fall of 2002, was to write about the happiest time of her life. “The happiest time of my life,” she wrote, “was the time when Daddy was home.” Reading that was one of those bittersweet moments that filled and broke my heart at the same time.
Now here we are, with the girls pulling out of our driveway all on their own. I’ve blinked and everything has changed: My parents are long gone, the things I missed with my kids can’t be reclaimed, and my life is different now. Lorrie is right. I need to remember every day how precious our time with the girls really is.
By landing safely, Flight 1549 returned passengers and crew to the loving embrace of their families. We’ve all been given second chances. We’ve been given new reminders that we are loved, and new opportunities to show affection to those we care about. There were 155 people on that plane who got to go home. I must never lose sight of the fact that I was one of them.
19. THE QUESTION
ONE DAY IN early May, almost four months after Flight 1549 landed in the Hudson, three large cardboard boxes arrived at my front door in Danville. Inside, well preserved and neatly packaged, were the things I had left behind in the cockpit of the plane. Everything was there except that eight-dollar tuna sandwich I had bought and never eaten before takeoff.
I was somewhat solemn going through my belongings. I knew that after most airline accidents, such boxes are sent to relatives of victims who’ve died. Or else, when a plane crashes, fire destroys most everything, or the victims’ belongings have been shattered into pieces so small that there is almost nothing to be returned. Maybe relatives will get back someone’s wedding ring. Usually loved ones get little or nothing.
In the case of Flight 1549, all of us who were “survivors” got boxes addressed directly to us. We were able to sign the FedEx slips ourselves. Some of what was returned to us was destroyed and unusable. But a lot of things were in good condition and could be folded back into our lives. Passengers got back their favorite jeans, their coats, their car keys, their purses. I pictured these passengers, all over the country, opening their boxes and flashing back to January 15, 2009. We could focus on waterlogged items that were ruined, or we could go through our personal effects feeling grateful.
The plane had sunk into the Hudson after we all evacuated, and a company from El Segundo, California, Douglass Personal Effects Administrators, was charged with taking what was fished out of the water and trying to reclaim what they could. I was impressed by the job they undertook in order to reunite us with our belongings. They went through every suitcase in the cargo hold and every item in the overhead compartments.
It was amazing and impressive that so many things submerged in dirty, icy water could be brought back to life. The company used sheets of fabric softener to separate all of the clothing and other items. The smell of dryer sheets was overpowering when we opened our boxes.
My roll-aboard bag was in one of the boxes, its contents dried, inventoried, and wrapped up in tissue paper. My iPod, laptop, and alarm clock were trashed. But my phone charger and iPod charger still worked. So did my data cable for transferring photos from my phone to my computer. My mini Maglite also worked fine. My running shoes looked as good as new. The shoes I was wearing on the flight came home with me in January but were totally waterlogged and beaten up. I really hoped they could be saved, because they were what we call “airport- friendly shoes,” with no metal; I didn’t have to take them off to go through security checkpoints. I took those shoes to my favorite local shoe repairman at a shopping center in Danville, and he did a wonderful job fixing and cleaning them up. I wear them still.
On January 15, I was traveling with four library books, including a copy of
Anyway, I was glad to find all four of the library books in one of the boxes of my belongings. The reclamation company had tried using a drying process to make the books usable again but weren’t completely successful. The pages are readable but too wrinkled to be checked out again by library patrons. I returned them anyway. The library has found a place for them to be displayed.
Since Flight 1549 came at the end of a four-day trip, I had mostly dirty laundry in my roll-aboard bag. All of my clothing came back in good condition, ready to wear, and with that strong fabric-softener smell.
I was also glad to get back my Jeppesen airway manual, which contains the charts for all of the airports we serve. Still taped neatly inside the manual, weathered but readable, was the fortune from a fortune cookie that I’d gotten at a Chinese restaurant in San Mateo, California, sometime in the late 1980s.
The fortune read: “A delay is better than a disaster.”
I thought that was good advice at the time and so I’d kept it in the manual ever since.
That fortune reminded me of an unexpected question Kate asked me when she was nine years old. I was driving her to school, and out of the blue, she asked me: “Daddy, what does
After thinking about it for a little bit, I came up with what, in retrospect, was a pretty good answer. I said, “
Integrity is the core of my profession. An airline pilot has to do the right thing every time, even if that means delaying or canceling a flight to address a maintenance or other issue, even if it means inconveniencing 183 people who want to get home, including the pilot. By delaying a flight, I am ensuring that they will get home.
I am trained to be intolerant of anything less than the highest standards of my profession. I believe air travel is as safe as it is because tens of thousands of my fellow airline and aviation workers feel a shared sense of duty to make safety a reality every day. I call it a daily devotion to duty. It’s serving a cause greater than ourselves.
And so I think often of that fortune, which sat for a good while in the cockpit of a water-filled Airbus A320, tilted sideways in the Hudson: “A delay is better than a disaster.”
It’s nice to have that fortune back. It will definitely accompany me on future flights.
A FEW days after receiving my belongings, I flew to Washington, D.C., where I met Jeff Skiles at the headquarters of the National Transportation Safety Board. We had been invited to listen to the cockpit voice recorder (CVR), and to offer our thoughts and memories.
Previously, the only tape available had been from the FAA, and that contained the radio communications between us and Air Traffic Control. This NTSB visit would be our first opportunity to listen to the audio from the cockpit voice recorder. We’d hear exactly what we had said to each other in the cockpit during the flight. For four months until this May meeting, both of us had been relying on our memories of what we had said. Now, finally, we would know for sure.
There were six of us in the room: Jeff Skiles, Jeff Diercksmeier, a U.S. Airline Pilots Association accident investigation committee member, three NTSB officials (two investigators and a specialist from the agency’s recordings section), and me. The investigators were happy to have Jeff and me there with them. After many airline accidents, when the recordings are reviewed, the flight crews are not on hand. Often, the pilots whose voices are on the recordings are dead, and so they can’t explain what they were thinking, why they made the decisions they did, or exactly what a particular word was.
Listening to the tape was an intense experience for us. It brought us back together into the cockpit, as if we were reliving the incident in real time.
We were in a small office with fluorescent lights, and we sat in chairs at a table, wearing headsets. Jeff and I didn’t look at each other much. For the most part, we were in our own heads, often with our eyes closed, trying to capture all the sounds and noises in the cockpit.
The recording began while Flight 1549 was about to push back from the gate and continued until we first touched the Hudson. There were things I said on the tape that I didn’t recall saying. Just thirty-three seconds before the bird strike, I said to Jeff, “And what a view of the Hudson today!” He took a look and agreed: “Yeah!”
The bird strikes were completely audible on the tape. There were the sounds of thumps and then unnatural noises as the birds went through the engines. You could hear the damage being inflicted on the engines, and how
