Highest Duty_ My Search for What Really Matters - Chesley B. Sullenberger [113]
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 they protested with sickening sounds that an engine should never make. We clearly heard the wooooooh of engines spooling down and rolling back, followed by the sounds of vibrations as the engines tore themselves apart. Listening to the tape, I was reminded of how we felt in that moment. It was as if the bottom were falling out of our world. Even in the safety of that office at the NTSB, it was disturbing for us to hear again the rundown of the engines, and to know we had been in the cockpit of that aircraft when that was occurring.
The biggest surprise for me, listening to the tape, was how fast everything happened. The entire flight was five minutes and eight seconds long. The first minute and forty seconds were uneventful. Then, from the moment I said, “Birds!” until we approached the