Talkie Tuesday: Sully

"This is the captain. Brace for impact."

Hello everyone!

Now, I will admit - generally speaking I don't fly often. Mostly because I have never had much opportunity, and as a second point because I have not really had much reason to, to begin with. 

But somehow I found myself rather intrigued by the TV show Mayday, which mostly describes air crash investigations after the disasters that have taken place during the years since airplanes have become the usual mode of transport.

It's not exactly something that makes sense, but bear with me here.

At one point, I accidentally stumbled across the episode that talked about a landing on the Hudson river. I was intrigued - was that even possible? Normally, when you imagine several hundred tons of aircraft landing on water, the mental image is that it's going to break apart, violently, water being like concrete at those speeds and altitudes.

Somehow, however, this plane managed it - and so when news broke that Tom Hanks would be playing the pilot from that same situation in a biopic, Sully, I was so on board the plane. Pun intended.

Allow me to review the so-called 'miracle on the Hudson': the plane in question left La Guardia airport, piloted by the first officer, and took off normally. It was a cold morning in January, and everything seemed to be fine, everyone was in good spirits, and they were climbing to cruising altitude when the first officer and the captain all of a sudden noticed something going directly for them.

Birds.

Namely, geese, who collided - violently - with the plane and smashed through both its motors, causing severe damage and forcing the captain to take control of the aircraft while sending a mayday message back to La Guardia that they would need to come back for an emergency landing.

However, it soon became clear that this would be impossible considering the amount of damage sustained, the lack of altitude, and decreasing speed, at which point the captain decided it would be too risky to try and fly to any airport - Teteboro also being on the right-hand side - and instead chose to touch it down in the middle of the Hudson river. This was effectively what he did, too, saving the lives of all 155 souls on board, both passengers and crew.

Now to the movie.

It's an interesting mix of the NTSB investigation of just why, exactly, both motors failed at the same time (birds were not initially considered as the damaging factor until the motors were found and inspected) and whether or not the captain made the right decision about landing.

In between this, we get to see a live-action replay, and wonderful performance by Tom Hanks and Aaron Eckhart, who grapple with the plane and try to land it safely for everyone on board.

The movie largely focuses on a negative approach, painting the NTSB as an agency which was looking solely for human error and a factor that they could blame on either of the pilots, to the dismay and shock of said pilots, planting doubts in the captain's mind about whether or not he had made the right call.

The focus rests heavily on computerised data and tests run with the knowledge that, immediately after the bird collision, the pilots would head back to the airport.

This is the point where Tom Hanks, portraying Sully, really shines, as he argues that in computerising everything and relying so heavily on all the printed information, the investigators have forgotten and exclused the human factor and the time for mistakes and deliberations: when something occurs on a plane, the pilot does not actually immediately go for the nearest landing strip. Pilots are trained in specific counter-measures to try and work out the problem and keep the plane in the air, which means that as they move through the steps and what they need to do, the time they could have for actually turning the plane around and getting back to their starting point is lost, or diminishes.

This is proven when the simulations are run by including a half-minute delay, attributing it to going through the manual and finding the correct procedure to deal with dual engine failure, in which cases none of the simulations make it back to the airport, but crash, which would result in multiple, if not all, casualties.

On top of that, both recovered motors show that they were severely damaged by the bird collision, and despite technicians swearing up and down that the left one had still been idling - and thus would have had enough thrust to bring the plane back, if needed - there actually was no more power anywhere on the plane.

Sully and his co-pilot are cleared of any errors, and praised as heroes for what they had done, and life slowly settles back to normal after that.

I have to admit, I wasn't very keen on the negative approach to the whole movie, but I WAS impressed by Hanks' acting chops. I can't even name one movie recently in which he hasn't been extraordinary (he even made Bridge of Spies worth watching!). The supporting cast was marvelous, and the recreation of the plane's incident, both in the cockpit and in the passenger portion, felt incredibly realistic and terrifying.

All in all, it's a movie I highly recommend, if you ever have 90 minutes to spare!

xx

*images and video not mine