Some on board had already written farewell messages.Īs well as a style, pilots also have a language all their own. I trust you are not in too much distress.' Happily for all, Moody was able to restart the engines when the aircraft, in glide mode, exited the ash cloud. We are doing our damnedest to get them going again.

In 1982, when his British Airways Boeing 747 flew through a cloud of volcanic ash over Indonesia and all four engines were progressively snuffed out, Captain Eric Moody demonstrated an abundance of The Right Stuff when he made one of the all-time gold-medal 'This is your captain speaking' announcements. He later became a test pilot and the first to officially break the sound barrier, at the controls of a Bell X-1 while nursing broken ribs sustained in a fall from a horse two days earlier.Īnd while the pilot of your next flight might not have Yeager's West Virginia drawl, the common factor among pilots is a laconic understatement that transcends national speech patterns. Yeager was a World War II fighter pilot who once downed five German aircraft in a single day, enough to qualify for the 'ace' tag on that day's efforts alone. See also: What it's really like to be an airline pilotĪccording to Wolfe, the template for that delivery and that voice was laid down by Chuck Yeager, the uber stick-and-rudder pilot and hero of Wolfe's novel. 'Anyone who travels very much on airlines in the United States soon gets to know the voice of the airline pilot… coming over the intercom… with a particular drawl, a particular folksiness, a particular down-home calmness that is so exaggerated it begins to parody itself… the voice that tells you, as the airliner is caught in thunderheads and goes bolting up and down a thousand feet at a single gulp, to check your seat belts because 'uh, folks, it might get a little choppy'…' Where did it come from, this abundance of cool? Tom Wolfe identified it in his 1979 novel, The Right Stuff. He's just a pilot, doing what a pilot does. Sully is telling it like it is, precise and professional, economical with words but a long way short of panic. You'd expect more voice tension from someone stalled on a freeway and requesting an assist. In the exchange that follows, the air traffic controller offers him another alternative runway, at Teterboro Airport.

'I am not sure if we can make any runway.'

Sullenberger's first instinct is to return to LaGuardia and make an emergency landing but he quickly realises he doesn't have enough height to turn and glide back to the runway. 'Ah this is uh Cactus 1549, hit birds, we lost thrust in both engines, we're turning back towards LaGuardia.'Īt this stage, the aircraft has zero power. This is Sully at the first indication of trouble, after a bird strike crippled his aircraft, identified by the call sign Cactus 1549, shortly after take-off from LaGuardia Airport: The tape of the conversation between Sully and the operator at New York Tracon, which controls air traffic in and around New York City, is instructive. Photo: AlamyĪnd with those final words before contact was lost, Captain Chesley 'Sully' Sullenberger landed his US Airways Airbus A320 on New York City's Hudson River in January 2009, saving the lives of all 155 passengers and crew. In the cockpit there's a special language that pilots use which makes no sense to the general flying public.

Pilot talk 3 physical copy