Highest Duty

15. ONE HUNDRED FIFTY-FIVE

THE WATER LANDING certainly wasn’t as bad as Jeff and I knew it could have been. We didn’t cartwheel when we touched down. The aircraft remained intact. The fuel didn’t ignite. Our recognition of all that went right was a slight release of tension. I guess it was an understated acknowledgment that we might yet succeed in keeping everyone on board alive.

Of course, there was no time or inclination to celebrate.

Yes, it was a relief that one of the biggest problems we faced that day had been solved: We had gotten the plane down and brought it to a stop in one piece. But we weren’t out of the woods yet. This was not yet a successful outcome.

I sensed that the plane was still intact, even though the moment of impact had been a hard jolt, especially in the back of the plane. I assumed that the passengers were probably OK. I’d later learn that some had their glasses knocked from their faces during the landing. Others hit their heads on the seat backs in front of them. But few passengers were seriously injured on impact. After the plane settled in the water, I heard no screaming or shouting from the cabin. Through the cockpit door, I heard just muffled conversation. I knew that the passengers were likely looking out their windows at the dark green water in the river, feeling stunned.

Seconds after the airplane stopped, Jeff turned to the evacuation checklist. The list is split between the captain and first officer, but the captain’s duties—including setting the parking brake—are only useful on land, or if we had working engines. I decided not to waste time on things that would have no benefit to our situation there on the river. Jeff’s checklist took him ten or fifteen seconds to complete. He checked that the aircraft was un-pressurized and that the engine and APU (auxiliary power unit) fire push buttons were pushed.

As he did that, I opened the cockpit door and stated one word, loudly: “Evacuate!”

In the front of the cabin, by the left and right doors, Donna and Sheila were ready for my order. I hadn’t had time to inform them during the descent that we were landing in water. But once they saw where we were, they immediately knew what to do. They changed their commands to “Don life vests; come this way!”

They knew to assess the exits carefully. They had to make sure the plane wasn’t on fire on the other side of the door and that there were no jagged metal pieces. They knew not to open a door if that portion of the plane was under water. The good news was that we could tell by the attitude of the plane that the forward doors were above the waterline. And so they opened them.

The slide rafts are supposed to inflate when the doors open. That happened correctly on the right side of the plane. On the left side, however, the raft didn’t automatically inflate and had to be deployed manually.

A far more dangerous issue: The back of the plane was quickly filling up with ice-cold river water. We later learned that the bottom of the aft end of the fuselage had been violently torn open by our contact with the water when we landed. A rear exit door had been partially opened, very briefly, and couldn’t be closed completely, which also brought water into the cabin. The plane was gradually taking on a more tail-low attitude.

Doreen, stationed in the rear of the aircraft, had a deep gash in her leg, the result of metal that had sliced through the floor from the cargo compartment when the plane hit the water. Though the water level rose quickly, she was able to make her way past floating garbage cans and coffeepots, urging passengers to move forward toward usable exits. After she got into the right-front slide raft—actually an inflatable slide that doubles as a raft—a doctor and a nurse who were passengers put a tourniquet around her leg.

Because the waterline was above the bottom of the aft doors, the emergency slide rafts at the aft doors were useless. That meant we needed to use the two overwing exits, which normally wouldn’t be opened when a plane is in water. One passenger struggled to push open an overwing window exit. Another knew the exit needed to be pulled into the cabin, and did so. This second passenger had been in the emergency row and, luckily, had the presence of mind to read the instructions after we hit the birds. He knew he might be called upon to act and he prepared himself.

As the evacuation began, passengers seemed understandably tense and serious—some were pretty agitated, hurriedly jumping over seats—but most were orderly. A few later called it “controlled panic.”

Since the rear exits were not usable, people were bunching up at the wing exits. There was still room in the rafts up front, so Donna, Sheila, and I kept calling for passengers to come forward. I didn’t observe people trying to get their luggage, but I later learned some of them did, against the advice of other passengers. One woman, who had collected her purse and suitcase, would later slip on the wing, which sent her suitcase into the river. Another man held his garment bag while standing on the wing, an unnecessary accessory at a time like that.

Jeff noticed that some people still on the plane were having trouble finding their life vests. The life vests are under the seats, and not easy to spot. Jeff told people where the vests were. Some passengers went out on the wings carrying their seat cushions, because they didn’t realize there were life vests available to them.

As passengers exited, Jeff and I, along with some young male passengers, gathered more life vests, jackets, coats, and blankets to hand to people shivering out on the wings. We kept handing them out of the plane, as those who were on the wings and in the life rafts shouted that they needed more. The temperature outside was twenty-one degrees, and the windchill factor was eleven. The water was about thirty-six degrees. Those standing on both wings were in water above their ankles, and eventually, some would be in water almost up to their waists. Eric Stevenson had to kneel for balance because late in the rescue the left wing had lifted out of the water as the plane tilted to the right. Its upper surface was “like an ice rink,” he thought.

Flight attendants train to empty a plane of passengers in ninety seconds. That’s the FAA certification standard. But doing the training in an airplane hangar, with 150 calm volunteers, is a bit different from attempting it in freezing weather in the middle of the Hudson River.

I was proud of how fast the crew got everyone off the plane. The last passenger left the aircraft about three and a half minutes after the evacuation began, even with the aft exit doors unusable and water entering the aft cabin.

Once the plane emptied I walked down the center aisle, shouting: “Is anyone there? Come forward!”

I walked all the way to the back and then returned to the front. Then I took the same walk again. The second time, the water in the back of the plane was so high that I got wet almost up to my waist. I had to stand on the seats as I made my way back to the bulkhead. The cabin was in good shape. The overhead bins were closed, except for a few in the aft part of the cabin. The seats were all still in place.

When I got back to the front, Sheila was in the slide raft on the right side of the plane with a full load of passengers, but was having difficulty detaching it from the airplane. Standing inside the plane, I lifted the Velcro strip that set them free.

Jeff, Donna, and I were the final three people inside the plane. As I finished that final walk down the aisle, Donna spoke to me in no uncertain terms. “It’s time to go!” she said. “We’ve got to get off this plane!”

“I’m coming,” I told her.

As is protocol, I grabbed the emergency locator transmitter (ELT) from the forward part of the cabin and handed it to a passenger in the left-front slide raft. Donna got into that same raft and I went into the cockpit to get my overcoat. I also grabbed the aircraft maintenance logbook. I left everything else behind. I reminded Jeff to get his life vest. I already had mine. I handed my overcoat to a male passenger in the left-front raft who was cold.

After Jeff stepped out, I took one final look down the aisle of the sinking plane. I knew the passengers had all made it out. But I wasn’t sure if some of them might have slipped into the near-freezing water. How would I describe my state of mind at that moment, as a captain abandoning his aircraft? I guess I was still busily trying to keep ahead of the situation—anticipating, planning, and checking. There was no time to indulge my own feelings. The 154 people outside the aircraft were my responsibility still, even though I knew that rescuers would be working to pick us all up.

By the time I got into the raft, there were already boats around the airplane. The rafts are designed to accommodate forty-four people, with a maximum overload capacity of fifty-five. But we had fewer than forty people on our raft on the left side of the plane, and it felt pretty crowded. I saw no one crying or sobbing. There was no shouting or screaming. People were relatively calm, though in shock from the enormity of our experience. Though we were packed extremely tightly, no one was pushing. People were just waiting to be rescued, and there wasn’t much conversation at all. Everyone was very cold, and we were shivering. Though I was wet from walking in water to the back of the cabin, my recollection is that in our raft the bottom was pretty dry.

It was fortuitous that we landed in the river right around Forty-eighth Street, just as several high-speed catamaran ferries were preparing for the afternoon rush hour. Across the river in New Jersey, at the NY Waterway Port Imperial/Weehawken Ferry Terminal, the boats’ captains and deckhands were shocked to see our plane splash into the water. They were riveted by the sight of passengers almost immediately escaping from the plane. And in that instant, without being contacted by authorities and on their own initiative, they quickly headed our way. Fourteen boats ended up assisting us, their crews and passengers doing whatever they could to get us to safety.

Ferries aren’t designed as rescue ships, of course, but the deckhands rose to the challenges before them. Many had trained and drilled for such an emergency. Others adapted to the situation and worked by their wits.

The first vessel to reach us, just three minutes and fifty-five seconds after we came to a stop in the water, was the Thomas Jefferson, under the command of Captain Vince Lombardi of NY Waterway. He began the rescue of passengers from the right wing. His vessel would eventually rescue fifty-six people, more than any other vessel that day.

The Moira Smith, the second vessel to arrive, commanded by Captain Manuel Liba, approached our raft. I shouted to the crew members on that boat, “Rescue people on the wings first!” Passengers on the wings were obviously in a more precarious situation. None of the passengers on our raft objected as the boat turned away from us. People really did seem to grasp the entire scope of the situation, rather than just their individual needs, and I was grateful for their goodwill. Those shivering in our raft clearly understood that the people standing in water on the wings had to be rescued first.

I wanted to get a head count. I knew there were 150 passengers and 5 crew members on the plane. Could we add up those in the rafts and on the wings and see if we’d reach 155?

I asked those on my raft to count: “One, two, three, four…”

I then yelled to a man on the left wing to get a count of people on his wing. He tried, but the process was soon overcome by events, and besides, by this time, people were already being rescued and taken off the wings and rafts. I couldn’t see the raft and the wing on the other side of the airplane or communicate with the people over there. So we never were able to get any kind of count while still on the river.

Our raft remained tethered to the left side of the airplane and Jeff expressed concern that as the plane continued to take on water and ride lower, it might eventually pull the slide raft down and tip people out into the river. He spent several minutes trying to disconnect us from the plane.

“I can’t get it undone!” he said as the plane inched lower in the water. A knife is stored on each raft, but with so many people crammed together, and so much going on, it wasn’t immediately evident to us where the knife was. I knew that deckhands on boats usually carry knives. So I shouted to someone on the raft closer to the ferry to call up for a knife. A folding knife was produced, tossed toward our raft (a woman passenger caught it), and Jeff was able to cut us loose.

WHEN PASSENGERS were later asked how long they waited for the lifeboats to arrive, some estimated it took fifteen minutes or longer. Actually, the first ferry had arrived in under four minutes. Standing in freezing water, after the trauma of a life-threatening emergency, can alter a person’s sense of time. After just a few minutes outside in the water, many of those on the wing were unable to stop shaking. A quick rescue was imperative to minimize hypothermia.

One passenger had jumped into the water and began swimming to the New York side of the river. He soon thought better of it, given the water temperature, and swam back. Other passengers pulled him into our raft, and we saw that he was unable to stop shaking.

One of our passengers was Derek Alter, a first officer for Colgan Air. “Sir, you have to get out of these clothes, and you have to do it now,” Derek told the man who had been in the water. Derek took off his first officer’s uniform shirt, gave it to the man, and then kept his arm around him to keep him warm. (Derek later said that it was his Boy Scout training that helped him know that the man needed to get out of his wet clothes immediately.)

The third vessel to arrive, the NY Waterway ferry Yogi Berra, captained by Vincent LuCante, rescued twenty-four people.

One woman slipped off the wing and into the river, and two other passengers risked falling in themselves as they pulled her back up. When it was time to get her on a ladder, she was unable to move her legs from the cold, and she fell off and had to be helped on again. Others also fell into the water trying to get up the ladders. It was pretty harrowing. Then there was the release of emotions. When passengers finally made it onto the ferries, some of them hugged the deckhands.

One ferry captain was Brittany Catanzaro, just nineteen years old, whose regular job was to transport commuters from Weehawken and Hoboken, New Jersey, to Manhattan. Her ferry, the Thomas Kean, the fourth vessel to arrive, had been pointed away from us when we landed, but she turned it around and headed our way. She and her crew members pulled twenty-six passengers off the wings. All the ferries had to be careful and slow down, especially as they approached those who were standing on the wings. If they threw off too big a wake, passengers could have been knocked into the water. Maneuvering near the aircraft was difficult, especially with the strong current, and required great ship handling to prevent bumping the plane.

An NYPD helicopter arrived, and I watched a diver being dropped from it into the river. The downwash from the rotors was strong; spray from the surface of the river got into our eyes. That was cold water mixed with a cold wind. The police diver rescued a passenger in the water near one of the wings.

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 of the investigation.

Patrick sat in that union room, consoled by the union rep, for what felt like hours. Then a friend poked his head into the room and said, “It looks like they’re going to make it. They’re on the wings of the plane.”

Patrick later told me that his relief was beyond words.

ONE OF the passengers was sitting near Jeff and me in the raft. Like so many people, he was drained and emotional. But he wanted me to know that he appreciated what the crew and I had done to bring the plane down safely.

He took my arm. “Thank you,” he said.

“You’re welcome,” I told him.

It was the simplest exchange between two men at an extraordinary moment, but I could tell it meant a great deal to him to say it. It meant a great deal to me to hear his words, and for Jeff and Donna, near us, too.

The cold air and wind were not immediately debilitating. But as we all waited for our turn to be rescued by the ferry Athena, a lot of us were in pretty rough shape. Many couldn’t stop shivering.

I made sure I was the last person off the raft, just as I had wanted to be the last person off of the plane. I don’t think there are any written guidelines suggesting that the captain be the last to leave a plane or any other vessel during an emergency. I was aware of the maritime tradition, but that wasn’t the reason I did it. It was just obvious to me: I shouldn’t be rescued until all the passengers in my care were attended to.

The rescue went quickly, all things considered. The deck of the ferry was about ten feet above the raft, so it took some effort for passengers to make their way up. By the time it was my turn to climb up the ladder, I was so cold that I could no longer use my hands. I had to stick my forearms through the rungs. I couldn’t grasp anything with my fingers.

From the deck of the ferry, standing with seventeen other survivors from Flight 1549, including Jeff, I looked back at the airplane. It continued to slowly sink lower in the water, as it drifted south toward the Statue of Liberty surrounded by a small trail of debris and leaking jet fuel.

Standing there, I realized I still had my cell phone on my belt. Though my pants were drenched, the phone was dry and working. It was my first moment to call Lorrie.

We have two landlines in the house and she has a cell phone, but I couldn’t get through to her on any of them. She wasn’t answering because she was on one of the lines, talking to a business associate. She saw my number come up on her cell phone, but at first she ignored it.

Given all the ringing, she told the person she was talking to: “Sully is calling every line in the house. Let’s see what he wants.”

She answered the other line, saying, “Hello.”

Hearing her voice, not knowing what she knew or didn’t know, my first words were meant to reassure her: “I wanted to call to say I’m OK.”

She thought that meant I was on schedule to fly back to San Francisco that night.

“That’s good,” she told me. She assumed I had already landed Flight 1549 in Charlotte. I saw she needed an explanation.

“No,” I said. “There’s been an incident.”

She still wasn’t getting it. She didn’t have her TV on, so she was unaware of the nonstop coverage of the incident that was all over the national cable networks. She assumed that I was trying to tell her my flight was delayed, and that I might not make it home.

And so I told her straight, almost as if I was giving her bullet points. “We hit birds. We lost thrust in both engines. I ditched the airplane in the Hudson.”

It was a lot for her to digest. She paused and asked her first question. “Are you OK?”

“Yes,” I told her.

“OK OK?” she asked. Obviously I had survived. She was asking if I was OK in a broader sense.

“Yes,” I said. “But I can’t talk now. I’m on my way to the pier. I’ll call you from there.” I felt pretty emotional hearing her voice; I could have used her consoling words. At the same time, there was so much to tell her and no time to do so. I wanted the kids to know I was safe, too. Until I could get back to them, they’d be hearing everything from the news reports on TV. But at least I had made contact.

After my call, Lorrie lay down on the bed in our bedroom. She wasn’t crying, but she was shaking really hard. My call had been a shock. She called a close friend and said, “Sully just crashed an airplane and I don’t know what to do.” Her friend told her, “Go get your girls.” So she got the girls out of school and brought them home.

WHILE STILL on the ferry, I began running through my mental checklist of other things I should be doing. I knew that US Airways was well aware of the incident through Air Traffic Control, but I thought I’d better give the airline a sense of the situation from my end.

Every flight has an airline dispatcher assigned to monitor it. The dispatchers work at their computers in a large, windowless room at the US Airways Operations Control Center in Pittsburgh, and they each track many flights at the same time.

I called Bob Haney, who was on duty that day as US Airways’ airline operations manager, and after a few rings he picked up.

“This is Bob,” he said. His delivery was clipped, and there was an intensity in his voice.

“This is Captain Sullenberger,” I said.

“I can’t talk now,” he told me. “There’s a plane down in the Hudson!”

“I know,” I said. “I’m the guy.” He was momentarily speechless. He couldn’t believe that the pilot from the aircraft in the Hudson, a scene he was watching on TV at that moment, was calling his desk phone. Given the gravity of the situation, we quickly began discussing the matters at hand. But I’d later smile at the memory of how he tried to cut me off at the beginning of our conversation with breaking news. “There’s a plane down in the Hudson!” Yes, I knew about that.

The Athena docked at Manhattan’s Pier 79, let us off, and then went back one more time to the plane to make sure no one was left behind. By 6:15 P.M., it would return to duty shuttling commuters back and forth across the Hudson, its seats still wet from the soaking Flight 1549 survivors.

As soon as I stepped onto the pier at the ferry terminal, I was met by US Airways captain Dan Britt, our union rep at LaGuardia. He had seen the television coverage at his home in New York, put on his uniform, and come down to be with me and Jeff.

I asked him to help me get answers and updates, and we both started making calls, verifying that the injured were being treated. I walked over to Doreen, who was on a gurney and was being treated by an EMT. She was the most seriously injured, with a gash in her leg, and would remain hospitalized for several days. I gathered together the rest of the crew, and included our two other airline pilot passengers, American Airlines first officer Susan O’Donnell and Colgan Air’s Derek Alter, who had given his shirt to a passenger in the raft.

Some passengers had been taken to the New Jersey side of the river and the rest came to New York, so it was hard to keep track. I desperately wanted a tally of all those who had been rescued, but I was still unable to get any kind of confirmation. The authorities kept asking me for the manifest. On domestic flights, the crew is not given one. US Airways would spend some time constructing one from the electronic records of the flight.

Police were everywhere, and a high-ranking police officer told me that Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly wanted me to go see them at another location. I had to decline. “I have responsibilities here,” I said. And so Mayor Bloomberg and Commissioner Kelly ended up coming to the ferry terminal to ask me a few questions. I was too concerned about the passenger issues to have a real conversation with them. I gave them a short update and that was it. “I made sure everyone was off the airplane,” I told them. “We’re trying to find out if they’re all accounted for.”

Much discussion took place about where the crew and I should go next. Eventually we were taken to the hospital to be evaluated and have our vital signs checked. All the while I kept asking and asking, “What’s the total?”

After we were examined in the emergency room and were told we were all OK, we were left just standing around, waiting for confirmation, waiting for news, waiting to find out where we would go next. There weren’t enough chairs for all of us in the examination room, but I didn’t feel like sitting anyway. It was stressful, just waiting, not knowing the outcome, standing there in my wet uniform and my wet socks. I wouldn’t have a chance to get into anything dry until midnight.

In the hour or two that followed, three more doctors came in. They didn’t really have any medical reason for stopping by. They probably were just curious to get a look at us, given that we were all over the news. At one point, a doctor in his mid-forties stopped in and looked me right in the eye. I could tell that he was trying to get the measure of me, trying to figure out what made me tick. He didn’t say a word for fifteen or twenty seconds. Finally he spoke. “You’re so calm,” he said. “It’s incredible.” He was mistaken. I didn’t feel calm at all. At that point, I was feeling numb and out of sorts. I just couldn’t relax until I knew the count was 155.

Finally, at 7:40 P.M., more than four hours after we landed in the Hudson, Captain Arnie Gentile, a union rep, came in and gave me the word. “It’s official,” he said.

I felt the most intense feeling of relief I’d ever felt in my life. I felt like the weight of the universe had been lifted off of my heart. I probably let out a long breath. I’m not sure I smiled. I was too spent to celebrate.

It had been the most harrowing day of my life, but I was incredibly grateful for this ending. We hadn’t saved the Airbus 320. That was ruined. But the people on the plane, they would be returning to their families. All of them.