Highest Duty_ My Search for What Really Matters - Chesley B. Sullenberger [79]
On Flight 1549, Jeff and I were doing all of these things almost simultaneously. We had no choice. That also meant we had to make sure that higher-priority tasks weren’t suffering as we worked to accomplish the lower-priority tasks.
The first thing I did was lower the plane’s nose to achieve the best glide speed. For all of us on board to survive, the plane had to become an efficient glider.
In the days that followed the Hudson landing, there was speculation in the media that all of my training as a glider pilot thirty-five years earlier had helped me on Flight 1549. I have to dispel that notion. The flight characteristics and speed and weight of an Airbus are completely different from the characteristics of the gliders I flew. It’s a night-and-day difference. So my glider training was of little help. Instead, I think what helped me was that I had spent years flying jet airplanes and had paid close attention to energy management. On thousands of flights, I had tried to fly the optimum flight path. I think that helped me more than anything else on Flight 1549. I was going to try to use the energy of the Airbus, without either engine, to get us safely to the ground…or somewhere.
On Flight 1549, as we descended and I watched the earth came toward us faster than usual, the passengers did not immediately know how dire this was. They weren’t flying the airplane, and they didn’t have the training. Most probably, they couldn’t put all these disparate cues into a worldview that would tell them the magnitude of our problem. The nature of the emergency and the extreme time compression forced Jeff and me to focus our attention on the highest-priority tasks, so there was no time to make any verbal contact with those in the cabin, even the flight attendants.
In the cockpit, Jeff and I never made eye contact, but from the few words he spoke and his overall demeanor and body language, I had the clear sense that he was not panicked. He was not distracted. He was working quickly and efficiently.
Sullenberger (3:27:28): “Get the QRH…Loss of thrust on both engines.”
Jeff grabbed the Quick Reference Handbook to find the most appropriate procedure for our emergency. The QRH book is more than an inch thick, and in previous editions, it had helpful numbered tabs sticking out of the edge of it. That made it easier for us to find the exact page we needed. You could hold it in your left hand and use it like an address book, grazing over the numbered tabs with your right hand before turning to the tab for, say, Procedure number 27.
In recent years, however, in a cost-cutting move, US Airways had begun printing these booklets without the numbered tabs on the edge of the pages. Instead, the number of each procedure was printed on the page itself, requiring pilots to open the pages and thumb through them to get to the right page.
On Flight 1549, as Jeff turned quickly through the pages of his QRH without tabs, it likely took him a few extra seconds to find the page he needed with the proper procedure. I told this to the National Transportation Safety Board in my testimony given in the days after the accident.
We were over the Bronx at that point and I could see northern Manhattan out the window. The highest we ever got was just over three thousand feet, and now, still heading northwest, we were descending at a rate of over one thousand feet per minute. That would be equivalent to an elevator descending two stories per second.
Twenty-one and a half seconds had passed since the bird strike. I needed to tell the controller about our situation. I needed to find a place to put the plane down quickly, whether back at LaGuardia or somewhere else. I began a left turn, looking for such a place.
“MAYDAY! MAYDAY! Mayday!…”
That was my message—the emergency distress signal—to Patrick Harten, the controller, just after 3:27:32.9.