Chesley Sullenberger — A true hero
In my post about Obama’s hubris, David Foster left this great comment:
Aviation analogy: Here we have a guy who once flew a Cessna 152 around the pattern, on a sunny day, with an instructor sitting right beside him. Now he has somehow become pilot in command of a large and complex airliner, in instrument weather and with thunderstorms about, and with several of the aircraft systems known to be broken and other behaving strangely. We are the passengers.
We want him to maintain a good degree of self-confidence, but we also want him to understand the seriousness of the situation. And especially we want him to focus on flying the airplane rather than daydreaming about how wonderful his press clippings will be after he lands the plane.
I couldn’t help but think about this as I read about Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger III, a man who is a hero by any definition of the term. As the WSJ explains, what he did was something that was considered more of a hypothetical possibility (despite all those talks about water landings) more than a reality:
Although commercial jetliners are equipped with life vests and inflatable slides, there have been few successful attempts at water landings during the jet age. Indeed, even though pilots go through the motions of learning to ditch a plane in water, the generally held belief is that such landings would almost certainly result in fatalities.
Capt. Chesley B. Sullenberger III, a veteran US Airways pilot, pulled it off while simultaneously coping with numerous other challenges.
In the minutes after takeoff, the pilot managed to maneuver past the skyscrapers of Manhattan and into the crowded Hudson River, even though the engines were disabled after apparently hitting a flock of geese.
Passengers said the plane was vibrating violently and the cabin began to fill with smoke. To reach its splashdown spot, witnesses said the jet glided over the George Washington Bridge before plopping into the water.
“The fact that passengers were able to walk off that airplane and wait on the wing for rescuers to arrive is remarkable. It’s amazing,” said aviation consultant Tommy McFall, a former airline pilot and retired accident investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board.
In addition to a spectacular feat of piloting, Sully established his bona fides as a true caption by being the last one to leave the plane:
The pilot “did a masterful job of landing the plane in the river and then making sure that everybody got out,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg said. “He walked the plane twice after everybody else was off, and tried to verify that there was nobody else on board, and he assures us there was not.”
“He was the last one up the aisle and he made sure that there was nobody behind him.”
Although I suspect Sully was borne and raised with the character he displayed yesterday, I wasn’t the only one to guess, immediately, that at least part of the skill came from military training, a supposition that proved to be true.
Sully is an expert, a hero and a natural talent. So far, in terms of the role he has undertaken, Barack Obama has shown none of these qualities to date. Let’s hope, though, that he is indeed a natural talent and can step forward and pilot the national plane to a safe landing at the end of his term.
