HERO OF THE HUDSON
Daily Express Thursday December 1 2016 in Los Angeles
AS US Airways Flight 1549 fell from the sky above New York after hitting a flock of geese shortly after take-off, passengers screamed, sobbed, thought of their loved ones and offered up desperate prayers as they awaited almost certain death.
But one man among the 155 souls aboard the crippled jet that icy morning in January 2009 was preternaturally calm: Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, played by Tom Hanks in the dramatic true-life movie Sully, which opens in Britain tomorrow.
“I didn’t think I was going to die but I never thought about my family once,” says Sully, aged 65. “I never thought about anything except flying the aeroplane, making the right choices.
“I knew we had little time before our flight path was going to meet the surface of the earth. I had to make sure it was in the best possible place. I knew from the outset it was going to be the most horrific, challenging experience I’d ever had in an aeroplane.”
But Sully had no idea that landing the plane safely on the Hudson River, saving all 155 lives, would be only the start of his ordeal. His life was turned upside down when he was hailed a hero, then almost destroyed when investigators blamed him for the crash, before finally being vindicated.
He loathed being called a hero, pursued by TV cameras and intrusive fans. He was invited to President Obama’s inauguration and awarded medals. The Republican party asked him to run for Congress and a cocktail was even named in his honour. Tom Hanks recalls meeting Sully at an Oscars party weeks after the crash and says: “He was like a combination of Elvis and John Wayne.”
But the intensely private pilot hated being praised just for doing his job. “I didn’t like having that pushed in my direction constantly,” he says. “But I understand why people do that… at the time the world needed it. It gave us hope. It was a confirmation that human nature is good and not merely about greed.”
HOWEVER, it took a long time for Sully to calm his nerves, he confesses. “In the first few weeks I couldn’t sleep more than 30 or 40 minutes. It took me about two-and-a-half months before my blood pressure returned to normal… it was so intense.”
Yet worse was to come when the official crash inquiry questioned whether Sully had needlessly endangered lives and should have attempted a return to New York’s LaGuardia airport.
Sully had practised water landings in a flight simulator but confesses: “I never thought anything like this would happen to me. I’d been flying aeroplanes for 42 years, I had 20,000 hours in the air and in all that time I’d never experienced in-flight failure of even one engine. I was almost 58 years old and thought it probably never would happen tomorrow. That’s why it was such a shock.”
At only 3,000ft above New York when both engines failed, Sully explained he had only moments to make his life-or-death decision.
“You need to be able to get right something you’ve never done before, all in 208 seconds,” he says. After an agonising wait the National Transportation Safety Board agreed that Sully had made the right decision and confirmed that his actions had saved lives.
Tall and slender with receding white hair and neat moustache, exuding gravitas and professionalism, Sully sought solace where he felt most comfortable: in the air.
“After about seven months I did go back to flying,” he says. “It felt good, like coming home.”
Sully wrote a bestselling memoir about his fateful flight and it was his friend and fellow pilot, Star Wars icon Harrison Ford, who first suggested it would make a good movie, sending it to a producer.
“Harrison said; ‘You have given the reader and the viewer a gift because of the unnecessary honesty of the book.’ It was my own flaws or concerns or feelings that make this a true story.”
However Sully feared that the film could expose painful secrets from his private life as well.
“I was 44 when my father committed suicide on December 7, 1995,” he says. “I still remember it was a Thursday. Until then I knew only that he had his ‘blue funk,’ his dark days, but not the depths to which he was pulled.
“He had just been discharged from the hospital after major surgery and, facing a long convalescence at home, perhaps he thought he was being noble by sparing my
The pilot played by Tom Hanks who saved 155 lives admits he didn’t want the film made in case it revealed family secrets
mother the burden of caring for him. It may never have occurred to him that she was the one left to find him, to call 911 and to clean up the bedroom where he shot himself. He left no note.
“For me there was shock, disbelief – and anger. I had young children. How could he remove himself from watching them grow up?”
Sully became a suicide prevention activist but was concerned that Hollywood might exploit his family’s suffering and issued a heartfelt plea to the film’s director Clint Eastwood. “I said; ‘I hope you take good care of us because this is our lives. A lot of people will see this story and to them this will be the truth.’”
Sully praises Hanks’ performance, saying, “He has definitely plumbed the depths… he’s spot on in the emotional temperature of the film in every part.
“Tom said when he watched the film that there is a palpable sense of foreboding. You can feel the dread, you can see it on his face.”
After the harrowing investigation into the crash, Sully retired from commercial flying at the age of 59, becoming an airline safety consultant and motivational speaker. To his chagrin he will forever be known as the hero of the “miracle on the Hudson”.
Hanks and Eastwood have each played big-screen heroes but both admit that Sully’s heroism is not in their own DNA. “I haven’t done anything that’s near-death,” says Hanks. “I think there are four roles for us in real life: you can be a hero, villain, coward or bystander – and I think I’m a bystander.”
Eastwood confesses his own lack of heroism: “You think of Iwo Jima or someplace where some fella fell on a hand grenade to save his friends. Most people if they see a hand grenade would start running in every other direction and I’d be right there pushing them out of the way, like; ‘Get me out of here!’”
The Dirty Harry actor recalls no heroic thoughts when he was a 21-year-old passenger in a US Navy bomber that crash-landed in the ocean off San Francisco in 1951. “You get to that moment where, this is it,” he says. “Some people live through this and some people don’t. That was all I thought about. Fortunately once we’d got in the water I felt much better.”
For Sully, viewing the film for the first time recently with his wife and two adult daughters was “very moving”. He adds: “It was otherworldly, like an out of body experience, to see someone else say my words on screen.”
And he still flies private planes, explaining: “That’s my life’s passion. I love it so much. It’s a very comfortable place to be.”