On the afternoon of January 15, 2009, Captain Chesley ‘Sully’ Sullenberger and First Officer Jeff Skiles boarded US Airways Flight 1549 from LaGuardia Airport in New York. The Airbus A320 collided with a flock of birds at an altitude of about 2,800 feet (850 metres) three minutes after takeoff. Due to this both the engines were damaged. Although he was advised to turn back or land at a nearby airport, the captain, drawing on his decades of experience, felt that the aircraft had neither enough speed nor altitude left. He took an immediate decision and followed his instincts without following standard protocol. Without much thought they decided to make an emergency controlled water landing (ditching) on the icy Hudson River. In that decision he had literally put his life and that of all the passengers at stake. All 155 passengers and crew survived. The next day I also wrote an editorial on the same actual incident in DNA newspaper in Bengaluru. While the passengers and their families were hailing Sully as a hero, the insurance lobby was trying to prove his actions were a mistake. Ultimately Sali won in the court. In 2016, a film ‘Sali’ was also made on this real incident. Little did I know that this Tuesday, June 9, I would be narrating this same real story line by line to some passengers, that too while sitting in a plane for five hours. At 3.50 pm on Tuesday, flight number 6E 5131, an Airbus 321 Neo (registration number: VT-NHN), took off on schedule from Terminal 1 of Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport with 221 passengers on board. Some passengers cheered, ‘Wow, we’re on time.’ It was a normal day not only for the regular passengers but also for Captain Gaurav and his second-in-command Ashish. The aircraft slowly moved from the far end of Terminal-1 towards the other end of Terminal-2 and waited for the final clearance from Air Traffic Control (ATC) to enter the runway so that it could take-off to reach Bhopal. It was quite exciting for the passengers to see this waiting area from the windows on the right side of the plane. At this very place, within a span of just one minute, many planes are seen landing one after the other and also at the rear end of the plane, the planes are seen standing in a queue one behind the other, like cars standing in bumper-to-bumper traffic. At 4.03 pm, ATC gave clearance and the pilot took a right turn and parked the aircraft at a place marked with white paint for a few seconds so that he could throttle the engine and achieve maximum speed. The plane started moving rapidly on the main runway. In the next 5-7 seconds, its front wheel was about to rise in the air when the Captain applied emergency brakes. Closed the throttle to reduce speed and postponed take-off. The sudden stop of the plane caused shocks to the passengers’ necks, but no one was injured. However, a wave of fear ran through the cabin. The captain immediately took the plane to the parking bay. Perhaps ATC had given such instructions so that busy air traffic was not disrupted. A team of aircraft maintenance engineers began investigating the suspected malfunction. For the second time, about two hours before take-off, the captain came on the passenger addressing system and said that ‘due to technical difficulties we had to take this decision, because safety is our priority.’ And they were absolutely right. The bottom line is that if you are the captain of anything, you have to take the final decision without thinking about ‘what will people say’. Because lives are linked to that decision.
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N. Raghuraman’s Column: It is always the responsibility of the ‘Captain’ to take the final decision
