00:00Sounded like a machine gun hitting the airplane.
00:02Birds.
00:04You'll hear a big thump.
00:06And you'll probably see feathers and blood.
00:09Everything seems fine.
00:10Something's just not right.
00:11Oh, you know.
00:13You know when you hit a bird.
00:15I would need more than two hands to count the number of near misses I've had with a bird.
00:18It's just a fact of flying.
00:20I've had two bird strikes.
00:22I have encountered some small birds and maybe some medium-sized birds,
00:26None of which have done any damage to my aircraft, aside from, you know, a streak of some feathers and
00:32disgusting stuff.
00:33I never experienced bird strike, but my friend, he catched the Canadian goose, which is huge.
00:39He's like, you know how much this turkey dinner cost me?
00:41This new engine, it's $250,000.
00:44Oh, s***.
00:45I've been a pilot for over 31 years.
00:47This was the scariest moment, although it wasn't that scary.
00:49It was more of a moment of making the decisions.
00:52Of course, many of us know the story of...
00:54Sully Sullenberger and having to land in the Hudson after a bird strike.
00:58Universal praise tonight for the U.S. Airways pilot who pulled off a flawless landing in the icy Hudson River.
01:04His name is Chesley Sullenberger III.
01:06I was flying out of San Francisco.
01:08San Francisco has two parallel runways, and as we took the runway for takeoff, saw a large flock of birds
01:14landing between the runways.
01:16And first thing that came into my mind was, boy, when I get cleared for takeoff, I hope they don't
01:21fly in front of me.
01:22Well, we got cleared for takeoff.
01:24As we lifted off, sure enough, a flock of birds came right in front of the airplane.
01:28Once you're very close to the bird, it either goes up or down, so your instinct is naturally to pull
01:35up.
01:35Because once it's coming at you, hopefully the bird goes down.
01:39Sometimes that doesn't happen, and you'll hear a big thump, and you'll probably see feathers and blood.
01:45Sounded like a machine gun hitting the airplane.
01:47Buh, buh, buh, buh, buh, buh, buh, buh.
01:48A smaller bird, maybe you have a dent in the wing, but that's not to say that they can't cause
01:53a problem.
01:53We got airborne, leveled off at a lower altitude.
01:56You fly the plane first and figure out what you're going to do next.
01:59Procedures call for basically checking the airplane out, making sure there's no vibration, checking the engine, seeing that the engine
02:05instruments are correct.
02:06Everything was fine.
02:07And the first officer said, well, everything seems fine.
02:11We don't have any vibration.
02:12Engines look fine.
02:13I think we can continue on to our destination.
02:15And right then, I was looking at the airplane, I felt something, and I said, something's just not right.
02:21There can be thousands of checklists for every single different type of plane.
02:25We're trained to know that checklist by heart, because if something happens, you want to already know what you're going
02:32to do before you're even thinking about it.
02:34In aviation, we say, aviate, navigate, and communicate.
02:39In that order.
02:40Aviate means fly the plane.
02:41There's been a lot of situations where, unfortunately, the pilots were not flying the plane first, and they made the
02:45situation a lot worse than it had to be.
02:47Navigate.
02:48Now we need to decide where we're going.
02:50And then communicate.
02:51We have to let air traffic control know that this is no longer a normal flight.
02:54Those are the three things you always have to do and always have to prioritize in an emergency situation.
02:59You have to feel the airplane.
03:01You have to feel what it's doing.
03:02And once you get used to an airplane, you know, you know what you're looking for.
03:06It's sort of like you're driving your car versus somebody else's car.
03:09You know what your car feels like.
03:10You don't know what somebody else's car is doing.
03:12Various different airplanes act in different ways.
03:15And at that time, I had over 6,000 or 7,000 hours in the airplane.
03:19I could feel that there was something wrong.
03:21And a lot of people ask me, have I ever been scared?
03:23Well, yeah, we get scared.
03:24We just try not to show it.
03:26And then we calm the passengers down.
03:28Obviously, they're worried about what's going on, especially if they heard some bangs and things, which I'm sure they did.
03:35I'm sure they heard those birds hitting the airplane.
03:37So you just kind of try to get on the PA, calm them down.
03:40Everything's okay.
03:40The airplane's fine.
03:41We're fine.
03:42We're going to be okay.
03:43I think a lot of passengers look to crew to see how to react.
03:48If you saw a pilot, you know, crying or being angry, you would not feel safe.
03:53So once our crew remains calm, our passengers tend to remain calm as well.
03:58Sometimes the passengers don't even know there is a problem.
04:01And that's usually because whatever the pilots are doing up front, they're figuring it out.
04:07This is their aircraft.
04:09They know what to do.
04:11They know how to fly it.
04:12And they are in control of it.
04:14You know, you have to trust your gut a lot of times.
04:17You look at the instruments.
04:19They are very important.
04:20For example, what happened to JFK Jr.
04:24You know, he didn't trust his instruments.
04:25He was going with his gut.
04:27You have to trust the instruments.
04:28Otherwise, which I've experienced, you get into vertigo.
04:31Your body thinks you're doing one thing.
04:33The airplane's doing something else.
04:34If you're near an airport, go back to the ground and just check everything out.
04:39Make sure it's okay.
04:40Do not ever stop doing what you are trained to do.
04:44So we turned around, told the passengers what's going on.
04:47We hit some birds, nothing to worry about right now.
04:50We're going to go back and land in San Francisco.
04:52Of course, talked to ATC, told them what was going on.
04:56And as we were turning, my autopilot kicked off by itself.
05:01Everybody thinks like we started putting autopilot and we fly.
05:05Yeah, in most of the cases it is.
05:06But what if a weather change, what if a diversion, what is a medical, what is the emergency happen?
05:13You never know what's going to happen on the flight.
05:14I said, well, that's not a problem. We normally land manually anyway.
05:18So as we lined up with the runway, the autothrottle kicked off.
05:21I said, well, that's no problem. We can land anyway.
05:24Old school stick and rudder flying.
05:26All stick and rudder.
05:27Like an Atari joystick.
05:29It is the basis of every single thing that you do.
05:32Thousands and thousands of hours of flight training.
05:34If we become too reliant on the automation and you start losing some of those stick and rudder skills,
05:38you lose the fundamentals of how do airplanes fly the ways that they do.
05:43While automation can be incredible, at the end of the day, you as the pilot are the one flying the
05:49airplane.
05:50So I went ahead, proceeded to land.
05:52And after we landed and got back to the gate, we saw that a bird was on one of our,
05:59what we call the angle of attack probe.
06:02And that's a vital instrument that provides information to data computers.
06:07And there was a bird impaled on there.
06:09What I felt when I said something's just not right was the fact that I was looking at my airspeed
06:14and it just didn't seem right.
06:16Even though the airspeed was working, I said, it just doesn't look right.
06:19So we went back and landed.
06:21Now, had we continued, we would have had what's called unreliable airspeed, which puts us in a more of a
06:27precarious situation.
06:28First officer obviously did not have as much experience as I did in the airplane.
06:33And he was thinking, well, it's okay to continue.
06:35Whereas I felt the airspeed wasn't right.
06:38Deck angle wasn't right.
06:39I added a few knots extra to the airspeed when we landed just in case.
06:44And we landed, everything turned out fine.
06:47We got another airplane and proceeded on to our destination.
06:51It's one of those things that you learn to get more comfortable with it and learn to look out and
06:55recognize and be aware of that risk.
06:58You have to tell the tower, you tell the people at the airport so they can go out and scare
07:03the birds away or send the dogs or whatever they do.
07:05At the end of the day there, you just kind of fill out a report.
07:08Maintenance personnel come out to the aircraft, they inspect the aircraft and life goes on.
07:15My favorite bird.
07:17What's my favorite bird, like an airplane?
07:19I don't know. I'm a Red Sox fan, but I really like looking at Orioles for some reason.
07:24Red tail hawk. She's a New York native like me.
07:27I love hummingbirds. They're just very intriguing to me.
07:30They're so small and I didn't realize until I first saw them that they were so small.
07:34I'm a big bagel guy. So, you know, the seagull pigeon family, you know, they're kind of into the bagels
07:39as well, I would say.
07:40And the way they just hover around that hummingbird feeder, their wings moving so fast.
07:47They're just very intriguing to me.
07:48They're kind of cool looking, you know, up until the last couple of years.
07:52And the Orioles were always really bad at baseball.
07:54So it was like, oh, I feel bad for you, but you're a pretty bird.
07:57No, but now we're in a battle.
08:00We'll see what happens this year.
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