Highest Duty_ My Search for What Really Matters - Chesley B. Sullenberger [85]
Patrick continued to talk to me, but I was too busy to answer. I knew that he had offered me all the assistance that he could, but at that point, I had to focus on the task at hand. I wouldn’t be answering him.
As we descended toward the Hudson, falling below the tops of New York’s skyscrapers, we dropped off his radar. The skyline was now blocking transmissions.
Patrick tried desperately to find a solution that would keep us out of the water. At 3:29:51: “Cactus, uh, Cactus fifteen forty-nine, radar contact is lost. You also got Newark airport off your two o’clock in about seven miles.”
At 3:30:14: “Cactus fifteen twenty-nine, uh, you still on?”
He feared we had already crashed, but then we flickered back onto his radar scope. We were at a very low altitude, but because we had returned to radar coverage, he hoped against hope that maybe we had regained use of one of our engines.
At 3:30:22 he said: “Cactus fifteen twenty-nine, if you can, uh, you got, uh, runway two nine available at Newark. It’ll be two o’clock and seven miles.”
There was no way to answer him. By then, we were just 21.7 seconds from landing in the river.
HAD WE lost one engine instead of two, Jeff and I would have had more time to analyze things and to communicate with the crew and passengers. We could have had the flight attendants prepare the cabin. We could have asked air traffic control to help us determine the best plan for our return. But on Flight 1549, there was much we couldn’t do because everything was so terribly time-compressed.
Many of the passengers had felt the bird strike. They heard the sound of the birds thumping against the plane, and the disturbing bangs that preceded the failing of the engines. They saw some smoke in the cabin, and like me, they could smell the incinerated birds. Actually, more accurately, the birds were liquefied into what is referred to as “bird slurry.”
I have heard the stories of what the passengers were going through while I was so occupied in the cockpit. Many would later write notes to me, sharing their personal recollections. Others gave media interviews that I found moving and haunting.
There was former U.S. Army Captain Andrew Gray, who had completed two tours of duty in Afghanistan, and was traveling on Flight 1549 with his fiancée, Stephanie King. As the plane descended, Andrew and Stephanie kissed and told each other “I love you.” As they described it, they “accepted death together.”
John Howell, a management consultant from Charlotte, thought about how he was his mother’s only surviving son. His brother, a firefighter, died at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. John later told reporters that as Flight 1549 descended, “The only thing I was thinking was, ‘If I go down, my mother’s not going to survive this.’”
In 12F, a window seat just behind the wing emergency exit, forty-five-year-old Eric Stevenson was experiencing an awful feeling of déjà vu. On June 30, 1987, he had been on Delta Air Lines Flight 810, a Boeing 767, traveling from Los Angeles to Cincinnati. Shortly after takeoff, as the plane was climbing over the Pacific before turning east, one of the pilots had mistakenly shut down both engines. He had done this inadvertently because of the way the engine control panel was designed and the proximity of similar engine control switches. The plane began descending from 1,700 feet, while passengers quickly donned life jackets and expected the worst. Hearing some passengers crying around him, Eric decided to take out one of his business cards and write the words “I love you” to his parents and sister. He shoved it in his pocket, figuring he was likely to die and the note might be found on his body. Then just 500 feet