Highest Duty_ My Search for What Really Matters - Chesley B. Sullenberger [81]
“OK, uh,” he radioed back to me. “You need to return to LaGuardia. Turn left heading of, uh, two two zero.”
“Two two zero,” I acknowledged, because I knew all my options lay to my left. In the left turn, I would have to choose one, and the option I chose would determine the ultimate heading I would fly.
From the cockpit voice recorder:
Skiles (3:27:50): “If fuel remaining, engine mode selector, ignition. Ignition.”
Sullenberger (3:27:54): “Ignition.”
Skiles (3:27:55): “Thrust levers, confirm idle.”
Sullenberger (3:27:58): “Idle.”
Skiles (3:28:02): “Airspeed optimum relight. Three hundred knots. We don’t have that.”
Flight warning computer (3:28:03): Sound of single chime.
Sullenberger (3:28:05): “We don’t…”
Patrick immediately contacted the tower at LaGuardia telling them to clear all runways. “Tower, stop your departures. We got an emergency returning.”
“Who is it?” the tower controller asked.
“It’s fifteen twenty-nine,” said Patrick, also getting the flight number wrong in the stress of the moment. “Bird strike. He lost all engines. He lost the thrust in the engines. He is returning immediately.”
Losing thrust in both engines is so rare that the LaGuardia controller didn’t fully recognize what Patrick had just told him. “Cactus fifteen twenty-nine. Which engine?” he asked.
Patrick replied: “He lost thrust in both engines, he said.”
“Got it,” said the LaGuardia controller.
You won’t hear it on the tape, because none of the controllers said it out loud, but in their minds they thought they were working a flight that would likely end very tragically.
Worldwide, airliners lose thrust in all engines so rarely that a decade can pass between occurrences. Usually, planes lose thrust in all engines only when they fly through a volcanic ash cloud or there is a fuel problem. And in the case of a volcanic ash encounter, the pilots have had enough time to get their engines to restart once clear of the ash cloud. Because they were at a high enough altitude—well above thirty thousand feet—there was time to go through their procedures and work on a solution, to get at least one engine going again.
In the case of Flight 1549, however, even if we were as high as the moon, we would never have gotten our engines restarted because they were irreparably damaged. Given the vibrations we felt coming from the engines, and the immediate loss of thrust, I was almost certain we’d never get the engines working again. And yet I knew we had to try.
So while Jeff worked diligently to restart at least one engine, I focused on finding a solution. I knew we had fewer than a handful of minutes before our flight path would intersect the surface of the earth.
I had a conceptual realization that unlike every other flight I’d piloted for forty-two years, this one probably wouldn’t end on a runway with the airplane undamaged.
14
GRAVITY
LESS THAN A minute had passed since the bird strikes ruined the engines on Flight 1549. At his radar position out on Long Island, Patrick, the controller, was still hoping he could get us to a runway at LaGuardia.
Controllers guide pilots to runways. That’s what they do. That’s what they know best. So he wasn’t going to abandon that effort until every option had been exhausted. He figured that even in this most dire of situations, most pilots would have tried to make it back to LaGuardia. He assumed that would be my decision, too.
Five seconds after 3:28 P.M., which was just 32 seconds after I first made Patrick aware of the emergency, he asked me: “Cactus fifteen twenty-nine, if we can get it to you, do you want to try to land runway one three?” Patrick was offering us the runway at LaGuardia that could be reached by the shortest path.
“We’re unable,” I responded. “We may end up in the Hudson.”
I knew intuitively and quickly that the Hudson River might be our only option, and so I articulated it. It felt almost unnatural to say those words, but I said them. In his seat to my right, Jeff heard me and didn’t comment. He was busy trying to restart the engines. But he later told me he silently