This is a really short book, only about 200 pages long so I managed to read it one go during some downtime at work. The subject is something I have a lot of experience in, I work in the avaition industry and on the type of aircraft the book is based on.

The tale needs no real introduction. On the morning of January 15th 2009 a US Airways A320 ingested a flock of Canada geese on take off from LA Guardia causing both engines to pretty much shut down. The captain Chelsey Sullenberger (Sully) landed the aircraft in the Hudson river. The decision of the pilots and the flight charcateristics of the aircraft meant that all the people on board lived and it became one of the greatest feats of modern flying.

This book takes a slightly different approach and instead of focusing on what could have been done to avoid the accident it tooks at the facts of the day. It dips in and out of historic examples of similar incidents and the background to the union disputes going on behind the scenes at US Airways at the time. The facts behind the day have been covered many times in the past and this book adds no more flesh to those details. However the comparisons with previous incidents are very interesting especially when looking at the differences between the A320 and other aircraft.

One thing that has always bothered me is the lack of explanation that the A320's flight systems and in particular its alpha protection pay a huge part in the reasons why the landing was successful. I've always thought that this was because it was an all American hero (Sully) landing in America on an aircraft which isn't American but from Boeings biggest rivals, Airbus. A lot has been pointed at the safety or claimed lack of safety when aircraft have computers taking more and more of the flying loads aways from pilots and its this part of the book which I found the most interesting.

The author takes a little while looking at the fact that humans seem to have a trait of taking more risks in situations that are meant to be safe. Think of the Titanic, a ship which was meant to be un-sinkable and yet sunk. Part of the reason is that the ship took on icebergs which would have been avoided in other ships. A similar thing has happened with the A320 in the past, a pilot at an airshow decided to bypass the safety systems to push it are close to stall possible just off the ground. His decision to bypass 3 levels of protection meant his miscalcualtions cost people their lives. In the Hudson case, a great peice of flying by Sulley coupled with the flight protections lead of an incredible landing and the saving of many lives.

The only down point to the book for me is that I felt it was missing a chapter at the end to tie everything together. The last chapter doesnt this to a small extent but I was still left feeling that there was a chapter missing. ( )

Short book lengthened too much by addition of extraneous lists (types of birds that hit planes, although the bit about the fish that hit the plane midair because it was carried in a bird’s mouth is funny; all other non-bird animal strikes have been on the ground), which I suppose was done to justify the idea that this was a book. Still, there were fairly interesting parts, such as the captain’s deliberate attempt to use his brief celebrity to create some financial security for his family including his college-bound kids, and a dive into why an airline pilot today lacks financial security. I also learned that tests of airplane evacuations always went really well until the tester decided to give the participants small monetary incentives to get out first (to increase the similarity to a real accident), at which point they started to trample each other. ( )

Emersion journalism in the close and yet objective eye of Langewiesche. If he is interested in something, it is interesting and his writing makes it compelling. As much as Langewiesche is a pilot, he does a great job of giving credit to Sullenberger's success to the airplane he was flying and the engineers that built it. ( )

Emersion journalism in the close and yet objective eye of Langewiesche. If he is interested in something, it is interesting and his writing makes it compelling. As much as Langewiesche is a pilot, he does a great job of giving credit to Sullenberger's success to the airplane he was flying and the engineers that built it. ( )

It's a mantra of mine that there's no point reading about events in the newspaper because the whole truth will not surface until time has passed and someone has written a book about the incident. I am fascinated by technology and especially transportation technology and follow NTSB reports carefully and with interest since, as another favorite author, Henry Petroski has pointed out, we learn more from our failures than from our successes. But it's nice when you get a really good author to summarize things. Langewiesche is one of my favorite authors. A pilot himself, he has written extensively about flying, so he was a logical person to analyze the famous A320 landing in the Hudson. As even Sullenburger as pointed out, the resultant success was certainly no miracle, it was a tribute to training and the competence of the pilots. That they managed to pull it off in the midst of horrible union-management relationship is perhaps even more remarkable.

Sullenberger had a trait that was perhaps even more important than training, focus, the ability to exclude all outside distractions and zero in on what needed to be done at the time. This trait was even more evident after the landing when he was being interviewed and dissected on television. Langewiesche contrasts his reactions to that of Skiles, his co-pilot, a man of many thousands of hours of experience (albeit in successive airplane types as the airline kept switching) who will probably never make captain because of cutbacks in the industry and who only had a few dozen hours in the A320. Sullenberger's focus translated into a realization that this was an opportunity to gain financial security for his family (his pension had been wiped out and his salary cut by 40% even as US Airways executive pay had increased.) It would also provide the chance to say some things about the industry while people were listening. At the NTSB hearing, following adulation and applause from the audience, "he said, 'I am worried that the airline piloting profession will not be able to continue to attract the best and the brightest.' His message was that successive generations of pilots willing to work for lower wages might perform less well in flight, and especially during emergencies. Sullenberger seems to believe this, but it is a questionable assertion, since it links financial incentive to individual competence, and ignores the fact that, with exceptions, the 'best and the brightest” have never chosen to become airline pilots, at whatever salary, because of the terrible this-is-my-life monotony of the job. Furthermore, although unusual stupidity is often fatal in flying, the correlation between superior intelligence and safety is unproven, given the other factors that intrude—especially arrogance, boredom, and passive rebellions of various kinds. If you had to pick the most desirable trait for airline pilots, it would probably be placidity." Sullenberger was politically astute, unlike Skiles who had nothing nice to say about US Airways management, yet the book Sullenberger was carrying and reading on this trip was "Just Culture: Balancing Safety and Accountability, about precisely such issues in the airlines and similar organizations."

The A320 is a unique airplane, almost semi-robotic in design and the fact is that the plane did a lot of the flying after losing both engines. Pilots didn't like the idea behind the plane because in theory it was built on the principle that computers can fly better than any human and, indeed, should override pilots in times of emergency. (This is certainly the case in the AA crash in 2001 over New York when the co-pilot over stressed the rudder in reaction to wake turbulence.) The Airbus engineers "knew that the airplane’s flight-control computers had performed remarkably well, seamlessly integrating themselves into Sullenberger’s solutions and intervening assertively at the very end to guarantee a survivable touchdown. The test pilots believed that the airplane’s functioning was a vindication of its visionary design."

Both pilots were well-rested, at the beginning of a four-day trip that would involve switching airplanes with other crews as the airline attempts to keep airplanes constantly in the air generating revenue. While pay has been cut for pilots on most airlines, the job does allow for a considerable amount of time at home and Sullenberger had averaged 16 hours of flying per week. Because he lived far away from his home base, he had to "dead-head" often to his first flight of the rotation. US Airways was not the greatest company t work for. In and out of bankruptcy, surviving only because of post-2001 government bailouts, it had reduced costs by more than a billion dollars by shaving salaries of employees and reducing the number of aircraft. Sullenberger was quoted as saying the airline executives used "employees like an ATM." Finally it was taken over by America West, (which gave up its name and assumed US Airways as the corporate logo) a relatively well-run company partially wned by Airbus, which explains the parking of 737s and other non-Airbus models. But war had been declared between pilots of the former and the latter over the terms of the newly unified contract. When they left New York, the plane had an extremely experienced crew, the cabin attendants each having more than 25 years of experience, Doreen Welsh alone had 38 years of airline work. "Between the pilots up front and the flight attendants in the cabin, this was not a crew you wanted to complain to about the peanuts." That's not the only humor. Langewiesche remarks on the ever-increasing safety announcements: "the do-not-hide-in-the-bathrooms-and-try-to-smoke-after-disabling-the-smoke-detectors, the thank-you-for-flying-our-miserable-airline." Ironically, the one thing they did not mention was that the emergency slides could be disconnected ad used as life rafts. On a flight to Charlotte? Who needs life rafts? No mention was made of life-vests as US Airways, to save money, had disconnected the video system that discussed all the safety features including life-vests, which explains why so few passengers actually had them on. It was lucky no one drowned.

Traffic at LaGuardia that day was considered light. At most other airports in the country the same level of traffic would have been overwhelming. LaGuardia's controllers were brilliantly handling landing and departing flights on runways that crossed and interweaving snowplows on the runways at the same time. "He put Northwest into position on Runway 4, ready to roll through the first gap offered by the inbound traffic and the plows. By no means was he yet working at his full capacity. One gets the feeling he was simultaneously juggling eggs and maybe playing Scrabble, just to limber up for the evening rush still to come." If you ever fly United tune to channel 9 where you can listen in on the cockpit radio chatter. Fascinating. (If anyone really cares, let me know and I'll recount an astonishing conversation I heard flying into Allentown, PA, one afternoon.)

Bird strikes are fairly common (an earlier issue of Airways magazine has some rather interesting pictures of damage done to planes following collision with a bird) hitting planes several hundred thousand times between 1990 and 2007. On that day there had been no reports of birds (they are so common over NY what would be the point?) and even though they showed up on the raw radar image (it's cleaned up for controllers) it would have been of no use since the controllers would have had no idea of their altitude. Why the birds did not move out of the way is the source of some interesting speculation on the part of bird experts. The one I liked was "that in their own manner the geese might also simply have thought, “What the fuck! We have the right of way here!” He was joking, sort of."

This is a remarkable story, remarkably told, providing context and detail not available in one place elsewhere. It's also an encomium to a brilliantly designed airplane.
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