Introduction

This is “What Just Happened?,” the podcast that looks at the biggest brand crises of our time, what they meant for organisational strategy and behaviour, and their lasting impact on our approach to crisis communication.

I’m Kate Hartley. And I’m Tamara Littleton. And together, we’ll delve into what happened, why it mattered, and whether it could happen again.

Episode

Tamara Littleton: Today we’re talking about the Miracle on the Hudson, the incredible landing of a US Airways passenger jet on the Hudson River in which all 155 passengers and crew survived. Kate, tell us what happened.

Kate Hartley: It really is an incredible story. On 15th January 2009, US Airways Flight 1549, which was an Airbus A320, took off at 15:24 local time from New York LaGuardia Airport. It was headed to Charlotte, North Carolina, and there were, as you say, 155 people on board, including the pilot, the 57-year-old Captain Chesley Sullenberger, who is now known by everybody as Sully, and First Officer Jeff Skiles. Also on board were flight attendants Sheila Dale and Donna Dent at the front of the plane, and Doreen Welsh at the back.

The plane took off, and Sully said in an interview that the flight started like 10,000 other days—routine and unremarkable for the first 100 seconds—but then it very suddenly became the worst day of his life. He said, “100 seconds. Just 100 seconds.” That’s extraordinary. He saw a large flock of Canada geese heading towards the plane and had absolutely no time to avoid them. There’s not much you could do to avoid them anyway, to be honest—these are massive birds, weighing about 10 pounds each with five or six-foot wingspans.

He said they hit the windscreen like a Hitchcock film, and they were just all over the front of the plane. They hit the wings, the nose, and—critically—they hit the centre of both jet engines. That’s obviously very serious, and it effectively took out both engines. The flight had reached, I think, 3,200 feet at its highest and had been airborne for just six minutes. Sully made a distress call, and the air traffic controller cleared a runway for him to return to LaGuardia, but Sully said, “We’re unable.” Then came those famous words we’ve all heard: “We might end up in the Hudson.”

He then considered going to Teterboro in New Jersey, but in just a few seconds realised that wasn’t an option. So he said, “We can’t do it. We’re going to end up in the Hudson.”

TL: And those words have become so famous. Now I kind of wonder what the air traffic controller must have thought on hearing that.

KH: You can’t imagine, can you? The air traffic controller was someone called Patrick Hart, and he apparently couldn’t believe what he was hearing. You can hear on the voice recordings that have been released—he said, “I’m sorry, say again?” He said that Sully sounded really calm, but of course, he half assumed the crash would be fatal, and it was a horrific 45 minutes before he found out people had survived.

He was asked later, when he was taking that call from the plane, if he thought about what the outcome would be, and he said, “You don’t think about that at the time. You just focus on what needs doing. All those thoughts come later.” Anyway, going back to the actual landing itself, it’s at this point that Sully seems to shut out everything that’s not necessary to the flight’s survival. He just focuses on the landing—and we’ll go into that a bit later, I think.

So he lined up the aircraft with the river as though it were a runway, and you can see he just glides over the Washington Bridge. Three minutes and 30 seconds after the bird strike, the plane hits the Hudson, and you can see footage of that happening as it was captured live by a local CCTV camera.

TL: We know that every single person got out of the plane, and there are some incredibly iconic photos of people standing on the wings of the plane. I remember them—they were in the rafts by the doors of the plane while it was floating in the water. That was kind of like the first instance of citizen journalism, wasn’t it? That photo taken by a mobile phone that was then around the world in seconds.

KH: I think it really was, because it sort of unfolded live in front of us, didn’t it? There was wall-to-wall news coverage, obviously. I think it’s really interesting looking back at some of that coverage now that we know so much more about what actually happened. I was looking at the CBS News archives, and what was interesting there was the commentary, as that plane was still in the water, saying it seemed the pilot had kept some control.

There was a commentator saying both the engines couldn’t possibly have failed because of the way it landed—the pilot had too much control. That just shows what Sully’s skill was in landing it. News reports were saying it was unclear how many passengers managed to get out, which must have been awful to hear if you had a relative or loved one on that flight.

TL: Terrible. Yeah. And what do we actually know about Sully and First Officer Skiles and how they worked together during the landing?

KH: I think their relationship was so important in this. Sully was a former fighter pilot—he’d been an airline pilot since he left the Air Force in 1980, and he had something like 20,000 hours of flying time logged, including 4,700 hours actually in an A320. He was also a glider pilot, which I think was probably quite a useful skill in the end, coming over that George Washington Bridge with no engines. He was also an expert in aviation safety, so he had an amazing background for this.

Jeff Skiles was also really experienced—he also had about 20,000 hours of flying time under his belt, including some as a pilot. But he’d only just done his training on the A320, so this was his first flight on that kind of aircraft, right out of training.

TL: You’d have to have so much trust in someone to go through something like that. There’s no time for arguments or discussion.

KH: Do you trust me like that, Tamara?

TL: I probably shouldn’t laugh—absolutely, with my life, Kate.

KH: I think we’d be very good in a plane together.

TL: We do good active listening and communication. No, actually, to be fair, I think we would. I think we would be absolutely perfect.

KH: I don’t think I’m a nervous flyer. You’re a nervous flyer. You might be after this podcast! So anyway, yeah, I think their relationship is really interesting. Sully has always said it wasn’t just him on his own doing this—it was the full crew, and of course, particularly Skiles. Sully has said that he was the best person he could have had with him, and it does seem that’s the case.

Sully said publicly that they didn’t have time to talk about what happened when the birds struck at all, but they knew intuitively what to do to help each other. He said—and this is incredibly important in a crisis—that Skiles was supporting his decisions, but also ready to intervene if Sully made an error, and to challenge him. We’ve seen that so many times, haven’t we—that you need somebody who’s going to challenge your decisions if needed.

TL: And I think you said that the phrase he used was “cheering me on”, wasn’t it? Which is such a good example of a great culture of psychological safety in a team, right there, isn’t it?

KH: Absolutely, but again, really clear leadership as well. There’s a moment where they say—and apparently, this is quite common in aviation—they will say, “Your plane,” and the person will say, “My plane,” so that there’s a real clear understanding of who is actually in charge and who’s making the ultimate decision, which is important, I think.

TL: And I can’t imagine what was going through the heads of the two pilots when they saw those birds and then realised that both engines had gone.

KH: I mean, it’s your worst nightmare, really, isn’t it? Sully described the noise of the birds hitting the plane and then feeling the vibration, and then realising what was happening, and realising that not one but both engines were out. He says that he felt all the things we talk about as being fight or flight—he felt his blood pressure rise, his perceptual field narrow, so you get a sort of tunnel vision because of the body’s stress response.

In a video interview, he says he remembers his first three conscious thoughts. The first one was, “This can’t be happening,” which is a very typical fight or flight response. The second was, “This doesn’t happen to me”—he’d had 20,000 hours of flight experience. And the third one, very quickly, was the realisation, in his words, that unlike all the other flights he’d made in 42 years, this wouldn’t end with the aircraft undamaged on a runway.

So that realisation—but the thing he says after that, which I think is really extraordinary—is he says, “I was okay with that, as long as I could solve the problem.” So he went straight into, “I can solve this.”

TL: And that must be to do with his training. I know we often talk to people that we put through crisis simulations about how it builds muscle memory to help you know what to do when that fight, flight, or freeze kicks in. But what do we know about the way that pilots are trained?

KH: A lot of the coverage at the time focused on the simulation training that pilots get, and they get an enormous amount of it. But what’s interesting is how they have to apply that in different situations. Sully says it wasn’t possible to train specifically for a water landing—or it wasn’t at the time—because simulators weren’t programmed for that. So the only training they’d had on a water landing was a theoretical classroom discussion.

What he says is that because he’d learned his craft so well, he knew the plane and he knew his profession so intimately—in his words—he could set really clear priorities.

TL: I wonder if they use this now for simulations—on how to do it. So that would be—yeah, I’m sure they do. How do you actually prioritise under that kind of pressure, though? It’s interesting.

KH: Again, if you listen to the audio, you can almost hear him doing this. He chose only to do the highest priority items, he says. He had the incredible discipline to completely shut out and ignore everything that wasn’t absolutely critical. Anything that was going to distract him from what he needed to do, he just ignored completely.

That included some of the later signals from air traffic control, and you can hear him just ignoring everything that he doesn’t really need to focus on. He says he’s well read—he’s up on the kind of neurobiology of this stuff—and multitasking is a myth. What multitasking actually is, is switching between tasks quickly. It means diluting your focus, effectively.

He realised how important it was to actually properly, properly focus. So he took what he saw as the first two most important steps: he turned on the engine ignition, so if the engines could recover, they would, and then he started the plane’s auxiliary power unit. He knew he only had a few minutes until—and these are his words—“our flight path intersected the surface of the earth.”

TL: Wow. I mean, what a phrase.

KH: Yes. And I think his choice of words is really interesting. He doesn’t say, “before the plane crashed.” In fact, he’s always been really, really careful not to call this a crash. It was a river landing. He had control of the aircraft—as much as you can when you’ve got no engines—but he goes on to say, “I had to choose the best possible place for that to happen.”

Now remember, all of this was going on in about three minutes before the plane landed. Incredible. He knew there were only two options—there were two runways, LaGuardia and Teterboro—and the only other place was the Hudson. As soon as he realised LaGuardia and Teterboro weren’t options, then obviously he knew he had to go into the Hudson, because otherwise he might risk crashing into New York.

So he said something I think is really interesting, and something we’ve looked at in another podcast, actually. He suspected right away that the only option would be the Hudson River, but he said he had to try and consider returning to a runway if it was possible. I don’t know if you remember, Tamara, we did an episode on United Airlines and Dr David Dao—we talked to Mark Fritz about decision-making.

TL: Yes.

KH: And he always says you have to have more than one option if you’re going to make a good decision. Because if you only have one, you’re forced to think it’s a good one. I think this is a really good example of that.

TL: And he came up with it straight away, didn’t he? Because he sort of said, “I think it’s going to be the Hudson,” and then he gave himself more options, and then—yeah—ended up discounting them. “We’re going to end up in the Hudson.” But to make decisions under that kind of pressure is absolutely extraordinary.

You’ve got a plane, as he said, that’s dropping at 1,000 feet per minute. You have less than three minutes in total. He must have been completely in the zone.

KH: It shows incredible focus and discipline, doesn’t it? He said later in interview, he knew that if he could deliver the aircraft to the surface intact, it would float long enough for the flight attendants to evacuate the passengers and for New York Waterway to send their ferries out to pick them out of the water. So again, those are his words.

TL: And just a reminder, this was January. It was a freezing day. New York winters are very, very cold.

KH: They’re brutal, aren’t they? Very cold. The air temperature was 21 degrees Fahrenheit, and that’s minus six Celsius for the Brits. The water temperature was 38, which is around three degrees Celsius. If you had to swim in that kind of temperature, you don’t last very long, basically.

TL: Can we talk comms? How important was clear communication in this?

KH: Very important. So Sully says he took—I love this phrase—he says he took an extravagant amount of time, three or four seconds, to choose his words. I mean, that’s amazing, isn’t it, when you think how long it takes to craft a message to get out to media in a crisis? He had three or four seconds, so he had to decide what he was going to say to the cabin, and he said he knew he needed to sound confident and not agitated. He said, “Courage can be contagious,” and that’s so important.

I think that’s such a great phrase, isn’t it? And real leadership. So he chose his words very carefully, and he puts that down to having a very well-defined and concise aviation vocabulary, which, again, I think is something we could all learn from. There are certain words that are set in aviation and have a very clear meaning, and they spark a set of commands from the crew.

So he knew he was going to say, “Brace.” Now, that signals to the crew that there’s about to be an emergency landing and the crew should help passengers. He chose another word to convey what was about to happen, which was “Impact.” So the crew heard, “Brace for impact,” and that’s basically all he needed to say.

That meant the crew started shouting commands to passengers, and they started to say, “Brace, heads down, stay down,” and they repeat that continually so that people really take it in. I think there’s a real lesson there for other industries, isn’t there? If you’ve just got a few clear words—if they’re the right words—they’re going to get everybody onto the same page.

TL: And again, all of that training—that people are trained to listen out for those key words as well.

KH: Exactly. They don’t have to think about it. They know exactly what their next response is going to be. And before the landing, Sully says he asked Skiles a question. That question was, “Got any ideas?”

TL: Bit late for that!

KH: He says that wasn’t a flippant thing. He wasn’t being kind of, you know—he wasn’t being funny. I mean, no time for funny, I suppose. But he was genuinely asking, is there anything else we should do? And Skiles answered, “Actually not.”

Again, that wasn’t flippant either. They both knew they’d done everything they could. Just extraordinary to be that calm in the seconds before the plane landed.

TL: And again, I’m going to go back to that psychological safety, because it’s having people that you’re giving permission to be challenged, aren’t you? And that’s exactly what was going on there, even though it wasn’t flippant—that’s obviously just the way they sort of talked. We also talk a lot about setting a clear intent for the crisis, which is something our previous guest, Jonathan Hemus, talks about often. Sully had a very clear vision, didn’t he—to try to save every life. That was his strategic intent.

KH: That would really focus you, wouldn’t it? I mean, that is a hell of a strategic intent. Everything he did was to meet that objective very clearly.

TL: Can we talk about the landing for a minute—that moment when you’ve made your decision and you don’t know what’s about to happen? What must that have been like?

KH: That final landing must have been so difficult. Sully talks about seeing a featureless water terrain ahead, where depth perception is inherently difficult. These are planes that are supposed to land on runways—they’re supposed to land on hard surfaces. He had to decide when to begin raising the nose of the plane to begin the landing, so that you can land properly on the water, which is very different from landing on a hard surface.

Skiles started calling out altitude and airspeed to help Sully judge the height at which to do that so they didn’t hit the water too hard. Apparently, they didn’t need to talk about that—they just knew that’s what they were going to do. Then they landed, and they knew the plane was intact. They knew it was stable and floating.

The absolutely incredible thing is, according to Sully, he and Skiles turned to each other and said exactly the same thing: “Well, that wasn’t as bad as I thought.”

TL: Are you sure that they’re not actually British? Because that is a masterclass in understatement. That is like the politest post-crisis comment, isn’t it?

KH: It really is amazing. But he also says they weren’t celebrating just yet—they still had to get 155 people out of an aeroplane that was taking on water in a freezing river in January. Again, he just shouted one word, which was, “Evacuate.”

TL: That can’t have been easy to do, that evacuation, when we’re talking 155 people who must have been panicking. It all happened so fast, and they would have needed help. I know there were children on the plane—there was a woman in a wheelchair—but they all got out, mostly without injury. And again, those images—I remember the images of the rescue with New York Waterway boats and ferries. They were all picking up passengers. It was just an incredibly fast process.

KH: It really was. It couldn’t have been done better. There were a couple of things, though—some people started swimming, which was not a very sensible thing to do. Some people slid off the wing and had to be pulled back on, so they were freezing.

What’s amazing, I think, is Sully’s response. He walked up and down the cabin twice to make sure everybody was out. He only got into the last life raft after every single person was off that plane.

There’s an amazing moment—which was actually shown in the film that came out in 2016—where a passenger says, “You saved my life,” and Sully just says, “You’re welcome.” So maybe you’re right—maybe he is British. Again, huge understatement.

He told the rescuers to save the people on the wing first, because in the rafts, they were safe. He was always, always still meeting that objective, even once he’d kind of fulfilled his role as a pilot. His view is that he had only completed his duties once he knew that everybody was safe. It was four hours before he knew for sure that everyone was accounted for, because they were being taken to different places—some people ended up on the New Jersey side of the river, some on the New York side—so it was difficult to account for everybody quickly.

TL: Incredible. And let’s go back to the flight crew. So what do we know about them?

KH: They were amazing. I mean, I think everybody on this was absolutely incredible. You can see on YouTube—there’s a US Transportation Infrastructure Subcommittee on Aviation (catchy name) that was responsible for the investigation, and they spoke to Sheila Dale, Doreen Welsh and Donna Dent as part of that investigation.

From their perspective, the story is very similar. They heard the birds hit, they assumed they were returning to LaGuardia, and then they heard, “Brace for impact.”

TL: Which—no one wants to hear that, you know, as a flight attendant or just anyone on the plane.

KH: You really don’t, do you? You really don’t. And the back of the plane took the majority of the impact. Obviously, you land with your nose slightly up, so it’s been reported that Doreen Welsh had a very different experience in the back of the plane than Dale and Dent did in the front. I think there was more panic in the back—obviously, it was a slightly more violent experience because things were flying around the cabin and so on.

At the front, they could open the door and the chute came out properly, but in the back it was underwater, so it was a very different experience. I think there wasn’t as much pushing and shoving at the front, but one of the passengers got past Doreen Welsh at the back and cracked the door open. Of course, that then let the water onto the plane, and that was the big issue. People were in shock, and then the water was rising very quickly in the plane.

She was amazing, and she ordered people to go to the wings and climb over the seats to get them onto the wings. She snapped people out of that shock, and it was only when she got to the front of the aircraft and was out of the main water that she realised she’d been quite badly injured. She had a quite serious injury to her leg, but she said she felt no pain until she was out of the water at the front of the plane.

Dale and Dent were in the front, and they said—again, like Sully—when they heard, “Brace for impact,” that training just kicked straight in. What I think is interesting is the impact afterwards, though. Dale and Dent, when you see them later at the hearing and also in interviews and things, they’re always wearing their uniform. But Welsh doesn’t, and she said later that she just couldn’t face putting hers on. She had a very different story from the others—it was very different in the back of the plane, and much more traumatic. I think she felt the after-effects perhaps in a slightly different way than the other two.

TL: And the outcome was that there was an investigation that lasted more than a year, which found that they did exactly the right thing in landing in the Hudson, and they did everything in their power to land the plane safely.

KH: Yeah. And I think that in the film—if you see it, the film Sully—it shows a slightly different side to that. I think some of the investigators were quite upset at their portrayal in the film, because actually, they did find that they did exactly the right thing. But they did—as aviation organisations always do—they did a very thorough investigation into it.

TL: Absolutely. So summarising everything here, I’d say that the big lessons must be around decision-making under pressure, training, and clear communication. And we’re going to dig into those after this short break.

Break

TL: We’re joined today by Gill Green. Gill is a psychologist specialising in pilots and aviation, and in selecting pilots for airlines and for training, and working in pilot mental health as well. So, absolutely brilliant to have you with us. Gill, welcome.

GG: Thank you for inviting me. I’m really pleased to be here.

TL: We’re going to just sort of jump in, because what I found so fascinating about this crisis is that it’s different to others that we’ve talked about before, because there was actually a lot that went right. So can we start with what actually makes a good pilot?

GG: Okay, yes. This whole incident with the Hudson River has really provided us with some invaluable insights. If I’m selecting potential future pilots, I’m looking for people who, when we assess them psychometrically and in interview, are steady. They’re steadier than many people—they’re not erratic, they’re not impulsive or prone to high highs and low lows of emotion. They’re steady, and within reason, they’re able to handle whatever life throws at them.

So, in other words, they’re resilient. And also, if I’m helping select wannabe pilots, I’m looking for individuals who provide evidence of already being able to make decisions under pressure in real life, on the ground—not just in the cockpit. I’m looking for people who are showing signs of high levels of self-discipline. You’ve mentioned discipline before.

Focused individuals who are conscientious, hard-working, motivated to learn and keep learning, and willing to continuously improve their skills. Those qualities—they’re called non-techs in aviation—and they’re all useful when it comes to making really tough decisions under enormous pressure. Aviation is a profession that doesn’t stop developing, so pilots have got to be constantly training.

Every time they change airline or aeroplane type, or if they advance from First Officer to Captain, they’re examined, they’re evaluated, and they practise, practise, practise in the simulator. They’re prepared for many, many different eventualities, and they’re probably the most scrutinised and tested of professionals. If you read the investigation report into the Hudson River event, you’ll notice there’s a whole section detailing the 72 hours that led up to the event in the lives of both Sully and Skiles. Pilots say they’re always under the microscope.

KH: There’s such a lot that we can learn from leaders in all sorts of other areas from that, isn’t there? That sounds like you’ve literally just described the perfect leader in a crisis in any industry, I think.

TL: Yes. And something that came across for me during this crisis—I think Sully and Skiles had to make those really tough decisions under enormous pressure. So are there things that would help make those decisions easier? Kind of like the environment, for example?

GG: Absolutely. And of course, before the flight, they and the cabin crew would have had a pre-flight briefing, and they would have already identified potential risks associated with that flight on that day. Of course, they’d never have imagined that they would actually happen, I’m sure. So they would have already considered the weather—and on that day, it was a clear blue sky. It was cold, yes—it was, I think, wintertime—and it was daylight.

What a different situation we’d be talking about had it been at night. The wind speeds were good. Was there potential icing? How busy was the airport? I guess they may have considered birds, because LaGuardia has large populations of birds nearby.

So they’d have done all of that pre-flight briefing, but they were also assisted by a number of other things. Conditions were good. They were flying a really advanced aeroplane that continued to function even though everything else was going on. Sully had made the really quick-thinking decision to switch on the APU, which basically kept the systems running even if the engines had failed. That helped them keep control of the plane on descent.

And of course, they would have had their checklists. Checklists are kind of the beating heart of the flight deck, really, I think. I mentioned discipline earlier, and you did. Discipline in aviation is about following procedure and functioning well with others. What’s needed is that pilots such as Sully and Skiles work together, and in aviation, this is called Crew Resource Management, or CRM.

KH: That was such an important part, wasn’t it, of this incident? I think how well they did work together. Can you talk a bit more about the importance of teamwork and how you create that?

GG: So this CRM, or Crew Resource Management, isn’t about the technical knowledge and skills required to fly, but it’s really about being able to harness all the available resources you have—so equipment, procedures, and crucially, people. In this situation, you had two pilots on the plane. Of course, this also applies to single-pilot operations as well, but it’s basically about being able to connect with others, to be able to solve problems together, take decisions together, but also work alongside each other on your specific tasks.

It’s not that Sully and Skiles needed to be nice to each other. What they needed to do was stick to vital processes when it mattered most, so they needed to be able to quickly share their thinking where they needed to. As you mentioned, Skiles was supporting Sully’s decisions, and I think he used the phrase “cheering me on.” But it’s also vital that if Sully made an error, Skiles needed to be able to challenge him on that.

When it comes to teamwork, you’ll remember how, during the interview, Sully constantly referred to it being a team effort that landed the plane. Sully asked Skiles at one point if he had any other ideas, so he was checking with his colleague and being open to options. Also, if you remember, Skiles had been the pilot flying when they took off from LaGuardia, but after the bird strike, Sully said, “My aircraft,” and Skiles confirmed, “Your aircraft.”

At that precise point, the division of labour became: Sully flying the plane—that’s ‘aviate’—and Skiles took over navigation and communication, following the checklists for restarting the engines, and calling out altitude and airspeeds as they were landing on the river. In aviation, “aviate, navigate, communicate” is a fundamental principle. That’s the priority: fly the aircraft, ensure proper navigation, and then communicate effectively—in that order.

KH: There is so much we can learn from this in other industries, isn’t there? I mean, the idea about the environment being right—there’s a lot you can do in business to make sure the environment is right to make difficult decisions. The importance of roles, the clarity of hierarchy and approvals—all those things in a communications context—we can take directly from this example. I think it’s really interesting. Can we go into the psychology of it then, Gill? What actually happens to us and our thinking when we’re under this kind of pressure?

GG: Okay, so first, I’ll talk about thinking, and then I’ll talk a bit about pressure and some emerging information about something in aviation which is called the startle response, which I think tells us an awful lot.

So first, thinking. There’s a psychologist and economist who’s a Nobel Prize winner called Daniel Kahneman, and we widely consider him to be the expert in decision-making. He’s proposed that the human brain operates mainly in two systems. System One is where our thinking is fast, unconscious—you mentioned muscle memory earlier—and automatic thinking, which we can’t control.

System One thinking allows us to assess situations really quickly. As you can imagine, it’s particularly valuable when we’re under threat or think we are. In truth, System One thinking probably takes up most of our thinking.

KH: Takes up most of mine, I think.

GG: So, an example—have you ever been on the motorway and suddenly realised you haven’t a clue which junction is coming up next?

KH: Yes.

JG: I think we all have. It’s a terrible thing to admit, but we’ve all been there. That’s the muscle memory. It’s very different when we’re learning to drive, or when we’re on the motorway for the first time, because that’s when we need our System Two thinking.

System Two thinking is slow, conscious, effortful, and we can control it. We use System Two when we’re investigating or probing for information in order to make complex decisions. This is our data analysis, and it takes up a small percentage of our thinking.

So imagine you’re trying to have a conversation with someone whose first language is German, and maybe you’re not fluent. You really have to use your System Two thinking to keep up. Pilots aren’t immune to relying too much on System One—they can fail to notice when things might be going wrong.

KH: I don’t want to hear that. I don’t want to hear that.

GG: Pilots aren’t superhuman, but they have to train to extraordinarily high standards. There are things we can all do if we notice that System One has taken over. The most important thing is to slow down and go back a few steps in your task—check what you’re doing thoroughly.

On the flight deck, I mentioned checklists—this is where they really come into their own. Other kinds of aide-mémoires can also be effective in keeping track of your tasks and engaging System Two, particularly when you’re doing something boring or habitual. It’s very interesting—people are sometimes reluctant to use checklists because we think we know it. We’ve done it so many times before.

Now, on the flight deck, we have to attend to checklists. The pilot cannot ignore them, and they are at the centre of decision-making.

So, onto the pressure bit. Under threat, we know the brain’s number one job is to keep us alive. We’ve all heard about fight, flight and freeze, and probably we’ve heard about the “chimp brain” or even the amygdala, which is a tiny structure in the limbic system of the brain. It’s involved directly in motivation, particularly related to survival and emotions.

It’s responsible for processing emotions such as fear, and of course fear is particularly relevant to this scenario. All of this happens very fast—faster than thinking.

So with the fight, flight, freeze response, we need to train. Pilots train for surprises. In the simulator, which they all go through many, many times during their career, they’re presented with various scenarios and assessed on their ability to handle them. Their ability to use Crew Resource Management is at the heart of this.

Now onto the new—or relatively new—concept in aviation: the startle response. We know that exposure to situations and training to deal with them can lessen the surprise effect and aid effective decision-making. That’s why we put pilots through simulations of emergency situations.

But in aviation, there’s growing interest in what happens when an event threatens what a pilot’s been expecting and disrupts their sense of safety. Sometimes—but I must highlight this is very rare—you might get what’s called a startle reflex. I think it’s been popularised as the “amygdala hijack.”

This startle reflex isn’t simply extreme surprise. It’s important that pilots in particular know the difference between surprise and startle, because there are different ways of managing them. The startle effect is when there’s a sudden, unexpected development that triggers an instantaneous and potentially inappropriate response in relation to the control of the aircraft.

I must add, this is not linked to the pilot’s age or flying experience—it could happen to any pilot. It’s very rare. But the key point is, the pilot who experiences this startle response may be initially convinced something’s happened that’s urgent enough to require immediate action. You can imagine—it’s not even really thinking, it’s a reaction.

The trouble is, the startle effect is very hard to train for because it’s so rare. We know about it mainly through confidential reporting by pilots when it’s happened on their flight deck. It’s an involuntary physical response, often affecting the flight path control—the pilot does something to change what the aeroplane is doing.

We know it typically happens at night or during quiet periods—up in the cruise, with no external visual reference, so it’s dark or cloudy. What happens then is the pilot makes a sudden change of course, and for up to 30 seconds afterwards, their information-processing capability can be affected.

As I said, most pilots won’t encounter it. But with really good CRM training and good situational awareness, the pilot who isn’t the one experiencing the startle effect can be trained to take action to retrieve the situation before it becomes too difficult to recover.

TL: And I’m going to guess that what you were saying earlier about having that environment where the pilots are encouraged to challenge each other and hold each other to account—I’m guessing that’s where you really need to see that environment play out when something unexpected happens, like that trigger.

GG: Exactly, yes. You need a safety culture within the organisation, which will affect the relationships between people on that flight deck, definitely.

TL: Staying on that communication theme—because I’m still thinking about the way that the two pilots were communicating—almost like in this very short, staccato sort of way. They were just in the flow. So clear communication is obviously so critical, and you know, the commands have to be exactly right. Can you just talk a bit more about the work that you’re doing with aircrews around communication?

GG: Yes, when I’m working with pilots, I’m always looking at their communication skills. Sometimes it can be as simple as—is their English good enough? Because obviously, English is the language used in aviation across the world. And how do they conduct themselves in conversation with other people?

For example, can they balance their need to talk with their colleague’s need for silence? I’m also looking at how they share their opinions and ideas—can they speak up when they disagree on something? This becomes more critical when you get a less experienced pilot flying with a more experienced one. It can be crucial, for example, if we have what’s called a power gradient happening on the flight deck.

This can happen in situations where there are different levels of experience, maybe personality differences, or cultural differences. It’s also when one pilot is perceived as authoritarian or bossy and acts in a very authoritarian manner. It could be when there’s a more senior, experienced pilot, and the other pilot complies with them and obeys them, despite concerns that something’s wrong. It might be a desire to conform or please that causes the pilot to go along with the view of the more powerful pilot—and of course, that pilot might actually be doing something wrong.

Training, standard operating procedures, and CRM will all help mitigate these factors. I mentioned the non-techs earlier that I’m looking at, and the two that are most important when it comes to communication are cooperation and leadership. Cooperation, for example—to what extent can a pilot work and communicate actively with the group and create a mutual working environment?

We absolutely saw that with Sully and Skiles, and how they took care of the others on the plane. They were true leaders, as you’ve described. Another non-tech is leadership—managerial—which focuses on a pilot’s ability to coordinate and manage a task or problem or direct an entire group. That’s exactly what happened in this circumstance.

Coming back to the Hudson River, direct, brief communication was vital between Sully, Skiles, the ATC, and the cabin crew. Single words like “Brace” or “Can’t do” or “Heads down, stay down,” or “Your aircraft”—there wasn’t any time for pleasantries, and that was all understood. The choice of words—Sully said, as you said—he took an extravagant amount of time, three or four seconds, to choose his words carefully when he addressed the cabin. We know certain words can have a desirable effect of getting people to do what you need them to do, and other words can have the opposite effect—they can cause people to panic.

So it’s really important—the use of words. Maybe it’s worth noting that again, this is useful on the ground as well. In aviation, there’s a commonly used briefing format for getting information across to people in high-stress situations. It’s called a NITS briefing, and it’s a mnemonic.

It stands for: N, the nature—what’s the nature of the problem or emergency? I, intention—what are we going to do about this? Typically, what’s the captain’s intention? T, time—how much time do we have to address the problem, and how much time is available to prepare for the situation? For example, is the emergency landing going to happen now, or do we have 20 minutes to prepare?

S, special instructions—if things don’t go according to plan, this is what you need to do. These are the instructions for the person receiving the briefing, so they know exactly what to do. Then what will typically happen is that person who’s been briefed will repeat it back to ensure they fully understand what’s going on.

TL: Gill, thank you so much. You’ve given us a masterclass on leadership and communication, and it’s absolutely brilliant. So thank you so much.

GG: Thank you, Tamara.

KH: I’m just going to talk to you in one-word things. Yeah, that’s it. “Brace.”

Outro

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