• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

We both knew that our predicament left us few choices. We were at a low altitude, traveling at a low speed, in a 150,000-pound aircraft with no engines. Put simply: We were too low, too slow, too far away, and pointed in the wrong direction, away from the nearby airports.

If there had been a major interstate highway without overpasses, road signs, or heavy traffic, I could have considered landing on it. But there are very few stretches of interstate in America without those barriers these days, and certainly none of them are in New York, the nation’s largest metropolis. And, of course, I didn’t have the option of finding a farmer’s field that might be long enough and level enough. Not in the Bronx. Not in Queens. Not in Manhattan.

But was I really ready to completely rule out LaGuardia?

Looking out the window, I saw how rapidly we were descending. My decision would need to come in an instant: Did we have enough altitude and speed to make the turn back toward the airport and then reach it before hitting the ground? There wasn’t time to do the math, so it’s not as if I was making altitude-descent calculations in my head. But I was judging what I saw out the window and creating, very quickly, a three-dimensional mental model of where we were. It was a conceptual and visual process, and I was doing this while I was flying the airplane as well as responding to Jeff and Patrick.

I also thought quickly about the obstacles between us and LaGuardia—the buildings, the neighborhoods, the hundreds of thousands of people below us. I can’t say I thought about all of this in any detail. I was quickly running through a host of facts and observations that I had filed away over the years, giving me a broad sense of how to make this decision, the most important one of my life.

I knew that if I chose to turn back across this densely populated area, I had to be certain we could make it. Once I turned toward LaGuardia, it would be an irrevocable choice. It would rule out every other option. And attempting to reach a runway that was unreachable could have had catastrophic consequences for everyone on the airplane and who knows how many people on the ground. Even if we made it to LaGuardia and missed the runway by a few feet, the result would be disastrous. The plane would likely tear open and be engulfed in flames.

I also considered the fact that, no matter what, we’d likely need a serious rescue effort. I knew that the water rescue resources at LaGuardia were a tiny fraction of those available on the Hudson between Manhattan and New Jersey. It would take much longer for rescue workers at LaGuardia to reach us and then help us if we tried for the runway and missed it.

And even if we could remain airborne until we were over a runway, there were potential hazards. Jeff would have had to stop trying to restart the engines, and instead turn his attention to preparing for a landing on a runway. I’d have to be able to appropriately manage our speed and altitude to try to touch down safely.

We had hydraulic power to move the flight control surfaces, but we didn’t know if we’d be able to lower the landing gear and lock it into position. We might have had to use an alternate method—one in which gravity lowers the landing gear—and that would require another checklist for Jeff to attend to.

We would have had to be able to align the aircraft’s flight path exactly with a relatively short runway, touch down at an acceptable sink rate, and maintain directional control throughout the landing to make sure we didn’t run off the runway. Then we’d have to make sure the brakes would work, stopping before the end of the runway. Even then, would the airplane remain intact? There could be fire, smoke inhalation, and trauma injuries.

I also knew that if we turned toward LaGuardia and were unable to reach the airport, there would be no open stretch of water below us until Flushing Bay. And even if we were forced to ditch in that bay, near LaGuardia,