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.
THROUGH 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.”
At 3:30:14: “Cactus fifteen twenty-nine, uh, you still on?”
He feared we had already crashed, but then we flickered back onto his radar scope. We were at a very low altitude, but because we had returned to radar coverage, he hoped against hope that maybe we had regained use of one of our engines.
At 3:30:22 he said: “Cactus fifteen twenty-nine, if you can, uh, you got, uh, runway two nine available at Newark. It’ll be two o’clock and seven miles.”
There was no way to answer him. By then, we were just 21.7 seconds from landing in the river.
HAD WE lost one engine instead of two, Jeff and I would have had more time to analyze things and to communicate with the crew and passengers. We could have had the flight attendants prepare the cabin. We could have asked air traffic control to help us determine the best plan for our return. But on Flight 1549, there was much we couldn’t do because everything was so terribly time-compressed.
Many of the passengers had felt the bird strike. They heard the sound of the birds thumping against the plane, and the disturbing bangs that preceded the failing of the engines. They saw some smoke in the cabin, and like me, they could smell the incinerated birds. Actually, more accurately, the birds were liquefied into what is referred to as “bird slurry.”
I have heard the stories of what the passengers were going through while I was so occupied in the cockpit. Many would later write notes to me, sharing their personal recollections. Others gave media interviews that I found moving and haunting.
There was former U.S. Army Captain Andrew Gray, who had completed two tours of duty in Afghanistan, and was traveling on Flight 1549 with his fiancee, Stephanie King. As the plane descended, Andrew and Stephanie kissed and told each other “I love you.” As they described it, they “accepted death together.”
John Howell, a management consultant from Charlotte, thought about how he was his mother’s only surviving son. His brother, a firefighter, died at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. John later told reporters that as Flight 1549 descended, “The only thing I was thinking was, ‘If I go down, my mother’s not going to survive this.’”
In 12F, a window seat just behind the wing emergency exit, forty-five-year-old Eric Stevenson was experiencing an awful feeling of deja vu. On June 30, 1987, he had been on Delta Air Lines Flight 810, a Boeing 767, traveling from Los Angeles to Cincinnati. Shortly after takeoff, as the plane was climbing over the Pacific before turning east, one of the pilots had mistakenly shut down both engines. He had done this inadvertently because of the way the engine control panel was designed and the proximity of similar engine control switches. The plane began descending from 1,700 feet, while passengers quickly donned life jackets and expected the worst. Hearing some passengers crying around him, Eric decided to take out one of his business cards and write the words “I love you” to his parents and sister. He shoved it in his pocket, figuring he was likely to die and the note might be found on his body. Then just 500 feet above the water, the passengers felt a massive burst of thrust and the plane jolted forward with full force. The pilots had restarted the engines. The flight continued to Cincinnati, its cabin littered with life preservers. After that incident, Boeing redesigned the engine control panel to prevent a recurrence.
That near-death experience led Eric to take a year off from work so he could travel the world, and every year after that, he found ways to solemnly mark the anniversary of the incident. He said it planted the seeds for his eventual move to Paris, where he continues to work as a marketing manager for Hewlett-Packard. It was while visiting the United States in January 2009 that he ended up as a passenger on Flight 1549. Sitting in 12F, looking out the window, he couldn’t believe he was on another airplane without working engines.
And so he again took out a business card and wrote “Mom and Jane, I love you.” He shoved it into his right front pocket and thought to himself, “This will probably get separated from my body if the cabin disintegrates.” But he felt a measure of comfort knowing he had taken this step. “It was the maximum I could do,” he later told me. “All of us were completely at the mercy of the two of you in the cockpit. It was a helpless feeling, knowing there was nothing we could do about the situation. So I did the only thing I could do. With the plane going down, I wanted my family to know I was thinking about them at the very last moment.”
As the plane descended, Eric didn’t feel panic, but he did feel the same sadness he experienced at age twenty-three, in that Boeing 767 over the Pacific. On our flight, he recalled, he had the same clear thought: “This could be the end of my life. In ten or twenty seconds, I will be on the other side, whatever the other side will be.”
