Sully and Skiles yet again - Marvellous analysis from Flight Safety Information

 

THE MARVELOUS ADVENTURE OF SULLY AND SKILES

By Roger Rapoport

FSI Contributing Editor

It only took US Airways Flight 1539 pilots Chesley Sullenberger and Jeffrey Skiles a little over three minutes to safely land their wounded Airbus in the Hudson, saving the lives of all 151 people on board. The National Transportation Safety Board investigation into the wisdom of their decision took many months.

Director Clint Eastwood's Sully version, compresses the NTSB's deep dive into a much shorter time frame in New York and Washington. The Captain's agony and attempts to chill out by jogging Manhattan in mid-January, 2009, is interrupted by meetings with union reps and the occasional call home. How, he wants to know, is his California family faring on reduced pay, slashed due to US Airways ways cost cutting necessary to buy more fly by wire planes from Airbus. 

 
This is a fascinating arc for a not to be missed aviation film sure to generate endless Oscar buzz for terrific costars Tom Hanks and Aaron Eckhart. Of course the real investigation stretched on well into 2009. As the accident investigators hauled both Airbus engines out of the frigid river, the Miracle On The Hudson became the bright spot in a year that saw 14 airline crashes taking the lives of 458 people from Comros to Amsterdam. 

More than half these victims were aboard another Airbus, Air France 447, which disappeared in the mid-Atlantic a few months later. Despite this later tragedy, Airbus enthusiasts like author William Langewiesche insists "there are hundreds of people alive today who owe every breath they take to the arcane philosophy behind the Airbus design."

The real safety problem, argues Langewiesche, is "that plenty of once-excellent pilots grow unsafe with time. They become arrogant, or bored or complacent. They drink, they fade. They erode. They become bitter about life or their bosses....these are difficult traits to control for, particularly in a crowd that tends to be self-impressed and is imbued with a union mind-set that holds employment seniority to be an inviolable measure of privilege...."

Is pilot error always at the heart of every aviation accident, or in this case, a water landing that totaled the plane due the dismay of US Airway's insurors? Sully laudably cross examines this question in a way seldom seen in Hollywood dramas. Unlike the preposterous Denzel Washington vehicle Flight, which parodies pilots as horny, alcoholic, drug crazed egomaniacs trying to fly inverted jets while falling down drunk, Hanks and Eckhart, as Sullenberger and Skiles, come off as poster children for the Airline Pilots Association. 

Their story focuses on the central question being asked about more than 90 commercial airline crashes since Flight 1539 immortalized this dynamic cockpit duo. What would the pilots lost on crashes such as Air France 447 or still missing Malaysia Air 370 have to say were they able to talk to their accident investigators. 

Plenty as it turns out.

In the Washington NTSB hearings on Flight 1539, a lead accident investigators notes this is the first time he has had the pleasure of sitting with the captain and first officer while listening to the cockpit voice recording of an airplane crash.

One NTSB theory, supported by Airbus simulations, suggested that Sully/Skiles , their crew and passengers would have never needed to towel off, if they had simply returned to base at LaGuardia or diverted to nearby Teterboro, New Jersey. Of course, as Sullenberger correctly points out, the Airbus simulator jockeys back in Toulouse rehearsed both landings 17 times. They also knew that their aircraft was going to lose both engines due to a bird strike, at the lowest recorded altitude in commercial aviation history.

Programmed into a real life reenactment of the accident, with about 35 seconds to react and recover from the double engine failure, these Airbus simulator pilots crashed into residential areas on both approaches. Clearly the copilots had the right stuff and were wise to glide to a safe water landing in the Hudson.
Sullenberger has said famously, "No matter how much technology is available, an airplane is still ultimately an airplane. The physics are the same. And the basic skills may ultimately be required when either the automation fails or it's no longer appropriate to use it.... "We need to know not only what to do but why we do it. So that when there is no time to consult every written guidance, we can set clear priorities, and follow through with them and execute them well."

By the time Sullenberger headed home to his family and had a chance to return his dried out library copy of, Just Culture: Balancing Safety and Accountability, Flight 1539 was proof positive that the number one safety system on any aircraft is a well trained pilot.

Editor's Note: Look for more soon on Sully from FSI Contributing Editor Roger Rapoport.

Roger Rapoport is the producer of the feature film Pilot Error .
He can be reached at rogerdrapoport@me.com or (231) 720-0930