At 3:27 on the afternoon of January 15, 2009, US Airways Flight 1549 was climbing out of LaGuardia Airport in New York, bound for Charlotte, North Carolina. It was the first officer’s turn to fly. At about 2,800 feet above the ground, the captain said one word: “birds.”
The cockpit voice recorder caught thumps and a shudder. Both engines began to wind down. “Uh oh,” said the first officer, Jeffrey Skiles. The captain, Chesley Sullenberger: “we got one rol- both of ’em rolling back.”
The two men had not flown together until that week. According to the National Transportation Safety Board, this was the first trip sequence the pair had been scheduled to fly together, four days that began on January 12. Flight 1549 was the last leg. Skiles had 15,643 hours in the air, but only 37 of them in the A320, the type he was sitting in. Sullenberger had 19,663.
About 13 seconds after “birds,” Sullenberger said, “My aircraft.” He later explained the split to Congress. He would fly, “since I had the greater experience in this particular aircraft type.” Skiles would run the checklist, “since he had so recently been through training on the airplane and knew the checklist intimately.” When the captain called for the checklist for a loss of thrust in both engines, about 17 seconds after the strike by his account, the first officer already had it out.
For the next three minutes they worked in parallel. Skiles read through the restart steps and called out airspeed and altitude. Sullenberger flew, talked to air traffic control, ruled out LaGuardia and Teterboro, and chose the river. Near the end he turned to his first officer: “got any ideas?” Skiles: “actually not.”
The recording ended at 3:30:43, three and a half minutes after the strike.
The board later called the crew’s coordination “excellent and professional.” Each pilot, it found, “adhered to his role,” and the captain “used the first officer as a resource by requesting his input.” Both pilots indicated to investigators that crew resource management, a style of cockpit teamwork US Airways built into all its training, was integral to the outcome. The captain, as the report summarizes him, credited it with giving pilots the skills “to build a team quickly.”
All 150 passengers and five crew got out of the airplane and were rescued. One flight attendant and four passengers were seriously injured.