Highest Duty_ My Search for What Really Matters - Chesley B. Sullenberger [84]
In emergencies, controllers are supposed to ask pilots basic questions: “How much fuel do you have remaining?” “What is the number of ‘souls on board’?” That would be a count of passengers and crew so rescue workers could know how many people to account for.
“I didn’t want to pester you,” Patrick later told me. “I didn’t want to keep asking, ‘What’s going on?’ I knew I had to let you fly the plane.”
Also, in order to save seconds and not have to repeat himself, he left the phone lines open when he called the controllers at other airports, so they could hear what he was saying to me and what I was saying to him. That way he wouldn’t have to repeat himself. The improvising he did was ingenious.
Patrick’s conscious effort not to disturb me allowed me to remain on task. He saw how quickly we were descending. He knew I didn’t have time to get him passenger information or to answer any questions that weren’t absolutely crucial.
The transcripts of our conversation also show how Patrick’s choice of phrasing was helpful to me. Rather than telling me what airport I had to aim for, he asked me what airport I wanted. His words let me know that he understood that these hard choices were mine to make, and it wasn’t going to help if he tried to dictate a plan to me.
THROUGH ALL my years as a commercial pilot, I had never forgotten the aircrew ejection study I had learned about in my military days. Why did pilots wait too long before ejecting from planes that were about to crash? Why did they spend extra seconds trying to fix the unfixable? The answer is that many doomed pilots feared retribution if they lost multimillion-dollar jets. And so they remained determined to try to save the airplane, often with disastrous results.
I had never shaken my memories of fellow Air Force pilots who didn’t survive such attempts. And having the details of that knowledge in the recesses of my brain was helpful in making those quick decisions on Flight 1549. As soon as the birds struck, I could have attempted a return to LaGuardia so as not to ruin a US Airways aircraft by attempting a landing elsewhere. I could have worried that my decision to ditch the plane would be questioned by superiors or investigators. But I chose not to.
I was able to make a mental shift in priorities. I had read enough about safety and cognitive theory. I knew about the concept of “goal sacrificing.” When it’s no longer possible to complete all of your goals, you sacrifice lower-priority goals. You do this in order to perform and fulfill higher goals. In this case, by attempting a water landing, I would sacrifice the “airplane goal” (trying not to destroy an aircraft valued at $60 million) for the goal of saving lives.
I knew instinctively and intuitively that goal sacrificing was paramount if we were to preserve life on Flight 1549.
It took twenty-two seconds from the time I considered and suggested Teterboro to the time I rejected the airport as unreachable. I could see the area around Teterboro moving up in the windscreen, a sure sign that our flight path would not extend that far.
“Cactus fifteen twenty-nine, turn right two eight zero,” Patrick told me at 3:29 and twenty-one seconds. “You can land runway one at Teterboro.”
“We can’t do it,” I answered.
“OK, which runway would you like at Teterboro?” he asked.
“We’re gonna be in the Hudson,” I said.
Patrick had heard me just fine. But he asked me to repeat myself.
“I’m sorry, say again, Cactus,” he said.
“I simply could not wrap my mind around those words,” Patrick would later explain in testimony before Congress. “People don’t survive landings on the Hudson River. I thought it was his own death sentence. I believed at that moment I was going to be the last person to talk to anyone on that plane.”
As he spoke to me, Patrick couldn’t help but think about Ethiopian Airlines Flight 961, hijacked in 1996. A Boeing 767260ER, it ran out of fuel and attempted to land in the