Where does one begin to tell a story like that? The natural place to begin is at the inception of the action. Exactly 80 seconds after U.S. Airways flight 1549’s wheels left the runway of LaGuardia International Airport, it ran into a flock of Canadian geese. Passengers and crew heard the birds strike the Airbus A320 and watched flames trail from both engines. Then there was silence.
Years later, the sound of that silence still haunts Sully. It announced a crisis that no pilot had ever faced: the complete loss of thrust at the very moment in the flight profile that required the greatest thrust. Less than five miles from takeoff, they had climbed only 2,818 feet before becoming the world’s largest glider.
But the story doesn’t really begin with the geese. When their flight path intersected that of the passenger jet headed for Charlotte, North Carolina, it became a convergence of many stories. More than beginning any one story, the bird strike drew together captain, crew, passengers, and people on the ground, into a new story—one that endures to this day.
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| Captain Chesley Sullenberger |
For his part, Sully’s story began in Denison, Texas where he was born in 1951. Interested in aviation from a very early age, he learned to fly at a local airstrip when he was 16. After graduating high school he entered the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. As a freshman in the class of 1973, he was hand-selected for the Cadet Glider Program. That was a part of his story that would be useful 40 years later.
After finishing his study at the academy, he took a graduate degree from Purdue University and earned his wings in 1975. He spent his time in the Air Force flying the F-4D Phantom, the first airframe to achieve the speed of sound in level flight. Following his retirement from military service, he became a commercial pilot in 1980 and flew for the same airline until his retirement thirty years later.
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| Sully with Jeffrey Skiles |
Sully is adamant that the miracle was no solo performance, but a team effort. His co-pilot, Jeff Skiles, has more than 22,000 hours of experience himself and was indispensable to the successful landing. His story, too, was tailor-made to be part of a greater story.
Nor was landing the plane the only miracle of that day. As the downed aircraft was rapidly sinking in the frigid water, 14 New York Waterway ferries, together with U.S. Coastguard and NYFD boats, plucked 150 passengers and five crew members from the freezing water. Ferry captains like Manny Liba and Vincent Lombardi drew on decades of training and experience to pull off the most successful marine rescue in aviation history.
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| Ferries from New York Waterway |
Each of these individual people has a history that uniquely contributes to his part in the “Miracle on the Hudson.” That’s how life works. Our lives and well-being are constantly affected by the lives of thousands of strangers who surround us. These people, in turn, all have histories of aptitudes, interests, training and personal choices that uniquely place them into our own story.
Every career decision, every moment spent learning, studying and training and every character enhancement or character flaw suddenly became a vital factor in whether real people lived or died. The “Miracle on the Hudson” brought this reality into focus, but it’s a reality that carries on in your life, as well.
Whatever you are doing today, good and bad, has real-world consequences for everybody around you. Sometimes your actions have immediate consequences. Other times they are deposits of knowledge, character and practice that you make toward some unknown future.
The point to notice here is that these actions do not only affect individual lives, they affect everybody else’s as well. That’s why communities rise and fall together. As each person in the community grows more competent and selfless, the community as a whole is better for it.
This is an important lesson to reclaim in a culture that values individual choice and individual satisfaction as the supreme good. They are not the supreme good! Autonomous choice divorced from care for the specific neighbors surrounding us can only tear down. It cannot build. Our choices, even private choices, are not made in isolation. Every thing we do has a direct bearing on the rest of the community.
On January 15, 2009, the entire community of Flight 1549 was lifted up by a thousand untold stories of sacrifice, training, self-denial and dedication. The skills, the character traits, the training and the fitness that saved the passengers on flight 1549 were all being put into place during months, years and decades leading up to that moment of truth.
Captain Sully reflected on this years later. “For 40 years I had been making deposits in my ability to take-off, fly and land aircraft,” he said. “On that fateful day I made a huge withdrawal. And if I hadn’t made all those deposits over all those years, I wouldn’t have been able to make that withdrawal, and save those people’s lives.”
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| Patrick Harten |
In the seconds that passed after hitting the birds, Sully and Skiles were not idle. The captain assumed control of the aircraft so that his co-pilot could begin executing the checklist required. Twenty-two seconds later, Sully radioed air traffic controller, Patrick Harten, “This is Cactus 1539, hit birds. We’ve lost thrust in both engines. We’re turning back toward LaGuardia.”
Harten immediately cleared runway 13 for landing. But Sully replied with a single word, “unable… We are gonna be in the Hudson.” They were over one of the most densely populated cities in the world—and three minutes from impact. There were 155 souls aboard and many times that on the ground below. But Sully and his co-pilot remained focused on the task at hand: to land safely.
Such occasions don’t come with a book. There is no time to “Google” the answer. Even if there were, the answer did not yet exist. The answer lay in Sully’s understanding of the physical world. Airspeed, wind direction, altitude, weight, lift and position all combined to form the canvass on which Sully would paint his masterpiece.
There was no opportunity for practice or a do-over. It’s like our life every day. Every word we speak, every move we make, is life lived out against the canvass of the real world. The outcome depends entirely upon how well we understand that world, and how skillfully we navigate it.
That’s what makes Sully’s story so uplifting. He understood. He acted on that understanding with competence and skill. In so doing, he guided 155 souls to safety.
Such a story encourages us to strive. Let us understand our world accurately. Let us discipline ourselves to shape character, mind and body. Let us pray for the grace to live our lives according to the truth. In so doing, each of us has the opportunity to be Sully in our own family, in our school, in our community.
It’s not just about us. Everyone benefits.
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