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The circumstances of Flight 943 were different from my experience on Flight 1549, mostly because Captain Ogg had hours to work on his plan and Jeff and I didn’t even have minutes. Also, he was landing on the open ocean, not on a river. But I had long admired Captain Ogg’s ability to safely land on water. I knew that not all pilots could have successfully equaled his effort.

After Flight 1549 hit the news, the San Francisco Chronicle contacted Captain Ogg’s widow, Peggy, to ask her about the similarities between my landing in the Hudson and her husband’s 1956 ditching in the Pacific. She spoke of her husband’s sense of duty. He had told reporters at the time: “We had a certain job to do. We had to do it right or else.”

When Captain Ogg was on his deathbed in 1991, his wife was sitting with him and noticed a faraway look on his face. She asked him what he was thinking about. He told her: “I was thinking of those poor canaries that drowned in the hold when I had to ditch the plane.”

THE FIRST major airline accident I ever investigated personally was PSA Flight 1771, which crashed into hilly ranchland near Cayucos, California, on December 7, 1989. It was traveling from Los Angeles to San Francisco.

The specifics of the crash were haunting and disturbing. A former USAir ticket agent named David Burke, thirty-five years old, had been caught on a security videotape allegedly stealing sixty-nine dollars in in-flight cocktail receipts. He was fired, and tried unsuccessfully to get his job back. He then decided to buy a ticket on Flight 1771 because his supervisor was a passenger on it.

In that era before the September 11 attacks, those with airport IDs didn’t necessarily have to go through security. So Burke was able to board the plane carrying a .44 Magnum revolver. Sometime after boarding, he wrote a note on an airsickness bag to his supervisor: “Hi Ray: I think it’s sort of ironical that we ended up like this. I asked for some leniency for my family. Remember? Well, I got none and you’ll get none.”

The plane was at twenty-two thousand feet when the cockpit voice recorder picked up the sound of what appeared to be shots being fired in the cabin. Then a flight attendant was heard entering the cockpit. “We have a problem,” she said. The captain answered: “What kind of problem?” Burke was then heard saying: “I’m the problem!”

The sounds of a struggle and gunshots followed. Investigators believed Burke shot the captain and first officer, and then himself, after which the plane went into a nosedive, probably because a pilot’s body was slumped against the controls. The plane hit the ground at about seven hundred miles an hour and much of it disintegrated on impact. None of the forty-three people on board survived.

As an Air Line Pilots Association safety committee volunteer, I served as an investigator at the crash site as part of the “survival factors” working group, charged with trying to determine what the crew could have done to make that flight survivable. Of course, given the circumstances, there was almost nothing they could have done. The FBI quickly took over and turned the crash site into a crime scene. Over the days of searching, the handgun was recovered with six spent cartridges. So was the note on the airsickness bag, and Burke’s identification badge, which he had used to avoid going through security.

When I got there, the crash site looked like an outdoor rock concert where everyone had left trash all over a hillside. There were hardly any big pieces of the plane besides landing gear forgings and engine cores. It was a very disturbing feeling being at the scene of a mass murder, knowing what had happened in the sky above us. The smell in the air was a mixture of jet fuel and death.

I had known one of the flight attendants on the plane, and it was horrifying to imagine what the crew and passengers went through. Working on this sort of investigation focuses your attention on how to prevent similar tragedies in the future. It renews your dedication to never let it happen