Insider’s View of the Miracle on the Hudson with Capt Sullenberger

This has been meandering around the pilot message boards and email lists. It purports to be anonymous, and seems to be written by a sim instructor in the former America West (now US Airways) training center.

A pilot’s thoughts on the Hudson River Landing

Ever since that Thursday when USAirways 1549 went into the Hudson River I’ve had in the back of my mind that I’d need to share some thoughts with some of my friends and family.

Note: This is written for a bunch of people (who ended up on the line in no order whatever) of varying backgrounds from my peers and even superiors in this field to some completely unaffiliated with air transport. For those at each end of the spectrum please bear with, I wrote to the middle. You may judge how well.

I was working in Phoenix that day. I’d just come downstairs to my office and our “senior” instructor called us over to his cubicle where he had CNN on his computer. We watched for a few minutes, three or four of us Airbus instructors, then someone over on the Chief Pilot’s side of the office reported that their video feed was streaming better and we migrated over there.

Eventually we went back upstairs, got CNN on a classroom computer and used the “blue-eye” projector to put it all up on screen for ourselves and the students who could no longer keep their nose in the computer-based training programs.

The time began with the usual post-crash “not again” feeling of general dread I’ve experienced so many times in this industry. Within minutes it had become apparent that this time something was very different.

First order of business was determining the type of airplane. There is a superficial resemblance between our Embraer 190 aircraft and the A-320 series Airbus, that is, a resemblance on jerky, pixilated live streaming video feeds from huge telephoto shots from vibrating helicopters. The first good look at the tip of the left wing settled it; the E-190 has an upturned, swept conventional winglet, the Airbus has an upper and lower “sail” winglet. It was an Airbus and since the overwing exits had already been thrown overboard and there were two on each side we could tell it was a 320. (the 319 has 1 per side and the 321 has four floor-level exits per side and no overwings)

The next thing we noticed was that all the exits were open except the two rear galley service doors which were almost completely under water. This, and the apparent lack of frantic rescue efforts going on seemed to indicate an orderly evacuation and relative lack of injuries. The scene seemed supernaturally calm, as plane crashes go. We all became very hopeful. As word came that “all aboard have been evacuated” and still no mention of serious injuries our mood became hopeful and much lighter. Amazement set in.

Nothing I have seen or heard since, official or hearsay has done anything but increase my amazement over this series of events.

First, when I came home that weekend I checked my logbooks to see if I’d flown aircraft 106 or N106US. Yes I had. Three occasions. It was one of the 124 different tail number Airbii (plural for Airbus) that I had flown, which was not even our full fleet pre-HP merger. On those three scattered days I flew that plane Philly-Windsor Locks-Philly, then Philly-Barbados for a great layover, and finally Charlotte-Cancun-Philly. When we were finally given the crew names I recognized Sully immediately. I remember him very well from my days with PSA in San Francisco .

Any pilot seniority list is like any other population segment. Within the group you will have ranges of intellect, ranges of abilities and so on. Some will never fail to disappoint you, some can make you feel inadequate. I remember Sully as being, as we used to say “golden” He was a man of good education, with above average flying skills and many other attributes.

Lots of us were “good pilots” and may have been, from that standpoint alone, his equal or even superior, but the whole package Sully brought was exemplary. If you had to have a really dire emergency, Sully would have been on just about anybody’s short list to be in the other seat. Oddly, I cannot remember for sure if I ever actually flew with him, though I’ve had three opportunities to do so: SFO in the BAe-146, SFO in the B-737 or PHL in the Airbus. I never logged who I flew with so..

I don’t know the rest of the crew but their overall experience level is pretty impressive. Of course as of the day I retired (October 2004) the JUNIOR pilot on the property had a hire date of 18 July 1988. Think of it; guys hired sixteen years earlier were so junior they were furloughed. In a healthy airline they’d have been senior captains!

As to the events themselves, recall that I was watching the TV coverage develop in a room full of USAirways Airbus pilots, instructors and other subject-matter experts. One thing we agreed on was that we knew LESS THAN the average viewer because we knew for a fact that much of what we were hearing was utter fantasy, rank, unqualified speculation and unfiltered musings of persons so irresponsible that they would stoop to calling themselves “experts” a title I would not assume for myself after 44 years in flying, 42 years instructing, 22 years with this airline and five years professional association with this airplane. We, among ourselves, had the same lists of questions. Some of these questions have been asked, but not necessarily answered in public forums.

I will offer some of my thoughts but I must ask you, my friends, my family, to use utmost discretion if you choose to pass my thoughts along to ANYONE. I am not speaking for the airline, the pilot group, the manufacturer or any other party. This is just some of my thinking but I am bound to the company as if by great cables if I speak out on this topic. If you wish to excerpt any part of this to use in any dialogue you might be having with any other person I would ask that you de-identify the source; even any mention of my background as authority to hold these opinions. I’d much rather you offer any such opinion as your own. Wow, sounds like I’m going to spill some secrets or offer something really controversial. I’m not. My opinions are probably just about like yours. So, in no particular order:

The “DITCHING” switch:

A lot of talk about this, I suppose partly because so few people have ever heard of this feature before and partly because an actual ditching of a jet airliner is such an unexpected event. I’d just like to observe that the ditching pushbutton is, or should be, irrelevant to further discussion of US 1549 for two reasons.

1. They did not get to it on the checklist. It was never pushed.

2. Nothing that button does will survive first contact with the water.

I sat, watching the many views of the pristine upper parts of this airplane and, like everyone else, marveled at the relative lack of visible damage. Did you notice that the ditching didn’t even break the radome? It took a tugboat to break that and the captain’s no.3 window. What I wanted to see was the underside. Later, with one of the company’s go-team I did get to see more than a hundred pictures of the recovery from the river and close-ups of the airplane on the barge. Let me tell you, the pristine top floating serenely in the Hudson River bears no resemblance to the shredded underside of that airplane. The leaks in the pressure vessel which compromise buoyancy are measured in square feet. They calculated that the plane, full of water, weighed in excess of a million pounds. Yet as it was lifted, water ran out so fast through the mangled metal that the crane crew did not even have to pause while lifting it clear of the water. In short, it was as a bucket with the bottom out.

The only remaining fear I have is that some fool at the FAA might seek to punish the crew for not pushing that placebo button. At least one management pilot would like to have it re-placarded as a “GROUND DE-ICE” pushbutton as its only meaningful function is to close those holes while the plane is being squirted with hot water-glycol mix. All crashes have ripple effects in future training and development of procedures. There is nothing bad about the button, it is okay to push it, but it will have no effect on the ditching unless you use a crane to gently set the airplane in a millpond. Good opportunity to consider making the item subject to captain’s discretion.

Going to Teterboro:

All-wise, all-knowing armchair pilots continue to opine that he should have flown it to Teterboro NJ . After all, distance from birdstrike to TEB is just about identical to distance to touchdown point on the river. This was one of the first things all of us pilots agreed on - his decision to turn left and land in the river was the ONLY decision he could have reached.

It is a bitter thing but some times a pilot (or a driver) has to make a decision in milliseconds to crash the thing and choose the least-bad way to do so. I’ve read two great magazine articles on this subject and wish to goodness I’d kept the magazines. One was how to crash a motorcycle and the other how to crash a helicopter.

Two different publications, two authors who probably did not know each other, and similar conclusions; that you are probably going to do more damage and suffer worse injury seeking to avoid the unavoidable crash. Better to accept it sooner and make everything else go as right as is possible.

I commend Captain Sullenberger and First Officer Skiles for doing that, and doing it without hesitation. It could not have been a feel-good experience at the time. Teterboro, in plain sight, straight ahead might as well have been on the Moon because the penalty for being even twenty vertical feet short of the required glidepath was the death of people onboard and probably people on the ground.

“The Miracle on the Hudson ”

As Wendell Willkie once said; “One good catchphrase can obscure fifty years of analysis.” (Thank you William for the refrigerator quote) I bristle at this phrase and I fancy that the crew might also. And yet there were developments, conditions, happenings that are nothing short of miraculous. Okay, the prose is cheesy but accurate.

If you have had the bad luck to have one bird ingestion (I’ve had at least three birdstrikes on the nose of the airplane but never, to my knowledge had one go into an engine - that is a different thing) then that is just the breaks, but if you have both engines ingest large birds you are just having a very bad day.

If it had happened sooner he’d likely have gone straight ahead or slight right turn into Flushing Bay . There may even have been a short part of his early flight path where losing both engines would have resulted in a water landing (like just past Hunt’s Point - up the little bay at the mouth of the Bronx River) that might have put him hard ashore before he stopped - no time to turn away. A little farther along and his only option might have been the East River with all the bridges, trams, and powerlines. But no, they didn’t meet the birds until past these points. From the time of bird impact he was just on left base to the Hudson River at a place where it was at least three thousand feet wide and straight as any runway on earth for more than eight miles. An easy target.

The Hudson River at this point may be the best place in the world to have a big maritime emergency. The river was almost completely clear of both water traffic and air traffic. There was one close encounter with a helicopter, which turned away. There was not, as far as I know, any problem with surface traffic. On the other hand boats big enough to receive significant numbers of survivors were there within ONE MINUTE, skippered by people bold enough to run right up on top the plane and get the people off it. Try that mid-Atlantic, or even bodies of water nearer shore, nearer civilization. Not likely up the Skagerrak or down the Kattegat . Probably not even in Lake Michigan at Chicago or Puget Sound at Seattle or San Francisco bay at, well you know, would you likely get a reception like they got. It was simply, well, miraculous.

One related note, a sincere thank you to whoever had the presence of mind to push it ashore, sticking the right wing into the mud at Battery Park. Had it not been so secured it would have floated out through Verrazano Narrows and sank in deep water, hampering the investigation.

What “Law” was the airplane in?

Many people now know that Airbus fly-by-wire system and its computers have levels of flight envelope protections called “laws” Loss of electrical power can have consequences by disabling some or even all of these FBW computers reducing us from “normal law” to “alternate law” or even to “direct law” and we SMEs have debated what law they were in and concluded that they were in the most basic law - “gravity” (Gravity, it’s not just a good idea, it’s the law!)

What did happen?

That will remain in the folder marked “what we don’t know” for as much as another year while the people who know how gather millions of data points from hundreds of sources including hands-on examination of the wreckage. They will collect their samples, conduct their interviews, take their measurements and so on. They have more tools in this investigation than for just about any I can think of in the whole long history of crash investigation, beginning with the death of Lieutenant Thomas O. Selfridge in a Wright Flyer. (The wooden propeller split along the grain, came apart and severed wires bracing the tail)

Public utterances can be found regarding compressor stalls on this very airplane, just a week earlier. Worth looking into but, apparently not remotely a factor. Corrective action was taken and apparently to good effect. The pilot’s initial report of a birdstrike should be verified by the presence of “protein matter” deep in the compressor section of the engine that should be DNA linked to some avian species and that shall be that.

I don’t know yet whether the engines went out completely or not. They may have, suffered damage and just shut down. In that case the generators and hydraulic pumps they each power would have been lost. On the other hand I’ve seen damaged turbine engines get into a high-EGT idle, or sub-idle condition and keep running. In a case like that they would not be producing any measurable thrust and might even have been producing more drag than if they simply windmilled or stopped rotating.

This possibility is a major factor in a theoretical decision to go to Teterboro. I’ve had a jet engine in a high-EGT sub-idle and it is pretty much useless. If you try to accelerate it to a more useful RPM it will begin to “compressor stall” which would produce a loud boom as ingested air was ignited by compression and forced FORWARD out the intake. The passengers would see a ball of fire shoot out the front of the engine.

The improper ignition of the fuel which keeps going to the “hot section” might produce similar fireballs and chugging at the exhaust end of the engine. As one who has great affection for airplane engines it is a sad sight to see because it cannot be good for them.

The point is, though, in this condition one might still have kept the generators on line. The hydraulic pumps might also be producing the full rated 3000PSI but that is not all good. The actual mass flow would be abnormally low, so you could not actually get the work out of the hydraulics. In short, you might have normal pressure until you attempt to do something like raise or lower gear or flaps, whereupon the pressure would fall off.

Regulations (US FAR Part 25) require that transport category airplane such as this have a source of “standby” electrical power that (distilling it here) is operable without selection by the pilots, for at least thirty minutes and can provide (in actual practice) the captain’s flight instruments and lighting for same, one navigation radio and one communication radio and control of the ship’s mechanical systems such as the outflow valve to control pressurization. In practice some gauges have an internal battery that is kept in a charged state during normal operation but some of this power comes from ships batteries. In this case that means two 24volt (nominal) NiCd (nickel-cadmium) batteries. There is also a RAT, a ram-air turbine that will power a hydraulic pump on the “blue” system, the smallest of the three hydraulic systems on the Airbus. This device also has a small “standby” generator to augment the Part 25 standby power. It will not deploy automatically for hydraulic losses but should for loss of AC electric buses 1 and 2. The RAT has a fold-out two-bladed propeller that drives the hydraulic pump and it produces an unknown, but significant amount of drag; another wild card in the hypothetical glide to Teterboro.

This means if both engines dropped below the RPM where the integrated-drive generators could still produce 400 Hz in its 3-phase 115 VAC power those buses would be unpowered and the RAT would drop out from the left wing root and take over the task. If the APU the auxiliary power unit was running at the time of engine loss its electrical supply would prevent the RAT from deploying as it would not be needed.

I’m not sure what happened. I’ve watched the various security cam tapes of the ditching and my eye tells me the RAT was not extended. But then the image quality is just not very good, maybe it was. I talked to someone (John, you know who) who has been on the barge with the recovered airplane and he said “the RAT is extended” but it is not certain to me at this point whether it popped out when the engines unspooled or when it hit the water. Not real important either way, but for a tech junkie like me, an interesting question.

Speaking of hitting the water:

Did I mention that the underside was shredded? It appears that the force deformed the airframe enough that the R1 door (the galley service door directly across from the passenger boarding door) was forced open! I cannot imagine what sort of force that took. You couldn’t chop your way through that structure with an axe and a six-day week to do it. The APU, and its entire fire containment box was ripped loose from the mounts and was hanging underneath the airplane by a single cable. There is also a wrinkle, an airframe deformation across the top of the fuselage just a ways aft of the wings. That airplane might have looked intact but it is junk; it is beer cans.

Another head scratcher for me:

The trailing edge flaps were extended. I have a report that they had been retracted at the time of the bird strike. (By the way Eddie Izzard, funny as he is, got that wrong. This was a birdstrike, not a birdsuck. Birds only get sucked into the engines at low forward speeds. At the speed they were doing, both air and birds were being rammed into the engine, not sucked in.) My reading of the procedures tells me that with the loss of both engines only the leading edge slats would have extended and not the trailing edge flaps.

The damage pattern clearly indicates that both LE and TE devices were extended. A couple of the slat panels are rammed back hard against the leading edge of the wing. Others are ripped off and, presumably, lie at the bottom of the Hudson River . The trailing edge flaps show similar damage, some carried away, some wrapped around above the wing. So how did they get extended? One of the questions that keep me thinking about partial power loss as opposed to full shutdown. No thrust available but some of the engines mechanical services still usable - electric, hydraulic and pneumatic, which apparently smelled of bird, cooked in full feather.

The miracle on the Hudson - again:

So, reading the paragraph above you can surely picture what the upper surface of those wings are like. There is jagged metal sticking up at leading and trailing edge from root to winglet and 155 people got out there, women in heels or people barefoot and NOBODY stepped on any sharp metal, nobody fell on sharp metal, not one slide/raft rubbed up against shredded metal and disemboweled itself. Astonishing!

After the euphoria wears off:

What is next? Public forums have opined that USAirways would want to cooperate with some museum and put this plane on permanent display. I find that extremely unlikely. After we all stop grinning, after the elation of not killing anybody wears off this will be just another unwanted reminder that airplanes do crash in dramatic fashion and it NEVER turns out this well. There is recycling in the future for #106.

Heroes:

I tell ya true, I don’t know what to think of this one. John, you might remember Freddy Ferguson from preflight at Fort Wolters . While you and I were ‘researching radio’ he took a Huey in to evacuate the Citadel in Hue during Tet ‘68 and got the Medal of Honor. I guess he is a hero because the criteria for the MOH is that the omission of the act would not reflect unfavorably on you. Trouble is, it does. I think we expect a man to step up and do what the moment requires. But there are helicopter pilots who were out on that night in Hue and did not go in there.

These are guys who maybe earned silver stars or DFCs and very likely, purple hearts that night and I’d call them heroes but they will always remember that he went in more than once and they did not. So someone who pulls you out of a fire - are they not a hero if that is their job? Or are they more of a hero for volunteering for a job like that in the first place. And if someone declines to pull you out of a fire is a dog, is a fireman who so declines a double dog? A lot of people did what the most demanding of us would ask, and more.

Sully is not a “hero” for managing to find the Hudson River . It was just there, to his left front. He did his job. Most of us got through our whole careers without ever having to “do our job” to quite that degree. He took over flying probably because the first officer lost his flight instruments. It may also be so worded in the Ops Manual, but in any case, the first officer’s performance of his duties was exemplary as well. He seems to have gotten very far along a long checklist and procedure under circumstances where a lot of people might have had some problem with concentration.

The flight attendants had to do it the hard way; no warning. Boom! Silence! Descending! Apparently the first word they heard was “brace” and yet 155 people got out six exits in around a minute. My hat is off.

So I guess they can be heroes. From the moment the plane flew into the flock of birds ’til the last person was off the sinking plane and under the control of public safety personnel the five crewmembers were just “doing their jobs” and nothing less should be expected of them. I, on the other hand must commend them for performing these jobs for an average of over twenty years each with this sort of event being a real possibility each and every day they went to work. Lots of people put on those uniforms and go to a similar job each day and we assume that any one of them should perform this well when called. Reality is, some will disappoint you. Hats off to these for being the genuine article when it counted. I’d like to buy them a beer for just being who they are.

Other factors:

The weather was perfect.

There was not a lot of light plane or helicopter traffic.

There was no boat traffic at all to speak of.

The assigned departure put them in this position, other runways, other procedures would have put them over long Island, over Westchester County and so on.

No birds came through the windshield.

The radome was not hit and shattered by birds, which would have so disturbed the airflow that airspeed and angle-of-attack readings would have become useless.

The river wasn’t frozen over.

It didn’t come at the end of a long, exhausting day.

You can probably add to the list. I try never to count on good luck but I’ll tell you, I will accept the absence of further bad luck every time it comes my way, and I accept it with gratitude. A lot went right that day.

Sully’s picture:

Cracks me up! Newspapers and tv have him off his own website, almost full-length. In-house that same picture is carefully cropped to hide the ALPA lapel pin he was wearing. For those of you who don’t know, the USAirways pilots voted narrowly last spring to drop their ALPA representation and go with an in-house union, USAPA which caused such a division in the pilot ranks that they still have no contract, not to mention out-of-seniority furloughs and some few lawsuits. It promises to be a bitter schism for years to come. The picture probably predates the infamous vote and I’ll bet it never occurred to him that there might be political consequences regardless of how he voted.

One last thought:

Maybe the whole “miracle” and “hero” thing started way back on 9/11. New York performed admirably on that terrible day too, but it was not a time or place for any celebration or self-congratulation. The time was just too grim for that. Google just the number 343 and see what I mean. But here they get a major disaster dropped in their laps and it is held down to a minor inconvenience and that is very much because of the outstanding performance of so many New Yorkers. Let them have their celebration. They’ve earned it more than once and I’d like to buy them a beer too.

I know I’m overdue to write to some of you and I just wanted to share some thoughts with you. Now back to work. Every accident changes the landscape in the training department. This will too, but this time it’s different. I’m looking forward to it. The photoshopped images of an Airbus on floats or geese in turbans that some of you have emailed to me have also been passed around inside the training department. I cannot tell you how sweet it is to feel free to do that so soon after a hull-loss accident.

Cheers

The more or less anonymous