[R-G] Pilot hero blasts deregulation

[Sid Shniad]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/02/24/chesley-sully-sullenberge_0_n_169512.html 


Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger To Congress: 

My Pay Has Been Cut 40 Percent In Recent Years, Pension Terminated 

The air traffic controller who handled Flight 1549 thought ditching in 
the Hudson River amounted to a death sentence for all aboard. Now the 
veteran pilot who pulled off the ditching safely says harsh pay cuts are 
driving experienced pilots from the cockpit. 

"People don't survive landings on the Hudson River," 10-year veteran 
controller Patrick Harten told a House subcommittee Tuesday in his first 
public description of how he tried to land the jetliner that lost power 
in both jets when it hit Canada geese after takeoff from New York's 
LaGuardia Airport. 

"I thought it was his own death sentence," Harten said of the moment 
when US Airways pilot Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger radioed that he was 
going into the river. Defying the odds, Sullenberger safely glided the 
Airbus A320 down and all 155 people aboard survived the Jan. 15 water 
landing. 

Sullenberger, a 58-year-old who joined a US Airways predecessor in 1980, 
told the House aviation subcommittee that his pay has been cut 40 
percent in recent years and his pension has been terminated and replaced 
with a promise "worth pennies on the dollar" from the federally created 
Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. These cuts followed a wave of airline 
bankruptcies after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks compounded by 
the current recession, he said. 

"The bankruptcies were used by some as a fishing expedition to get what 
they could not get in normal times," Sullenberger said of the airlines. 
He said the problems began with the deregulation of the industry in the 
1970s. 

The reduced compensation has placed "pilots and their families in an 
untenable financial situation," Sullenberger said. "I do not know a 
single professional airline pilot who wants his or her children to 
follow in their footsteps." 

The subcommittee of the House Transportation and Infrastructure 
Committee heard from the crew of Flight 1549, the air traffic controller 
who handled the flight and aviation experts to examine what safety 
lessons could be learned from the accident. 

Sullenberger's copilot Jeffrey B. Skiles said unless federal laws are 
revised to improve labor-management relations "experienced crews in the 
cockpit will be a thing of the past." And Sullenberger added that 
without experienced pilots "we will see negative consequences to the 
flying public." 

Sullenberger himself has started a consulting business to help make ends 
meet. Skiles added, "For the last six years, I have worked seven days a 
week between my two jobs just to maintain a middle class standard of 
living." 

Controller Harten riveted the hearing with his account of the 3.5 
minutes during which he spoke with the crippled jetliner after the bird 
strike at an altitute of 2,750 feet. 

When Sullenberger said he couldn't make it either back to LaGuardia or 
to Teterboro Airport in New Jersey and would ditch in the the Hudson 
River that separates New York and New Jersey, Harten testified, "I 
believed at that moment I was going to be the last person to talk to 
anyone on that plane alive." 

But Sullenberger delicately glided the jetliner into the river in one 
piece near ferry boats that picked the passengers off the planes wings 
before it sank in the icy waters. 

Harten, who has spent his entire career at the radar facility in 
Westbury, N.Y., that handles air traffic within 40 miles of three major 
airports, struggled vainly to help get the airliner safely to a landing 
strip. 

Making lightning-quick decisions, Harten communicated with 14 other 
entities in the three minutes after the bird strike as he diverted other 
aircraft and advised controllers elsewhere to hold aircraft and clear 
runways for 1549. 

First, Harten tried to return the plane to LaGuardia Airport, asking the 
airport's tower to clear runway 13. But Sullenberger calmly reported: 
"We're unable." 

Then Harten offered another LaGuardia runway. Again, Sullenberger 
reported, "Unable." He said he might be able to make Teterboro Airport 
in New Jersey. 

But when Harten directed Sullenberger to turn onto a heading for 
Teterboro, the pilot responded: "We can't do it .... We're going to be 
in the Hudson." 

"I asked him to repeat himself even though I heard him just fine," said 
Harten. "I simply could not wrap my mind around those words." 

At that moment, Harten said he lost radio contact with flight and was 
certain it "had gone down." 

Afterward, Harten said he told his wife, "I felt like I had been hit by 
a bus." 

NTSB investigators have said bird remains found in both engines of the 
downed plane have been identified as Canada geese. 

Sullenberger and Skiles said anyone who's spent much time in cockpits 
has encountered bird strikes but that this one was exceptionally severe 
in knocking out both engines. Some gulls don't even dent the airplane, 
Skiles said, but this "was a bigger bird than I've ever hit before." 

The bird problem has been growing, said John E. Ostrom, chairman of the 
Bird Strike Committee-USA and a manager at the Minneapolis-St. Paul 
International Airport. Since 1990, the number of Canada geese that live 
year-round in the country rather than migrating has grown from 1 million 
to 3.9 million and the population of 24 of the 36 largest bird species 
has increased, Ostrom testified. 

The crew and passengers of a helicopter that crashed en route to an oil 
platform on Jan. 4 weren't as lucky. The National Transportation Safety 
Board reported Monday that investigators have found evidence birds were 
involved in the accident near Morgan City, La., that killed eight of 
nine people aboard.