[Jim727]

The planes also began to change. Where a Vietnam-era pilot could fly more or less by stick and rudder, today’s pilots fly primarily by computer. Sully, for instance, was flying the Airbus 320. On older aircraft, a pilot pulls back on a wheel attached to cables that literally pull the plane up. On an Airbus 320, he pulls back a joystick that sends a signal to the computer’s auto-throttle. If he’s doing it wrong, the computer often corrects him, thrusting if he doesn’t do it soon enough, never stalling if he pulls back too hard. Takeoff has preprogrammed speeds; the pilot just moves a lever into a notch. Practically everything about the Airbus assumes the human factor to be the most dangerous thing about the flight. Incredibly, you can go on autopilot from as low as 100 feet in the air. Although some pilots worry about overreliance on technology and the distractions it can cause, most like a tricked-out plane. Still, there’s no getting around the fact that automation has taken control away from pilots. It’s the same with regard to air-traffic controllers and airline operations. Pilots used to have to navigate themselves; now it’s all done with GPS systems. Pilots used to have more discretion over takeoff times and maintenance decisions; now they’re frequently overruled.

The state of the airline industry has also diminished pilots’ status. The modern era of airline mergers and bankruptcies and rising fuel costs has meant extended flying schedules, wage freezes, and pension cuts. Today starting salaries at some airlines are as low as $25,000. Sully’s retirement plan was taken away during one airline bankruptcy, and over two decades, his pay has increased by just 6 percent. “Pilots are being treated as a commodity,” says Gary Hummel, training committee chairman for the U.S. Airline Pilots Association. “Until you need them to park a plane in the Hudson. Then you say, ‘Hey, there might be more to this job.’ ”

Pilots and pilot advocates worry that great aviators may be being bred out of the system. “I have a son who is 27 and a software engineer,” says Hummel. “I have a daughter who is 25 and is a professional nurse. They both graduated from good colleges. Both of them have flown an airplane, but I told them, ‘Find another profession, because you won’t be able to feed your family or have a retirement in this one.’ My daughter earned more in her first year as a nurse than Jeff Skiles, Sully’s first officer on Flight 1549, earns after eighteen years of dedicated service with US Airways. Why would I encourage them to be a professional pilot?”

Pilots have a hard time making a case about the potential effects of all of these changes, because the airlines’ safety records are so impressive at the moment. “You go and argue with either the public or the CEOs that there’s going to be an impact on safety at some point,” says Bob Ober. “The statistics make it hard to make that case to someone who isn’t intimately acquainted with day-to-day operations, sitting in the cockpit next to people. But the guys in the industry know it’s got to.”

So what does happen when the unexpected happens? In an emergency, what separates a great pilot—a Sully—from one who fails catastrophically?

Keeping calm is clearly an essential factor, but what’s that a function of? In 1989, United Airlines Flight 232, a DC-10 piloted by captain Al Haynes, crash-landed in Iowa at Sioux City Airport. The craft had lost one engine and all three hydraulic systems, forcing an emergency landing. One hundred and eighty-five people survived the crash. In part, self-preservation is what helped keep Haynes calm, he says. “Panic just won’t do you any good. From day one, you know that if you panic, you’re dead.” Not only does piloting self-select for people who tend to handle stress effectively, but the airline industry has developed sophisticated systems for ferreting out candidates who aren’t unusually self-possessed. “When I was hired,” says one retired commercial pilot, “you got hired on the basis of your qualifications, your interviews, and that was it. Now you see a shrink, you’ve got batteries of psychological tests, you’ve got an interview process to go through with very sophisticated questioning.”

The thousands of training hours pilots log also help them numb their stress, Haynes says. “By constantly being retrained, and going through all kinds of different problems and having to do it calmly and efficiently, that just sticks with you. So when the time comes that something really goes wrong, that’s inherent in you and you just do it.” Today’s flight simulators can mimic almost any situation. “They’re actually a little more difficult to fly than the airplane, so if you can fly the simulator, then you can certainly fly the airplane.”

In recent years, the old paradigm of the lone pilot’s single-handedly saving the day has been discredited in favor of assiduous collaboration. The approach is known as Crew Resource Management, and it’s seen as another critical tool for successfully managing a crisis. Haynes’s United Flight 232 is taught as a case study in CRM. Denny Fitch was a flight instructor and check airman who happened to be a passenger on Flight 232. When Fitch sent word to the cockpit that he was intimately familiar with the systems of a DC-10, Haynes brought him forward, and he and the rest of the crew worked together. “Any other captain probably would have said, ‘Why don’t you shut the hell up? I’m busy up here,’ ” says Gary Hummel. “But Captain Haynes said, ‘Absolutely. I’ll take all the help I can get.’ ” It was only by working together—Fitch had knowledge of the plane’s hydraulic systems that proved critical—that Haynes and the others managed to jury-rig an effective solution. “If you read the cockpit transcript, there’s no arguing at all,” Haynes says. “None of us knew what to do, and we’re just working together to find a way to get the thing down to the ground.”

The airlines have since concluded that the least communicative pilots and crews in crises are the ones that fail the most, and CRM is now a standard part of flight training. Simulated flights are even videotaped and critiqued to maximize collaboration among pilots and between pilots and crew. “In the debriefing,” Hummel says, “you actually sit down with the captain and the co-pilot and say, ‘Hey, when you were having that emergency situation, and you looked over at the co-pilot and said, “Give me the gear now”—how did that come across?’ And the co-pilot can say, ‘Well, he kind of shut me out. It was like he was screaming at me.’ And the captain might sit back and say, ‘You know what? I didn’t know I came across like a jerk. I could have said, “Hey, how about the gear, please?” I could have included him and made him more inclusive.’ ”

At the same time, a pilot has to know when to take over an aircraft himself and simply improvise. Al Slader was the co-pilot of United Airlines Flight 811, a 747 that was en route from Honolulu to New Zealand in 1989 when a cargo door failed, blowing out several rows of seats. With a gaping hole in the side of their plane, the crew was still able to make an emergency landing back in Hawaii. Nine people died, but 346 survived. “We had two engines out, Nos. 3 and 4, same side,” Slader says. “We were gonna go down; it was just a matter of where.” United’s procedure for severe engine damage is to pull the firewall shutoff, he says. “If I had done that, we’d have lost two hydraulic systems”—half the plane’s flight controls—“and we’d have probably ended up in the water. But I didn’t do that.”

In emergency situations, Denny Fitch says, you have to “live by what you can use out of the book, then adapt your airmanship if it’s not in the book. You just have to come up with your answers to problems that nobody ever thought of before.” Old-fashioned optimism, Fitch says, can also help. “My attitude from the very beginning of that incident was that we weren’t going to crash,” he says. He had a clear vision of the desired outcome: “We are going to successfully land this thing, with the wheels down, rolling down a runway, and come to a stop. The evacuation doors are going to open, the slides are going to deploy, and 296 people are going to slide out safely. Then we are going to get ground transportation, go to the nearest bar, and I am buying.”

“Twenty-five years ago, we were a step below astronauts,” says one veteran pilot. “Now we’re a step above bus drivers. And the bus drivers have a better pension.”

When you break the rules, of course, you’ve got to get it right. That’s what leaves other pilots in awe of the Hayneses and Sladers and Sullys of the world. “Pilots are on-off switch people,” says Jack Stephan, another US Airways pilot. “We go through a decision tree, through procedures and training and checklists, and the pilot knows what to do. Captain Sullenberger displayed the type of piloting that’s required when the checklist really doesn’t cover the situation. There is no way to train for this. Clearly this was a hand-flying masterpiece.”

Being lucky doesn’t hurt, either. It was pure chance that Sully had been trained as a glider pilot. It also helped that the sky was clear and the winds light that day. “If Sully had been a mile or so in almost any other direction across the river, he wouldn’t have made it,” Slader notes. “He wouldn’t have been able to glide into the river. So he did a heck of a good job, but there was a little bit of luck involved. Same thing with ours. We were lucky.”

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