Highest Duty_ My Search for What Really Matters - Chesley B. Sullenberger [67]
The river analogy works in our marriage and it helps us cope with matters such as our financial difficulties. “As long as we can keep our heads above the water,” Lorrie says, “we can make it.” It’s a beautiful way of looking at life.
Lorrie and I don’t always succeed in staying optimistic, but we have tried our best to live our lives in the middle of the river. Or else we’re on our favorite hilltop, looking at the world below, reminding ourselves that anything is possible.
11
MANAGING THE SITUATION
AL HAYNES.
Pilots mention his name with reverence.
On July 19, 1989, he was the captain of United Airlines Flight 232, a DC-10 traveling from Denver to Chicago. There were 296 passengers and crew on board.
When I was a facilitator of the crew resource management course (CRM), the story of that flight served as one of our most useful teaching tools. And personally, Flight 232 has taught me a great deal about flying—and about life.
After taking off from Denver, Flight 232 flew uneventfully for about eighty-five minutes. Then, soon after crossing into the airspace above Iowa, with the plane at thirty-seven thousand feet and the first officer, William Records, at the controls, an explosion was heard coming from the rear of the plane. The cause was soon apparent: The center engine had failed. Captain Haynes, who was approaching thirty thousand hours of flying experience, asked Dudley Dvorak, the second officer (flight engineer), to go through the engine failure checklist. As this was under way, the cockpit crew realized that all three hydraulic systems were losing pressure. Hydraulics are necessary to control this type of airplane. The first officer was having trouble controlling the aircraft.
Captain Haynes took the controls and saw he could turn the plane to the right but not the left. After the flight engineer announced to the passengers that an engine had failed, an off-duty United check pilot named Dennis Fitch, seated in the main cabin, came up front and offered to help. Captain Haynes welcomed him into the cockpit.
This type of emergency was so rare that there was no training for it, no checklist. It would later be determined that the odds of a simultaneous failure of three hydraulic systems approached a billion to one. But Captain Haynes played the hand he was dealt, and relied on his decades of experience to improvise and to lead. He and the others realized that the only way to control the airplane was to manipulate the throttles. The four men in the cockpit flew like that for more than forty minutes, trying to brainstorm ways they might get the damaged airplane to the ground in one piece. In essence, they had forty minutes to learn a new way of flying an airplane.
Traditionally in the airline industry, there had been a steep hierarchy in cockpits, and first and second officers had been reluctant to offer many suggestions to a captain. The fact that Captain Haynes solicited and welcomed input that day helped the crew find ways to solve this unanticipated problem, and have a better chance of making it to a runway.
At first, air traffic controllers were going to send the crippled aircraft to Des Moines International Airport. But the plane was turning on its own, to the west, and so a decision was made to send it to Sioux City Gateway Airport. “I’m not going to kid you,” Captain Haynes told the passengers. “It’s going to be a very hard landing.”
The cockpit voice recorder captured both the collaborative professionalism and the poignant camaraderie that eased their tension.
At one point, Dennis Fitch said, “I’ll tell you what, we’ll have a beer when this is all done.”
Captain Haynes replied: “Well, I don’t drink, but I’ll sure as hell have one.”
They approached the airport at a speed of 215 knots, descending at 1,600 feet per minute, as they tried to slow down by raising the nose. The pilots did a remarkable job of touching down near the beginning of the runway. It looked like they might make it.