landing. She wished that he and the 109 others on his DC-9–32 could have made their way onto the plane’s wings, or into slide rafts in the water of the Everglades.
“I had wondered for many years what my dad’s final minutes were like,” Theresa wrote. “I had assumed he was full of fear, and regret that he would never see his family again. The thought of him dying in a moment of panic and sadness was overwhelming for me.”
Greg Feith, the lead investigator with the National Transportation Safety Board, had told her that her dad’s focus would have been on landing the plane. The investigator’s words had been somewhat reassuring to her. But in the thirteen years since, she was unable to fully embrace them, because the investigator had never been in a cockpit of a plane in great distress. How could he know what a pilot was truly thinking in such a horrible moment?
That’s why my appearance on
“To hear you say how focused you were, and that you had a job to do…it gives me peace of mind, because you were someone who lived through it,” she wrote. “I now know that Greg was right. My dad didn’t leave this world in a moment of deep sadness. He was only trying to do his job. I can’t thank you enough, Captain Sullenberger. It has been a real blessing to hear your story.”
Lorrie was moved to tears by Theresa’s letter. She couldn’t get it out of her head, and so she decided to call her. They spoke for an hour—a pilot’s wife and a pilot’s daughter, sharing memories. “It was cathartic for both of us,” Lorrie later told me.
Theresa talked of the inappropriate things well-meaning people have said to her. “People tell me that my father died doing what he loved,” she told Lorrie. “Hearing that hasn’t been helpful to me. If he died in his garden of a heart attack, that would be different. That would have been dying doing something he loved. But he died in a three-thousand-degree fire. That wasn’t what he loved.”
The search for the remains of Flight 592 victims took two months, and Theresa told Lorrie how traumatic that was for surviving families. The plane had disintegrated into the smallest pieces, which had to be pulled from the muck far into the Everglades. While workers pushed through every sawgrass blade, snipers stood by to shoot alligators before they approached.
Half of those who died on the flight were never identified. Theresa recalled talking to a woman who was given her son’s ankle. They were able to identify it because of a tattoo.
Theresa’s father was identified only by a finger, which was delivered to the family in a small box. Because he was in the Air Force, there were records of his fingerprints. “The coroner asked what we wanted to do with it,” Theresa said. “We told him, ‘We want it back in the Everglades with the rest of him.’”
A mental health counselor and a wildlife and fisheries agent went with the family to the crash site during a memorial service, dropping First Officer Hazen’s remains from a small envelope back into the water. It was a surreal and tough moment for the family, and yet it offered a small bit of comfort.
There have been all sorts of airline incidents since the ValuJet crash in 1996, but Theresa said Flight 1549 struck her in ways that none of the others had. Flight 1549 and Flight 592 were similar, she said. Both encountered a serious problem minutes after takeoff. Both couldn’t make it back to a runway. Both ended up in the water.
Theresa has been offered the opportunity to listen to the cockpit voice recordings, but has declined to do so. A father of a flight attendant chose to listen, and said he ended up in therapy as a result. The cockpit door was open, and the sounds of screaming passengers are very clear on the tape. “It would be too hard for me to hear that,” Theresa said.
In 2006, on the tenth anniversary of the crash, she did find the courage to approach Greg Feith, the investigator: “I can take it,” she said to him. “Please tell me: Was my father screaming?” He responded: “Absolutely not. Your dad was going through his checklist. He and Captain Kubeck did everything they were supposed to do until they were incapacitated.”
Theresa told Lorrie that when she watched me on
She also told Lorrie this: “Because I lived through the worst outcome, I think I celebrate Flight 1549 so much more. My joy for the passengers and crew is so much more profound.”
In her letter to me, Theresa explained that she had spent a lot of time over the years thinking about “what-might-have-beens” involving her dad, who was fifty-three years old when he died. He passed away four years before Theresa’s daughter, Peyton, was born. “That’s the hardest part of the loss,” she wrote, “that he’ll never meet his granddaughter.”
Along with her letter, Theresa enclosed a photo of herself with her husband and daughter—“so you can see who you’ve touched.” They’re a very attractive family, pressed tightly together, all smiles. She told Lorrie that she now feels her father and I are connected; two pilots who tried their best to save lives. Though her father would never see his granddaughter, it gave her comfort to know that I would.
And so I was honored to hold the photo of beautiful nine-year-old Peyton in my hands as I thought about First Officer Hazen and the things he has missed.
17. A WILD RIDE
IN THE EARLY days after Flight 1549, I could sleep only a couple hours at a time. I kept questioning myself. On the very first night, I had said to Lorrie: “I hope they know I did the best I could.” That thought remained in my head.
It took me a couple of months to process what had happened and to work through the post-traumatic stress. Our pilots’ union has a volunteer Critical Incident Response Program team that began helping me and the crew the day after our Hudson landing. I had asked them for a road map of what to expect. They told me I’d be sleeping less, I’d have distracted thinking, I’d lose my appetite, I’d have flashbacks, and I’d do a lot of second- guessing and “what-iffing.”
They were right on all fronts. For the first couple of weeks, I couldn’t read a book or newspaper for more than a few seconds without drifting off into thoughts of Flight 1549.
“You might find it hard to shut off your brain,” I was told, and that described exactly what I was going through. I’d wake up in the middle of the night and my brain was running hard: What could I have done differently? What did other pilots think of what I had done? Could I have found time to tell the flight attendants that we’d be landing in water? Why didn’t I say “Brace for water landing!” when I finally got on the public address system? Could I have done something else, something better?
Eventually, I dealt with the issues in my psyche and started sleeping again. I went through every scenario. For instance, if I had said “Brace for water landing,” passengers might have begun fumbling around, desperately searching for life vests, rather than bracing. They might have panicked. The investigation would later show that before we took off, only 12 of 150 passengers had read the safety card in the seat pocket in front of them.
In the end, I was buoyed by the fact that investigators determined that Jeff and I made appropriate choices at every step. But even after I felt comfortable with the correctness of my decisions on January 15, I longed for my life before that day.
For months, if I could have clicked my heels and made the whole incident go away, I would have done so. Lorrie and the girls also wished it had never happened. Though I never thought I was going to die, they certainly felt as if they had almost lost me on January 15. It was hard for them to shake the horror of that feeling.
In time, however, my family came to see that our new reality was manageable, and we tried hard to find the positive possibilities in our new lives. I’ve been asked by colleagues to be a public advocate for the piloting profession and for airline safety, and I believe that’s a high calling. In testimony before Congress, I was able to speak honestly and bluntly about important issues in the airline industry. I know I now have the potential for greater influence in aviation issues, and I plan to be judicious in how I wield that influence.
Meanwhile, the notoriety I gained from Flight 1549 has allowed my family to have more than a few
