Highest Duty_ My Search for What Really Matters - Chesley B. Sullenberger [92]
Jason’s Cradles, hammocklike maritime rescue devices with cloth webbing and similar to ladders with rungs, were lowered from the boats to us in the rafts, and passengers started climbing up. At one point, there were fears that the stern of a ferry might puncture a raft, so it had to move away and reposition itself. One elderly female passenger did not have the strength to climb onto the deck of the boat. The hammocklike part of the Jason’s Cradle had to be used with pulleys to get her on board.
When it came time for the Athena, a Block Island ferry used by NY Waterway and captained by Carlisle Lucas, to rescue those in our raft, I shouted, “Injured and women and children first!” Others on our raft passed the message up to the deckhands. It seemed like we were all on the same page.
I wasn’t just being chivalrous. Because women and especially children weigh less than men, they would be more susceptible to hypothermia. They would also lose physical strength more quickly. So it made the most sense to get them onto the boats sooner.
As things turned out, though, it wasn’t logistically easy to help the women and children first. Because the raft was so full and movement within it so difficult, those closest to the end of the raft, nearest the ferry, were taken off first.
In the stress of the moment, there was an efficient kind of order that I found absolutely impressive. I also saw examples of humanity and goodwill everywhere I looked. I was so moved when deckhands on ferries took off the shirts, coats, and sweatshirts they were wearing to help warm the passengers.
As a boy, I had been upset by the story of New Yorker Kitty Genovese and the bystanders who had ignored her. Now, as a man, I was seeing dozens of bystanders acting with great compassion and bravery—and a sense of duty. It felt like all of New York and New Jersey was reaching out to warm us.
WHILE WE were on the river, Patrick, the controller who had overseen our flight from his post on Long Island, was relieved of his position and invited to go to the union office in the building. He knew, as did his superiors, that he shouldn’t finish his shift, guiding airplanes still in the sky. Controllers are always asked to step away from their duties after major incidents.
Patrick was understandably distraught. He assumed we had crashed and that everyone on the plane had perished. “It was the lowest low I had ever felt,” he later told me. “I was asking myself: What else could I have done? Was there something different I could have said to you?”
He wanted to talk to his wife but feared he would fall apart if he did. So he sent her a text: “Had a crash. Not OK. Can’t talk now.” She thought he’d been in a car accident. “Actually, I felt like I’d been hit by a bus,” he said. “I had this feeling of shock and disbelief.”
Patrick was secluded in that office with a union rep who kept him company and talked him through it. There was no TV, so he couldn’t see coverage of the rescue. In case we had a bad outcome, his union rep didn’t think Patrick needed to see it in those early moments.
Over and over again, Patrick played in his mind his final exchanges with me, assuming they were my final words. He had heard the distress in pilots’ voices during lesser emergencies he’d dealt with in the past. As he would describe it, their voices became “almost like a quiver.” He thought about my voice, and how it seemed “strangely calm.”
At that point, he didn’t know what I looked like and didn’t know anything about me. He just knew we had spent a few riveting minutes connected to each other, and now he assumed I was gone.
He was told he couldn’t leave the facility until the drug testers came to take a urine sample and do a Breathalyzer test. This is standard procedure for controllers—and pilots, too—involved in an accident. It’s part