Highest Duty_ My Search for What Really Matters - Chesley B. Sullenberger [75]
In the winter, of course, there are often weather conditions to be concerned about. And you have to be ready for flight delays as you wait your turn to get your plane deiced.
Still, despite all this, I enjoy flying out of LaGuardia. I like the challenge of it, and especially the view from the air—Central Park, the Empire State Building, the gorgeous homes and boats out on Long Island. I kind of enjoy the passengers out of LaGuardia, too. They often have a seasoned manner about them, and they’re not always as tough as they seem.
It’s true that a lot of passengers who board in New York can be very direct. They’ll push the limits. But veteran flight attendants know that the way to deal with them is to be self-assured and push back a little. If passengers are firmly told the boundaries, they’re generally OK with them.
When a passenger asks for two drinks at once, a flight attendant might smile and say, “Just a minute. I’ll get to you. It’s not all about you, you know! Didn’t your mother teach you that?” If the flight attendant has the right, humorous delivery, a lot of passengers smile back and accept it. Flight attendants have told me: “When you want someone to turn off his computer for landing, you can ask him nicely, or you can say, ‘OK now, that’s enough of you and that laptop!’”
On midweek US Airways flights from “LGA,” there are a lot of business travelers, and they can be savvy fliers. I often fly from LaGuardia to Charlotte, which has become a major banking center. So I might have a dozen or more bankers on each of those flights. There are always rows and rows of other frequent fliers, too, people who fly so often that they have a pretty good knowledge of the airline industry, the responsibilities of the crew, and the role passengers might have to play in an emergency.
In the case of Flight 1549, a Thursday-afternoon trip down to Charlotte, that would turn out to be fortuitous.
ON JANUARY 15, 2009, the day of Flight 1549, the snow around LaGuardia had stopped earlier in the morning. It was cold and clear, with scattered clouds. Winds were out of the north, so we prepared to take off toward the north.
We were flying an Airbus A320–214, built in France by Airbus Industrie. The particular plane assigned to us, delivered to US Airways in 1999, had logged 16,298 flights before our takeoff. It had been airborne for 25,241 hours. The left engine had seen 19,182 hours of service, and the right engine had served for 26,466 hours. The most recent maintenance “A check” (which is done every 550 flight hours) had been forty days earlier. The plane had its annual C check (a comprehensive inspection) nine months earlier. These are common statistics for planes flown by commercial airlines in the United States.
With First Officer Jeff Skiles at the controls, we lifted off on the northeast runway, runway 4, about four seconds before 3:26 P.M. Along with the two of us in the cockpit, there were 150 passengers and our three flight attendants—Donna Dent, Doreen Welsh, and Sheila Dail.
As soon as we passed the end of the runway, the local controller at LaGuardia passed us off to the departure controller, Patrick Harten, who works at New York Terminal Radar Approach Control (TRACON) in Westbury, Long Island. Fourteen minutes earlier, he had been assigned to the LaGuardia departure radar position, which handles all departures from LaGuardia.
I radioed Patrick: “Cactus fifteen forty-nine, seven hundred, climbing five thousand.” That meant we were passing through seven hundred feet, on the way to five thousand feet. Complying with our departure instructions, we had turned left to a heading of 360 degrees. On the magnetic compass that’s due north.
Patrick responded: “Cactus