each procedure was printed on the page itself, requiring pilots to open the pages and thumb through them to get to the right page.

On Flight 1549, as Jeff turned quickly through the pages of his QRH without tabs, it likely took him a few extra seconds to find the page he needed with the proper procedure. I told this to the National Transportation Safety Board in my testimony given in the days after the accident.

We were over the Bronx at that point and I could see northern Manhattan out the window. The highest we ever got was just
over three thousand feet, and now, still heading northwest, we were descending at a rate of over one thousand feet per minute. That would be equivalent to an elevator descending two stories per second.

Twenty-one and a half seconds had passed since the bird strike. I needed to tell the controller about our situation. I needed to find a place to put the plane down quickly, whether back at LaGuardia or somewhere else. I began a left turn, looking for such a place.

“
M
AYDAY
! M
AYDAY
! Mayday!…”

That was my message—the emergency distress signal—to Patrick Harten, the controller, just after 3:27:32.9. My delivery was businesslike, but with a sense of urgency.

Patrick never heard those words, however, because while I was talking, he was making a transmission of his own—to me. Once someone keys his microphone, he can’t hear what’s being said to him on the same frequency. While Patrick was giving me a routine direction—“Cactus fifteen forty-nine, turn left heading two seven zero”—my “Mayday” message was going no farther than our cockpit.

I didn’t know that Patrick hadn’t heard me and that I hadn’t heard him. This is a regular and problematic issue in communications between controllers and pilots. When two people transmit simultaneously, they not only block each other, but they also sometimes prohibit others nearby from hearing certain transmissions. “Anti-blocking” devices have been invented that allow
aircraft radios to detect when someone else is transmitting. That way, once a radio senses another transmission, it can prevent your radio from transmitting so you don’t block someone else. We could certainly use such devices or similar technology in our cockpits. All pilots have stories. There have been times when a pilot will bump his radio’s button, and for a few minutes, those of us in planes on the same frequency hear only background noise from that pilot’s cockpit. We can’t hear the controller. It is a potentially hazardous situation that has not been resolved because airlines and other operators have chosen not to adopt anti-blocking technology, and the FAA has not mandated it.

Patrick’s transmission lasted about four seconds, and when he released his transmit button, he heard the rest of my transmission: “…This is, uh, Cactus fifteen thirty-nine. Hit birds. We’ve lost thrust in both engines. We’re turning back towards LaGuardia.”

I had gotten the flight number wrong. Later, when I heard the tape, I detected a higher stress level in my voice. My voice quality was slightly raspy, slightly higher pitched. No one else might have noticed, but I could hear it.

P
ATRICK, A
thirty-four-year-old controller, had worked many thousands of flights in his ten years on the job, and had a reputation for being careful and diligent.

He had assisted a few jets with failures of one engine, though none to the point where the plane had become a glider. He worked to get these flights back to the ground as quickly as pos
sible, and in each case, the planes landed without incident. Like other controllers, he took pride in the fact that he had never failed in his attempts to help a plane in distress get safely to a runway.

In Patrick’s previous emergencies, he had remained calm and acted intelligently.

Once, he had a plane coming in from overseas. There was bad weather that day, and the plane had been held in holding patterns. Eventually, it had enough fuel to last just thirty more minutes. The plane was almost twenty minutes from the airport. If a new weather problem developed, or there was a further traffic delay, the plane could run out of fuel. Knowing there was no margin for error, Patrick had to pull another aircraft from its final approach, and slot in the plane with low fuel. He oversaw the rearranging of a jigsaw puzzle in the sky, and was able to help the plane land without incident.

About fifteen times in his career, Patrick had pilots tell him that their planes had just hit birds. The worst bird strike he had ever handled before Flight 1549 involved a cracked windshield. Patrick had helped that airplane return to LaGuardia safely.

Patrick certainly had his share of experiences with emergencies. But like almost every controller working in the world today, he had never been in a situation where he was guiding a plane that had zero thrust capability.

In the case of Flight 1549, Patrick knew he had to act quickly and decisively. He made an immediate decision to offer us LaGuardia’s runway 13, which was the closest to our current posi
tion. At that moment, we were still heading away from LaGuardia and descending rapidly.

He made no comment, of course, about the seriousness of the condition of our plane. He just responded.

“OK, uh,” he radioed back to me. “You need to return to LaGuardia. Turn left heading of, uh, two two zero.”

“Two two zero,” I acknowledged, because I knew all my options lay to my left. In the left turn, I would have to choose one, and the option I chose would determine the ultimate heading I would fly.

From the cockpit voice recorder:

Skiles (3:27:50):
“If fuel remaining, engine mode selector, ignition. Ignition.”

Sullenberger (3:27:54):
“Ignition.”

Skiles (3:27:55):
“Thrust levers, confirm idle.”

Sullenberger (3:27:58):
“Idle.”

Skiles (3:28:02):
“Airspeed optimum relight. Three hundred knots. We don’t have that.”

Flight warning computer (3:28:03):
Sound of single chime.

Sullenberger (3:28:05):
“We don’t…”

Patrick immediately contacted the tower at LaGuardia telling them to clear all runways. “Tower, stop your departures. We got an emergency returning.”

“Who is it?” the tower controller asked.

“It’s fifteen twenty-nine,” said Patrick, also getting the flight
number wrong in the stress of the moment. “Bird strike. He lost all engines. He lost the thrust in the engines. He is returning immediately.”

Losing thrust in both engines is so rare that the LaGuardia controller didn’t fully recognize what Patrick had just told him. “Cactus fifteen twenty-nine.
Which
engine?” he asked.

Patrick replied: “He lost thrust in
both
engines, he said.”

“Got it,” said the LaGuardia controller.

You won’t hear it on the tape, because none of the controllers said it out loud, but in their minds they thought they were working a flight that would likely end very tragically.

Worldwide, airliners lose thrust in all engines so rarely that a decade can pass between occurrences. Usually, planes lose thrust in all engines only when they fly through a volcanic ash cloud or there is a fuel problem. And in the case of a volcanic ash encounter, the pilots have had enough time to get their engines to restart once clear of the ash cloud. Because they were at a high enough altitude—well above thirty thousand feet—there was time to go through their procedures and work on a solution, to get at least one engine going again.

In the case of Flight 1549, however, even if we were as high as the moon, we would never have gotten our engines restarted because they were irreparably damaged. Given the vibrations we felt coming from the engines, and the immediate loss of thrust, I was almost certain we’d never get the engines working again. And yet I knew we had to try.

So while Jeff worked diligently to restart at least one engine, I focused on finding a solution. I knew we had fewer than a hand
ful of minutes before our flight path would intersect the surface of the earth.

I had a conceptual realization that unlike every other flight I’d piloted for forty-two years, this one probably wouldn’t end on a runway with the airplane undamaged.

L
ESS THAN A
minute had passed since the bird strikes ruined the engines on Flight 1549. At his radar position out on Long Island, Patrick, the controller, was still hoping he could get us to a runway at LaGuardia.

Controllers guide pilots to runways. That’s what they do. That’s what they know best. So he wasn’t going to abandon that effort until every option had been exhausted. He figured that even in this most dire of situations, most pilots would have tried to make it back to LaGuardia. He assumed that would be my decision, too.

Five seconds after 3:28
P.M.
, which was just 32 seconds after I first made Patrick aware of the emergency, he asked me: “Cactus fifteen twenty-nine, if we can get it to you, do you want to try to land runway one three?” Patrick was offering us the runway at LaGuardia that could be reached by the shortest path.

“We’re unable,” I responded. “We may end up in the Hudson.”

I knew intuitively and quickly that the Hudson River might be our only option, and so I articulated it. It felt almost unnatural to say those words, but I said them. In his seat to my right, Jeff heard me and didn’t comment. He was busy trying to restart the engines. But he later told me he silently acknowledged my words in his own head, thinking I might have been right. The Hudson could turn out to be our only hope.

We both knew that our predicament left us few choices. We were at a low altitude, traveling at a low speed, in a 150,000-pound aircraft with no engines. Put simply: We were too low, too slow, too far away, and pointed in the wrong direction, away from the nearby airports.

If there had been a major interstate highway without overpasses, road signs, or heavy traffic, I could have considered landing on it. But there are very few stretches of interstate in America without those barriers these days, and certainly none of them are in New York, the nation’s largest metropolis. And, of course, I didn’t have the option of finding a farmer’s field that might be long enough and level enough. Not in the Bronx. Not in Queens. Not in Manhattan.

But was I really ready to completely rule out LaGuardia?

Looking out the window, I saw how rapidly we were descending. My decision would need to come in an instant: Did we have enough altitude and speed to make the turn back toward the airport and then reach it before hitting the ground? There wasn’t time to do the math, so it’s not as if I was making altitude-descent calculations in my head. But I was judging what I saw out the
window and creating, very quickly, a three-dimensional mental model of where we were. It was a conceptual and visual process, and I was doing this while I was flying the airplane as well as responding to Jeff and Patrick.

I also thought quickly about the obstacles between us and LaGuardia—the buildings, the neighborhoods, the hundreds of thousands of people below us. I can’t say I thought about all of this in any detail. I was quickly running through a host of facts and observations that I had filed away over the years, giving me a broad sense of how to make this decision, the most important one of my life.

I knew that if I chose to turn back across this densely populated area, I had to be certain we could make it. Once I turned toward LaGuardia, it would be an irrevocable choice. It would rule out every other option. And attempting to reach a runway that was unreachable could have had catastrophic consequences for everyone on the airplane and who knows how many people on the ground. Even if we made it to LaGuardia and missed the runway by a few feet, the result would be disastrous. The plane would likely tear open and be engulfed in flames.

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.

T
HROUGH 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 theory. 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.”