- January 15, 2009 started just like 10,000 other days, literally. And Flight 1549 initially, like all those other flights for so long, was completely routine and unremarkable for the first 100 seconds. But this very suddenly, and I
was aware of it at the time, became the worst day of my life. (slow brooding music) We were traveling at that
point 316 feet per second so I saw the birds about thee
football field lengths ahead but not enough time to
maneuver away from them. And then they filled the wind screen as if it were a Hitchcock film. And this was a large flock of large birds, The species Canada Geese,
they weight eight or ten, sometimes 12 pounds. They have five foot or six foot wingspans. And they struck the airplane along the leading edges
of the wings, the nose, and into the center, the
core of both jet engines. Now jet engines are turbines. They're finely balanced machinery spinning at tens of thousands
of revolutions per minute and having a ten pound object or two go through each of them, in the center of the core of the engine, is incredibly damaging and disruptive. Immediately, I could hear terrible noises from the machinery being damaged that I'd never heard
in an airplane before. I could feel terrible vibrations I'd never felt on an airplane before. And then I received confirmation of
what I believed had happened, what I could smell coming
into the cabin air, the burning bird odor from the engines. And then the thrust loss was sudden, complete, symmetrical,
bilaterally, both engines at once. It felt as if the bottom
had fallen out of our world and my body responded immediately in a very normal human way to this sudden life-threatening stress. I was aware that as it happened. I could feel my pulse shoot up, my blood pressure spike,
my perceptual field narrow in tunnel vision because of my stress. I remember vividly my first
three conscious thoughts. This can't be happening. Having read about many accident flights, a very typical response
rooted in disbelief. Followed immediately by
this doesn't happen to me. In other words, for over four decades, I had never been so
challenged in an airplane I doubted the outcome. Followed immediately by a realization that unlike all those other
flights I'd had for 42 years, this one probably would not end on a runway with the aircraft undamaged. And I was okay with that as long as I could solve the problem. And so even though we'd
never trained for this in our flight simulators or the airline it as not possible to
practice a water landing, they aren't programmed for it. The only training we'd ever
gotten for a water landing was a theoretical classroom discussion. But because I had
learned my craft so well, I knew my airplane and my
profession so intimately, I could set clear priorities. And so I chose to do only
the highest priority items and then I had the discipline to ignore everything I
did not have time to do as being only distractions and potential detriment
to our performance. You see, I'm also well read
and so I knew the neurobiology. I knew that multitasking is a myth. That when we think we're multitasking, what we are in fact doing is switching rapidly between tasks, not doing either of them well. And so I chose not to try to do too much. Within a few seconds,
by memory I had taken the first two remedial actions that we would eventually
get to on the checklist over a minute later,
over a third of the way through the remaining flight time, but I needed those actions
to be effective immediately and not to wait. I turned on the engine ignition so if the engines could
recover, they would. And I started the airplane's
auxiliary power unit. I knew it was only a
matter of a few minutes before our flight path intersected
the surface of the Earth. I had to choose the best possible
place for that to happen. Having flown into New York many times, I knew that there were only three options. There were only two runways
that might be reachable. It turned out with reaction
time, they were not. And the only other place in
the entire New York metro area, one of the most densely
developed areas on the planet, where it might be possible to even try landing a large jet airliner
would be the Hudson River. I suspected early on that's
where we would end up but I knew I had to try to consider at least returning to a
runway if it was possible. I took control of the aircraft, made one distress call, worked with the aircraft controller, considered returning to LaGuardia, decided it was unreachable, considered trying to reach
the Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, across the river, decided that was not reachable either, and told the controller we
were going to be in the Hudson. He told me later he was shocked, in disbelief, and he assumed that by choosing that path, that we would all perish and it as an agonizing 45 minutes until he found out that
everyone had survived. Our First Officer, Jeff Skiles, I couldn't have had a better
colleague that day or since. In a situation where the time pressure and the workload were so intense, we didn't have time even to
talk about what had happened and what we should do about it. He and I were able to
collaborate wordlessly by knowing intuitively
in this developing crisis what we should do to help the other, based on our own long experience. Had Jeff not also had
20,000 hours of flying time like I did, had he not
been a captain before, had he not been so experienced, he wouldn't have known either
to do that or how to do that. So he made an important suggestion at several points in the flight. He was silently cheering me
on as I made each decision but ready to intervene,
to check my performance if he thought I was making an error. I had a chance to make only
announcement in the cabin and before I made what I knew would be the most important
PA announcement of my life, I took what was probably an
extravagant amount of time, three or four seconds to
choose my words very carefully before I spoke. I wanted to sound confident, not agitated, because I knew that
courage can be contagious. And I chose specific words
for specific reasons. Fortunately, we have the advantage of having a very well defined and very concise aviation vocabulary, in which there are certain single words that are rich with meaning. Brace is such a word. It signals to the cabin
crew, the flight attendants, that an emergency landing is imminent and that they should
help the passengers avoid injury during the landing so that they'll be able to evacuate by shouting their commands
to the passengers. And in the spur of the moment, I chose another word to give the passengers and
crew in the cabin alike a vivid image, a word
picture of what to expect, that without engine thrust, we were using gravity to
provide the forward motion in the airplane. We were descending the equivalent in a hotel elevator descending
at two floors per second. So I knew it was going
to be a hard landing. I just didn't know how hard because Jeff and I had
never practiced this before. So I chose the word impact to give them that vivid image. I said "this is the Captain. "Brace for impact." And immediately even through
that armored cockpit door, I could hear the two
flight attendants in front, Donna and Sheila, and I'm sure Doreen in the back was doing the same, begin shouting their commands
in unison to the passengers. "Brace, brace, brace. "Heads down, stay down." Hearing those words that day encouraged me. It comforted me to know that by saying
the few words I had, but choosing the right words, I had literally gotten
my crew on the same page and that if I could find a way to deliver this aircraft
to the surface intact, it would float long enough for the flight attendants
to evacuate the passengers and for New York Waterway to send their ferries to
pick us out of their water and that was critically
important on such a cold day. The air temperature was
21, the water about 38. Right before the landing, I asked Jeff Skiles a question. I said got any ideas? Some think that was a flippant
remark but it was not at all. It was just an indication
of how deeply internalized these team skills are
that I used to teach. I was saying to him, and
he understood in context exactly what I meant, I've done everything I can
think of that can help us. Are there any other
actions that we can take, that you can think of,
that would help us succeed, even by a fraction? And Jeff's answer was actually not. And he answered just like that. Not at all because he was being insouciant or not because he was resigned
to an ineluctable fate. Far from it. We were fighting to save
every life to the very end. He answered that way because
he knew we'd done all we could. The fact that we could have that exchange just before the emergency
landing of a lifetime is one of the more remarkable things about this flight and this crew and our diligence, our
dedication to never give up. Just try to save every life. To do everything we possible could. And then finally, as we
were approaching the water, again Jeff collaborated
with me wordlessly. He knew that the final critical maneuver was for me to try to judge visually, looking at this featureless
water train ahead, where depth perception's
inherently difficult, the height at which to
begin raising the nose, to begin the landing, to trade some of our forward motion for a reduced rate of
descent and touch down and to achieve the proper
slightly nose-up attitude as we touched the water. So Jeff began to call out
to me air speed and altitude as I was looking at the water ahead to help me judge that critical height. And we were coming down so rapidly, if I misjudged any of them by a fraction, we might start too soon and
get too slow and hit hard or start too late and descend
into the water too rapidly in the wrong attitude. As we hit, we hit hard. But the deceleration, well,
our rapid was uniform. And based upon the forces
that Jeff and I felt in the cockpit as slowed to the stop, it as obvious that the
airplane was intact, it was stable, it was floating, and people were probably
still okay at that point. And in the most amazing coincidence, Jeff and I turned to each
other at that moment, in the same time, using
the same words, said "well that wasn't as bad as I thought". But we weren't high-fiving. We still had to get 155
people out of an airplane taking on water in a river in January. I opened the cockpit door and
shouted one word, "evacuate". The evacuation went fairly quickly. Passengers and crew worked together to help out an elderly woman who had been boarded in a wheelchair. They helped a young family of four, including a mother with
a nine-month old child. And by the time I left the
airplane as the last one off, the New York Waterway
ferries were all around us and the rescue was well underway. But it was an agonizing four hours until I finally received word officially that everyone was accounted for and only then were my
immediate duties completed when everyone was safe. (somber music)
That was an incredible video. Thank you for posting, OP.