was no TV, so he couldn’t see coverage of the rescue. In case we had a bad outcome, his union rep didn’t think Patrick needed to see it in those early moments.
Over and over again, Patrick played in his mind his final exchanges with me, assuming they were my final words. He had heard the distress in pilots’ voices during lesser emergencies he’d dealt with in the past. As he would describe it, their voices became “almost like a quiver.” He thought about my voice, and how it seemed “strangely calm.”
At that point, he didn’t know what I looked like and didn’t know anything about me. He just knew we had spent a few riveting minutes connected to each other, and now he assumed I was gone.
He was told he couldn’t leave the facility until the drug testers came to take a urine sample and do a Breathalyzer test. This is standard procedure for controllers—and pilots, too—involved in an accident. It’s part of the investigation.
Patrick sat in that union room, consoled by the union rep, for what felt like hours. Then a friend poked his head into the room and said, “It looks like they’re going to make it. They’re on the wings of the plane.”
Patrick later told me that his relief was beyond words.
ONE OF the passengers was sitting near Jeff and me in the raft. Like so many people, he was drained and emotional. But he wanted me to know that he appreciated what the crew and I had done to bring the plane down safely.
He took my arm. “Thank you,” he said.
“You’re welcome,” I told him.
It was the simplest exchange between two men at an extraordinary moment, but I could tell it meant a great deal to him to say it. It meant a great deal to me to hear his words, and for Jeff and Donna, near us, too.
The cold air and wind were not immediately debilitating. But as we all waited for our turn to be rescued by the ferry
I made sure I was the last person off the raft, just as I had wanted to be the last person off of the plane. I don’t think there are any written guidelines suggesting that the captain be the last to leave a plane or any other vessel during an emergency. I was aware of the maritime tradition, but that wasn’t the reason I did it. It was just obvious to me: I shouldn’t be rescued until all the passengers in my care were attended to.
The rescue went quickly, all things considered. The deck of the ferry was about ten feet above the raft, so it took some effort for passengers to make their way up. By the time it was my turn to climb up the ladder, I was so cold that I could no longer use my hands. I had to stick my forearms through the rungs. I couldn’t grasp anything with my fingers.
From the deck of the ferry, standing with seventeen other survivors from Flight 1549, including Jeff, I looked back at the airplane. It continued to slowly sink lower in the water, as it drifted south toward the Statue of Liberty surrounded by a small trail of debris and leaking jet fuel.
Standing there, I realized I still had my cell phone on my belt. Though my pants were drenched, the phone was dry and working. It was my first moment to call Lorrie.
We have two landlines in the house and she has a cell phone, but I couldn’t get through to her on any of them. She wasn’t answering because she was on one of the lines, talking to a business associate. She saw my number come up on her cell phone, but at first she ignored it.
Given all the ringing, she told the person she was talking to: “Sully is calling every line in the house. Let’s see what he wants.”
She answered the other line, saying, “Hello.”
Hearing her voice, not knowing what she knew or didn’t know, my first words were meant to reassure her: “I wanted to call to say I’m OK.”
She thought that meant I was on schedule to fly back to San Francisco that night.
“That’s good,” she told me. She assumed I had already landed Flight 1549 in Charlotte. I saw she needed an explanation.
“No,” I said. “There’s been an incident.”
She still wasn’t getting it. She didn’t have her TV on, so she was unaware of the nonstop coverage of the incident that was all over the national cable networks. She assumed that I was trying to tell her my flight was delayed, and that I might not make it home.
And so I told her straight, almost as if I was giving her bullet points. “We hit birds. We lost thrust in both engines. I ditched the airplane in the Hudson.”
It was a lot for her to digest. She paused and asked her first question. “Are you OK?”
“Yes,” I told her.
“
“Yes,” I said. “But I can’t talk now. I’m on my way to the pier. I’ll call you from there.” I felt pretty emotional hearing her voice; I could have used her consoling words. At the same time, there was so much to tell her and no time to do so. I wanted the kids to know I was safe, too. Until I could get back to them, they’d be hearing everything from the news reports on TV. But at least I had made contact.
After my call, Lorrie lay down on the bed in our bedroom. She wasn’t crying, but she was shaking really hard. My call had been a shock. She called a close friend and said, “Sully just crashed an airplane and I don’t know what to do.” Her friend told her, “Go get your girls.” So she got the girls out of school and brought them home.
WHILE STILL on the ferry, I began running through my mental checklist of other things I should be doing. I knew that US Airways was well aware of the incident through Air Traffic Control, but I thought I’d better give the airline a sense of the situation from my end.
Every flight has an airline dispatcher assigned to monitor it. The dispatchers work at their computers in a large, windowless room at the US Airways Operations Control Center in Pittsburgh, and they each track many flights at the same time.
I called Bob Haney, who was on duty that day as US Airways’ airline operations manager, and after a few rings he picked up.
“This is Bob,” he said. His delivery was clipped, and there was an intensity in his voice.
“This is Captain Sullenberger,” I said.
“I can’t talk now,” he told me. “There’s a plane down in the Hudson!”
“I know,” I said. “I’m the guy.” He was momentarily speechless. He couldn’t believe that the pilot from the aircraft in the Hudson, a scene he was watching on TV at that moment, was calling his desk phone. Given the gravity of the situation, we quickly began discussing the matters at hand. But I’d later smile at the memory of how he tried to cut me off at the beginning of our conversation with breaking news. “There’s a plane down in the Hudson!” Yes, I knew about that.
The
As soon as I stepped onto the pier at the ferry terminal, I was met by US Airways captain Dan Britt, our union rep at LaGuardia. He had seen the television coverage at his home in New York, put on his uniform, and come down to be with me and Jeff.
I asked him to help me get answers and updates, and we both started making calls, verifying that the injured were being treated. I walked over to Doreen, who was on a gurney and was being treated by an EMT. She was the most seriously injured, with a gash in her leg, and would remain hospitalized for several days. I gathered together the rest of the crew, and included our two other airline pilot passengers, American Airlines first officer Susan O’Donnell and Colgan Air’s Derek Alter, who had given his shirt to a passenger in the raft.
Some passengers had been taken to the New Jersey side of the river and the rest came to New York, so it was hard to keep track. I desperately wanted a tally of all those who had been rescued, but I was still unable to get any kind of confirmation. The authorities kept asking me for the manifest. On domestic flights, the crew is not
