[Jim727]

Some experts worry that today’s pilots—with their lack of military experience, their aversion to risk, their reliance on automation—are perhaps less capable of improvising in an emergency. They may be the right men for providing the greatest margin of safety for the greatest number—and in a world in which 80,000 planes take off and land in the United States every day, having that kind of pilot corps makes sense. But what if you are one of the unlucky few who wind up in a plane that’s in trouble? On that plane, you may want the pilot who dodged enemy fire over Vietnam, the seat-of-the-pants stick-and-rudder guy. “I’m not suggesting that a young pilot or new pilot could not handle a situation,” says Jack Stephan. “But would you want your kid in that flight?”

The importance of a pilot’s ability to improvise in an emergency isn’t lost on passengers. Haynes, Fitch, and Slader all stay in touch with some of the survivors of their flights. They have dinner together, see shows, go to ball games. Fitch says he gets a Christmas card every year from a family whose baby daughter survived the crash. She’s in her twenties now. “I’ve watched that child grow,” Fitch says. “The note would include, you know, ‘Look at her, this is the life you saved.’ What a sweet reminder of how they regarded me for my efforts.”

David Sontag, a 74-year-old screenwriter turned professor, was flying home to North Carolina on US Airways Flight 1549 after attending the funeral of his brother. From the back of the plane, in seat 23F, he had heard the bang a minute into the flight. From his window he could see flames coming out of one engine. The next five minutes were a blur of fear: the impact, the evacuation, waiting on the wing to be rescued. Before they hit the water, he said a prayer: “God, my family does not need two deaths in one week.”

Last week, Sontag wrote letters to Sully and the rest of the crew. “I tried to personalize each of them as best I can,” he says—even those to the flight attendants in the front whom he never met. In his letter to Sully, he says, he thanked the pilot “for his extraordinary skill and clear thinking and decision-making, and the calm and professionalism he exhibited.” He included words that he spoke at his brother’s funeral, back in New York: “We leave a little bit of ourselves with everybody we come in contact with.” The whole crew, Sontag says, “would live on with everybody who was on that flight—and everybody we touch with our lives.”

Sontag believes Sully did one crucial thing that day that prevented a widespread panic: He didn’t announce “Brace for impact” until it was absolutely necessary. “My feeling is he waited that long to keep people from freaking out,” Sontag says. “By saying it that close to impact, all you could do was put your head down. If that was his choice, I thought it a good one.”

Of course, Sully also might have been too busy gliding over the Hudson to keep the passengers posted. But Sontag prefers to think he was in control the entire time—that it really was his aircraft. So do we all. For many of us, faith in the captain is the only thing that gets us on a plane.