Sully: The Untold Story Behind the Miracle on the Hudson

by Chesley B. Sullenberger III

By 1962, when I was eleven years old, I was already reading every book and magazine I could find that talked about flying.

Once pilots push back from the gate, and until we are above ten thousand feet in the air, cockpit crews aren’t allowed to talk to each other about anything except the details of the flight.

We also talked about our side jobs. Like a lot of pilots, Jeff also sees the need to supplement his income. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin, and has a business as a general contractor, building new homes.

I am grateful for all the adventures to be found at thirty thousand feet. But I’ve got to be honest: Eating PB&J while smelling the gourmet beef being distributed with wine in first class—that’s a sure reminder that there are less-than-glamorous aspects of my job.

Pilots are paid per hour of flying, and “flying” is tallied from the moment you move away from the gate in one city to the moment you arrive at the gate in the next city. Delays frustrate everybody—pilots, too, of course—but the fact is that we start getting paid when the plane has pushed back from the gate. If we sit on the tarmac for hours, we’re getting paid. If we’re waiting at the gate, we’re not.

Historically, safety advances in aviation often have been purchased with blood. It seems sometimes we’ve had to wait until the body count has risen high enough to create public awareness or political will. The worst air tragedies have led to the most important changes in design, training, regulations, or airline practices.

Consider that more than thirty-seven thousand people died in auto accidents in the United States last year. That was about seven hundred a week, yet we never heard about most of those fatalities because they happened one or two at a time. Now imagine if seven hundred people were dying every week in airline accidents; the equivalent of a commercial jet crashing almost every day. The airports would be shut down and every airliner would be grounded.

In any case, some mornings he’d wake up and say to my mother, “I don’t feel like working today. Let’s go to Dallas.” My mom would get on the phone and cancel all his patient appointments, then she’d call our school to say we wouldn’t be coming in. My father figured my sister and I were smart kids; we could make up any missed schoolwork. And besides, he felt we could always learn something down in Dallas.

In one eighth-grade school essay, titled “The Way I Am,” I wrote: “I have good habits as well as bad ones. Being polite is one of my good points. My parents have taught me the manners I should know. I think my table manners are what they should be. “I have bad habits, too. I am not very patient sometimes with other people. I would like to do everything exactly right, and I would like others to do the same. I should realize that everyone is not perfect.

“Sully, you expect a lot from yourself and those around you. You’re in control. That helps you as a pilot. But those aren’t always good husband qualities. Sometimes I need a companion who is more forgiving and less of a perfectionist.”

I also signed up to learn how to fly gliders. I loved flying the gliders because gliding is the purest form of flight. It’s almost birdlike. There’s no engine, it’s much quieter, and you’re operating at a slower speed, maybe sixty miles an hour. You feel every gust of wind, and so you’re aware of how light your airplane is, and how you are at the mercy of the elements.

It’s interesting. After you fly for an airline for a while, you realize that it doesn’t really matter what your background is. You could have been the ace of your base, or even a former astronaut. You could have been a war hero. Your fellow pilots might respect you for that, but there’s no real impact on your career. What matters most is your seniority at that particular airline. How many years have passed since you were hired? The answer to that decides your schedule, your pay, your choice of destinations, your ability to decline flying red-eyes, everything.

What are a pilot’s obligations to a sick passenger? We aren’t doctors. So how do we determine when a passenger is so ill that an emergency landing is required, diverting the flight to the nearest airport that has appropriate medical facilities, disrupting other passengers’ travel plans? We have access to advice from contract medical services and they and the airline dispatcher help a captain make an informed decision about whether to divert and to what airport.

I’ve learned that word choice is so important. When there’s a delay, I like to address passengers by saying: “I promise to tell you everything I know as soon as I know it.” I’ve found such language makes a world of difference. It’s inclusive. It tells passengers our intention is to give them the whole truth, and it lets them know we trust and respect them enough to share this truth.

I’m a believer in “realistic optimism,” which I consider a leader’s most effective tool. That’s short-term realism combined with long-term optimism.

People used to say that airline pilots were one step below astronauts. Now the joke is: We’re one step above bus drivers, but bus drivers have better pensions.

The QRH book is more than an inch thick, and in previous editions, it had helpful numbered tabs sticking out of the edge of it. That made it easier for us to find the exact page we needed. You could hold it in your left hand and use it like an address book, grazing over the numbered tabs with your right hand before turning to the tab for, say, Procedure number 27. In recent years, however, in a cost-cutting move, US Airways had begun printing these booklets without the numbered tabs on the edge of the pages. Instead, the number of each procedure was printed on the page itself, requiring pilots to open the pages and thumb through them to get to the right page.