Remembering that Water Landing
Flight 1549 and the 2009 "Miracle on the Hudson," and a little bit about childbirth
I’ve had a song in my head lately, the innocent, delightful early 1900s popular song, “Come Josephine in My Flying Machine.”1 In those heady days of man-propelled air flight, people were dazzled to see what had once been deemed impossible. The easy waltz tempo of “Josephine” captures the wonder of the crowd, but it belies the infinitesimal precision required to become airborne. Like dancing, when flight looks easy, it isn’t—it’s built on innumerable factors and forces that have to coordinate seamlessly. And that seamlessness, in birds or in machines, manifests a form of beauty and artistry.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot. January 15 marked the 15th anniversary of what many know as the Miracle on the Hudson, when US Airways flight 1549 made an emergency landing on water, and all 155 people on board survived. Some of us were old enough then to recall how perilous the news of a low plane over New York City would sound. In 2009, when Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger was at the controls of the Airbus that would go down in the Hudson River, the cleanup from the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 was still recent news, and rebuilding was still happening at Ground Zero. So eyewitnesses who saw the US Airways plane descending less than 900 feet over the George Washington Bridge must’ve experienced heart-stopping moments of panic, thinking that yet another nightmare was about to happen all over again.
Except it didn’t.
In the minutes after a mass of birds known as a bird strike hit the plane’s engines, Sully and first officer Jeffrey Skiles, assisted by an extremely professional air traffic controller, Patrick Harten, made split-second decisions. Instead of trying to fly to nearby runways, Sully—who’d been flying since he was sixteen, manned fighter jets in the Air Force, and become an expert in flight safety—decided to land on the water. Despite the 36-degree water, the frigid air temperature, and the fact that no recorded emergency flight ditching had ever resulted in saving every life on board, let alone most of them, he piloted the Airbus to turn the Hudson into a runway. His and Jeff’s efforts, plus the work of the experienced and well-trained flight attendants Sheila Dale, Donna Dent, and Doreen Walsh, and then the quick help of boat captains and first responders, managed to save everyone on the Airbus.
So many things could’ve gone so very differently. With a speed of about 230 miles per hour when the birds hit, the plane lost both engines. As Sully put it in his memoir, Highest Duty: My Search for What Really Matters,
Within a few seconds [of the strike,] Jeff and I felt a sudden, complete, and bilaterally symmetrical loss of thrust. It was unlike anything I’d ever experienced in a cockpit before. It was shocking and startling. … Without the normal engine noises, it became eerily quiet. Donna and Sheila would later tell me that in the cabin, it was as quiet as a library.
That’s glider noise, not jet-fuel-propelled commercial aviation noise. And then Sully and Jeff felt the plane become, in essence, a huge, hulking, fast-sinking glider:
If you’ve got more than 40,000 pounds of thrust pushing your 150,000-pound plane uphill at a steep angle and the thrust suddenly goes away—completely—well, it gets your attention. I could feel the momentum stopping, and the airplane slowing. I sensed that both engines were winding down. If only one engine had been destroyed, the plane would be yawing, turning slightly to one side, because of the thrust in the still-working engine. That didn’t happen. So I knew very quickly that this was an unparalleled crisis.
You can see a re-enactment of what happened in the 2016 film Sully. While the drama with the National Transportation Safety Board after the landing was largely fictionalized, the scenes showing what happened during the flight itself are mesmerizing and terrifying. Sully, the prototype of a stalwart pilot, articulated this in his book.
The failure of even one engine had never happened to me before [in over 19,500 flight hours of experience]. Engines are so reliable… that it is possible for a professional airline pilot to go an entire career without losing even one. I was headed for that perfect record before Flight 1549. …
Within eight seconds of the bird strike, realizing that we were without engines, I knew that this was the worst aviation challenge I’d ever faced. It was the most sickening, pit-of-your-stomach, falling-through-the-floor feeling I had ever experienced.
I finished reading Highest Duty three weeks ago, just as my labor with our newborn son really kicked in. There’s some connection between birthing a child and landing a plane on water, namely that the process can seem routine (all planes have to land, all pregnant mothers must birth their unborn children) but, on closer inspection, the number of things that have to go right are nearly countless, and no safe delivery is guaranteed. Sully’s response after January 15, 2009 struck me, as a mother in labor, as particularly apt in two ways.
One of Sully’s reactions after the landing and the media firestorm was that he was simply doing his job—fulfilling his duty. He rightly, I think, insisted that he wasn’t a hero. Heros, in his definition, are bystanders who run into burning buildings, people who insert themselves in situations which they could easily ignore or stand by comfortably on the sidelines, leaving the self-sacrifice to others. Sully, on the other hand, was supposed to fly the plane. He didn’t have a choice. But his expertise coupled with his decisions saved everyone on the flight. Were his actions heroic? Perhaps. But I think “salvific” is more accurate term, in some ways. He was the means by which people were saved. While the key players were mightily worthy of praise, the so-called heroes were not the point. The saving was the point. The people were, and are, the point.
This leads to another quality of Sully’s story that I love, and that is his unabashed and rightly directed gratitude to all the people involved in making Flight 1549 one of hope. From Jeff, who’d been immersed in the flight manual, or Quick Reference Handbook, as he trained to fly the Airbus and so was nimble-fingered and prepared to look up exactly what Sully needed as the plane descended. To the flight attendants, who seamlessly went into emergency mode when prompted by Sully’s words and were instrumental in getting the passengers off the plane. To Patrick, the air traffic controller, who likewise made clear his gratitude to the efforts of others, from his wife to the engineers who designed the Airbus that held together for a water landing (his testimony about the accident brings me to tears). To the boat captains and others who instantly jumped into action to save passengers standing on the plane’s wings in near-freezing water and sat soaked and waiting in cold rafts. If any one person had skipped out or been lazy, people would’ve died.
There’s a part in the film when Sully and Jeff take a break after hearing their own cockpit recording—you know, the recording that people usually listen to after everyone on a plane has died. Sully’s reaction to Jeff is sheer thankfulness: “I’m so proud of you.” Sully was blessed with the experience and confidence to do his job. He also knew that doing his job would’ve meant nothing if others, like Jeff, hadn’t also done theirs.
Machines can be magnificent. They’re also machines. They are not human. “This wasn’t a video game,” Jeff says in the film (see this key moment here). And that’s precisely the point. Though the vast majority of us learned of Flight 1549 through the wonders of technology, the significance of the event lay in the deliverance of real, live people.
Lately, we’ve heard news of commercial flights with potentially deadly problems, from faulty doors to loose tires and more, including leaked audio deploring “useless white male pilots,” presumably those like Sully. It’s easy to get depressed about these kind of realities. It’s also easy to forget how many times, every day, planes take off and land without incident, and how many people are literally delivered safely from one place to another. We can’t discount sobering truths about declining structural quality and administrative bloat and incompetence, among many other issues. But neither should we forget what makes human flight possible and beautiful, namely all the many dedicated, careful, and conscientious people behind the lift and landing of every plane.
Our son’s birth was the same. I will write about it at some point, I promise. It was routine and not routine, like almost every other birth. Here is where I feel like Sully, in that I marvel at how many, many things went right, and how grateful I am to so many people who did their jobs that day, and who continue to help us as we transition to life with another new baby. Like the singer of “Come Josephine,” I am happy to sing “I’m a sky kid,” one who’s been on amazing flights, including another labor and delivery, and made it safely back to earth to tell of the adventure.
I think I feel this more with each birth — that it’s such a miracle. I don’t know if it’s because I’m more aware of how many things go wrong, because so many friends have had hard experiences. But I take so little of the whole process for granted. It’s just a miracle that these things happen every day.