Fly by WireBy William Langewiesche Penguin, 193pp, £8.99
THE INVERTED commas in the title of William Langewiesche’s intelligent and entertaining new book are a sign that scepticism is afoot. The “miracle”in question took place on January 15th, 2009, when a US Airways Airbus A320 left LaGuardia airport and quickly collided with a flock of geese. With both engines wrecked, Capt Chesley Sullenberger glided the aircraft to a landing on the Hudson. All 155 people on board survived. Within no time, “Sully” was a national hero, and had parlayed his five-minute-flight into a $3 million two-book deal.
Langewiesche is well placed to deconstruct events, having worked as a pilot before breaking into journalism. Fly by Wiredelves into the precarious state of American airlines, psychological profiles of airline pilots, and what happens when humans share the skies with birds.
Langewiesche also provides gripping accounts of various air disasters and disasters narrowly averted, most notably that of an American Airlines Boeing 757 travelling from Miami to Cali, Colombia, in 1995 that ended in catastrophe, a crash Langewiesche attributes to the captain’s intellectual arrogance. “No technology can protect passengers from such pilots,” Langewiesche writes, “but in this particular case, had they been in a fly-by-wire design, it seems likely that everyone would have survived.”
Fly by wire is the term used to describe the marriage between electrical control circuits and lightweight digital computers. It was the big advance in flight in the 1970s. The Airbus has a “full-on digital fly-by-wire control system that radically redefined the relationship between pilots and flight”.
Its “flight envelope protections” are interventions that kick in outside the range of normal operations and cannot be overridden or disabled by pilots. It is not known how many times the system has kicked in. But, Langewiesche writes, there are hundreds of people who wouldn’t be alive today but for its interventions.
It is the Airbus, then, that lurks behind those inverted commas. It seems that Sullenberger – who often lauded his crew – never gave credit to the aircraft and may even have been delivering a “coded and familiar slap” when he told the National Transportation Safety Board hearing on the flight: “No matter how much technology is available, an airplane is still ultimately an airplane.”
Langewiesche fully acknowledges Sullenberger’s mastery that day: he was “a pilot at the peak of human performance”. But the use of “human” there is not accidental. “Nothing against him, but the automation in the accident airplane had emphatically not failed, and indeed had been integral to Sullenberger’s control all the way down.”
Langewiesche loves a beautifully designed machine. Whatever about anthropomorphising those Canadian geese (he makes a half-serious attempt with some experts who try to guess why the geese didn’t just get out of the way when they saw the plane), it is the Airbus, paradoxically, that comes to seem just a little bit human. And it is the Airbus that has the last word.
“Many believed they were witnessing a miracle of some kind. This may or may not have been right, depending on how the word is defined. But what they undeniably did see was an Airbus in the Hudson, drifting nose high like a beast in the water, and refusing to die.” By then, I too had fallen in love with the Airbus.
Molly McCloskey is a short story writer and novelist