Reluctant hero

Captain, my captain: Chesley Sullenberger successfully landed his US Airways flight 1549 in the Hudson river, below, and was immediately hailed a hero for saving the lives of the 155 passengers.

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"THIS IS the captain." That calm, avuncular rumble, distorted and edited by the tinny public announcement speakers of the jumbo, interrupts many a dehydrated, post-prandial doze. On any given day, the pilot offers a few flying and landing details and reminds you of the airline you are travelling with.

But on the cold, clear winter afternoon of January 15 this year, not five minutes after they had lifted off from LaGuardia Airport, passengers aboard US Airways flight 1549 from New York to Charlotte, North Carolina, heard three words straight after, a sentence dreaded by fearful fliers since the dawn of the age of flight: "Brace for impact." A few minutes earlier, Captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger and First Officer Jeffrey Skiles had seen the flock of about a dozen Canada geese from the cockpit, but with the plane travelling at 100m/sec they could barely blink before they were upon the birds, which can weigh up to 8kg and use their 2m wingspan to flap at about 80km/h in a flat V formation.

Many passengers had felt the bird strike, barely 95 seconds into the flight, in which the geese thumped against the fuselage. They heard disturbing bangs from both engines, which had sucked in a few of the birds. They smelt smoke in the cabin and the whiff of the incinerated geese, could see the rising tops of the skyscrapers. Without the usual engine noise, the experienced flight attendants, Donna and Sheila, would later say that the cabin was "as quiet as a library". Some started to write notes to loved ones or use their mobile phones.

As soon as Sully realised both engines on the Airbus A320-214 had failed, he knew it was the worst aviation challenge he'd ever faced. Engines are so reliable, he writes in Highest Duty, his surprisingly fascinating and occasionally moving book about the flight and his life as a pilot, that it's possible for commercial pilots to go their entire career without losing even one.

"It was the most sickening, pit-of-your-stomach, falling-through-the-floor feeling I had ever experienced."

Skiles had handled the take-off but Sully, who had more experience on the 320, immediately knew he needed to be at the controls and for his first officer to handle the emergency checklist.

"My aircraft," he said to Jeff.

"Your aircraft," Jeff responded.

Both realised the seriousness of the problem. Zero thrust, with 155 people on board, above a heaving conurbation of 20 million people, a 70,000kg plane descending at a rate equivalent to a lift dropping two storeys every second. Patrick Harten, a flight controller with 10 years' experience, had helped a few jets that had lost one engine land safely, but never both engines. On hearing the direness of the situation, Harten directed Flight 1549 back to LaGuardia. "Unable," said Sully. Teterboro, a small airport in New Jersey that handles corporate jet traffic, was then considered. "We can't do it." Harten's final suggestion was Newark, a larger airport in New Jersey, but Sully couldn't hear it – the plane had fallen below the New York skyline and off the radar screen.

Twenty-two seconds before impact, Sully asked Skiles: "Got any ideas?" Skiles replied: "Actually, not." Millions of people around the world who watched the final grainy CCTV images of the plane's flight know what happened next: it glided quickly but gracefully into the chilly Hudson River and all 155 passengers and crew walked away virtually unscathed.

SULLY, 58, STILL worries if he did the very best he could. He told the Sunday Star-Times in his careful, deep tones that many factors fell in their favour – it was daylight and visibility was good, the cabin crew were experienced, the river was available and ferries were nearby. He notes that on a below-zero winter's day in New York hypothermia was a real possibility for some passengers. A landing in the open ocean would have been much more difficult.

The first ferry arrived in four minutes, one of 14 boats to help. Sully walked the length of the plane twice, the last time in waist-deep water, to check for any remaining passengers.

He writes that the plane landed with the nose at 9.8 above the horizon, the wings were exactly level, 125.2 knots (note the 0.2), but the rate of descent "could not be arrested as much as I would have liked". The plane, it should be noted again, had no power.

Sully writes that he didn't kiss his wife Lorrie goodbye that day, because she's a light sleeper. He found he did not think of his family when trying to land the plane: it would have only distracted him from the job of controlling the plane, but by writing it suggests he frets whether this was right. He didn't call Lorrie until he was on the deck of a ferry.

It took her several seconds to understand what had happened. She lay down on the bed, not crying but shaking really hard. She called a friend and said: "Sully just crashed an airplane and I don't know what to do." The friend said, "Go get your girls." So she got their teenagers, Kate and Kelly, out of school and brought them home.

Pilots must balance confidence and responsibility, leadership and service. Sully writes that he never thought he was going to die. "Based on my experience, I was confident that I could make an emergency water landing that was survivable. That confidence was stronger than any fear."

Flight controller Harten, who didn't at first know that the plane had ditched safely, went over and over his final exchanges with pilots during lesser emergencies. Their voices, he said, became "almost like a quiver". Sully's voice, by contrast, seemed "strangely calm".

But still Sully worries. He tells a tale in Highest Duty about Pan Am Flight 943 in 1956, which was bound from Honolulu to San Francisco with 25 passengers. There were also 44 cases of live canaries in the cargo hold. In the middle of the night, Captain Richard Ogg lost two engines, and the remaining two were straining and burning large amounts of fuel. He circled for several hours until daylight, a US coastguard vessel waiting below. The tail and nose of the plane were damaged in the ditching, but everyone got off safely. Ogg went through the plane twice to check no one was left behind. When Flight 1549 made the headlines, reporters contacted Ogg's widow. He had simply done his job, he'd said at the time, but she said on his deathbed he had a faraway look in his eyes. She asked what he was thinking about. He said: "I was thinking of those poor canaries that drowned in the hold when I had to ditch that plane."

But there is no mawkishness in Highest Duty, the barest of sentimentality and, perhaps unusually from a man who grew up on the Texas-Oklahoma border next to an air force base, no repeated statements of thanks to a higher power. Just a boy made for flying – he took his first flying lesson when he was just 16, and knew from that thrill "this would be my livelihood and my life" – who became a serious, studious, details-focused decent fellow. A shy young man, more at home in a cockpit, for whom public speeches, media interviews and book signings would be like having teeth pulled without anaesthetic.

He recalls his first plane ride. "The airport, Dallas Love Field, was 75 miles south of our house, and when we got there, it seemed like a magical place filled with larger-that-life people. Pilots. Stewardesses. Well-dressed passengers with somewhere to go." He is wistful for that glamour and cachet, well-captured in the Leonardo diCaprio film Catch Me If You Can, now gone, partly because flying is so cheap and almost without risk.

FLYING IS "ultra-safe", says Scully today. Nevertheless, he continues to campaign for air safety, in the light of regular cost-cutting in the industry and the outsourcing of aircraft maintenance. He notes that some pilots for regional US airlines are paid $US16,000 ($22,000) a year. Both Scully and Skiles had to work outside flying to make a decent living. He was thinking about property concerns as he travelled to work that day.

"Historically, safety advances in aviation often have been purchased with blood," he writes. We talk about Flight 811, travelling between Honolulu and Auckland in 1989, in which New Zealander Lee Campbell, 24, was one of nine killed when the cargo door blew open. After two years the US National Transportation Safety Board accepted his father Kevin Campbell's findings that there had been faults in the door-locking system. Does it frustrate Sully that potentially simple and inexpensive changes can save lives? "Yes."

So what safety aspects need to be immediately addressed?

Fatigue mitigation "needs to be done yesterday", he says. Frequent short-haul flights and ultralong-haul flights are both now much more common, and decades-old rest rules need to be changed. And with the current frequent cost-cutting, safety has to be "at least on an equal footing with economics".

His concerns range from replacing technology in control towers that can sometimes stop pilots being heard, to minimising bird strikes, to the limits of automation, to easy tabbing on emergency flight manuals. He's surprisingly outspoken on the need for unions, saying elsewhere that "no one person can stand up to management". Pilot training must be ongoing. Though it's harder to train for air accidents, he says, because reliability and safety are so good, that more often they have unique causes. You can't train for ditching a plane when there is no data for flight simulators to work from.

He could talk for hours on safety, and in fact does, through a consultancy he set up before the accident. Lessons learnt in airline industry can be transferred to other areas such as health. As a simple example, he cites the use of checklists, so that all allergies are checked and all instruments are counted after operations to check none is left inside a patient.

Earlier I'd wondered about whether, in light of his previous life, the frictions he writes of from being away from home have lessened. Again he's upfront: we can't change our basic temperament too much, he says, but the events of January 15 remind us "how petty and unimportant are some of the things we worry about on a daily basis".

Anyway, before the accident he'd been wanting to change his job, to be closer to his family. The career he loved so much took him away from home for 18 days a month. Ironically, he's away more often at the moment, but he knows that won't last forever (though it is a two-book publishing deal). He doesn't fly as often now, though he did pair up with Skiles in October.

I ask this most reluctant hero who his own heroes are. He thinks for a moment, and comes up with Abraham Lincoln (saved the union and was a wonderful leader), Ernest Shackleton (not leaving anyone behind) and the many Medal of Honor recipients (bravery beyond what seems humanly possible). In the book he includes Charles Lindbergh, who first flew across the Atlantic and a model of whose plane, Spirit of St Louis, Sully built when he was six years old. What made him heroic to young Sully? He "understood that his flight across the Atlantic wasn't really about luck. He planned. He prepared. He endured."

I don't know about you, but that's the kind of guy – experienced, properly paid, well rested – I want up front when the seatbelt sign comes on.

Highest Duty, by Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger with Jeffrey Zaslow, Morrow/HarperCollins, $34.99.

- © Fairfax NZ News