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.
PATRICK, 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 possible, 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 position. 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):
Sullenberger (3:27:54):
Skiles (3:27:55):
Sullenberger (3:27:58):
Skiles (3:28:02):
Flight warning computer (3:28:03):
Sullenberger (3:28:05):
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.
Patrick replied: “He lost thrust in
“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 handful 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.
14. GRAVITY
LESS 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
