For Fitchburg audience, co-pilot recounts Miracle on the Hudson landing
By Paula J. Owen, TELEGRAM & GAZETTE STAFF
FITCHBURG � The only procedures he had to go by were designed for a scenario where the plane was 30,000 feet in the air with adequate reaction time for the pilot to carry out the pages of checklists needed for a terrestrial landing. He was 3,000 feet up with seconds to respond and only the Hudson River for a landing strip.As the five-year anniversary of the Miracle on the Hudson landing nears, pilot Jeff Skiles spoke Tuesday night at Fitchburg Municipal Airport about the crash on the Hudson River in the Airbus A320 with 150 passengers on board.Before his presentation at Bullock Hangar to members of the Fitchburg Pilots Association and guests, the 53-year-old from Madison, Wis., said he didn't even realize it had been almost five years since the incident. It was, and still is, surreal to him, he said."It feels like it was someone else," Mr. Skiles said. "It was just three and a half minutes of my life. It wasn't what happened. It was what happened afterwards that was a life-changing event."What happened was that just a few short weeks after his training, while he was serving as co-pilot on the flight, a large flock of Canada geese took out both engines of the plane.Despite incredible technological advances in the last five years, Mr. Skiles said, birds hit commercial airplanes and take out engines all the time � but usually only one engine, not both.Within a six-month period after the Miracle on the Hudson, he said, around a half-dozen commercial airplanes lost one of their engines from birds."There is not much you can do to protect the engines from geese," he explained. "A really big flock shows up on the screen and the air traffic controllers see that it is showing on the screen and tell us, but it is difficult to tell at what altitude they are flying or if there is any danger."Mr. Skiles told the group weather wasn't a factor in the crash � though it became a huge factor when the crew and passengers were all exposed to the frigid water temperature later, on the 20-degree afternoon of Jan. 20, 2009.US Airways Flight 1549 was barreling along New York La Guardia Airport's main runway, headed for Charlotte, N.C. Mr. Skiles, who was first officer and flying manually, said it was his first trip in the airplane and first time he had met Capt. Chesley Sullenberger."We have very defined roles in any situation, even an emergency situation," he said. "I looked up slightly to the right to see a line of birds far too close to maneuver around. I thought for a moment they were perfectly spaced out."He said two geese went right through the core or "guts" of the right engine, and at least one went through the core of the left."I could hear the geese impacting on the airplane," he said."There was a lot of them."And then it was what he did not hear that was most frightening � both engines just completely quit, he said.The plane felt as if it was sagging, he said, and then "Sully" took over the aircraft."Everything was planned, acted out and choreographed," he said. "We changed roles."Mr. Skiles switched to his role as a troubleshooter and looked at procedures for something he practiced in a simulator in training a few weeks before � which was designed to be done at 30,000 feet."It was not designed to be done at 3,000 feet in three minutes' time," he said.The men were lined up with the Hudson River and were looking at roads, skyscrapers and Central Park � filled with rocks � to the sides."The passengers know something is horribly wrong," he said. "Some saw birds, and there were flames shooting out of the left engine like a flamethrower."The right engine wasn't working at all, he said.The pilots tried to restart the engines because they didn't know they had lost power completely.They were gliding as every alarm in the cockpit was going off, some erroneously, from cascading failures overwhelming the system, he said."Sully grabbed the public address telephone and said, 'This is the captain. Brace for impact.' "That signaled the flight attendants to begin emergency procedures, he said.Some of the passengers wrote notes to leave in their shirt pockets, and a large percentage of them texted loved ones on the phones they were supposed to have shut down when they left the gate, he said.Those last-minute messages to those they thought they would never see again were unneeded.In the Miracle on the Hudson, every passenger and crew member survived, he said.Contact Paula Owen at . Follow her on Twitter @PaulaOwenTG.