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Subject: Fwd: CLINT EASTWOOD V. NTSB The $65 Million Misunderstanding
CLINT EASTWOOD V. NTSB
The $65 Million Misunderstanding
By Roger Rapoport
Flight Safety Information Contributing Editor
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Until I read the script, I didn't know the investigative board (NTSB) was trying to paint the picture that he had done the wrong thing. They were kind of railroading.
-Clint Eastwood in Promotional Trailer for Sully
For those who are the focus on the investigation, the intensity of it is immense (the process was) inherently adversarial with professional reputations absolutely in the balance.
-Chesley Sullenberger, The New York Times
By now we all know the story of the January 15, 2009, US Airways Flight 1549. A flock of Canada geese, flying above their assigned New York Terminal Control Area altitude, met their maker inside the twin engines of an Airbus A320-214 piloted by Captain Chesley Sullenberger and First Officer Jeff Skiles. Unable to return to base or an alternate airport, the pilots correctly made an emergency landing on the Hudson River. Final score, US Airways 155, Canada Geese 0.
With $60 million in hand, getting those facts right was no problem for Eastwood's production team. Unfortunately, the public is now beginning to learn, there is a very good reason why it took Eastwood nearly eight years to go beyond the true story and discover what no one else knew, that the NTSB was trying to railroad Captain Sullenberger.
It turns out that events, dialogue and key scenes in the film never happened. As the NTSB hearing links below show, Eastwood has apparently succeeded in brainwashing himself with the help of screenwriter Todd Komarnicki.
After an extensive analysis of the wreckage and simulations of the flight conducted by accident investigators with the cooperation of the airline, Airbus, the pilots, flight attendants, and passengers, the National Transportation Safety Board convened a Washington D.C. hearing on the event in June 2009. Chief Investigator Robert Benzon told the board that after the bird strike:
"The captain soon concluded that a landing in the river was the safest alternative available. During the course of the investigation, flight simulations were conducted. These flight simulations revealed that a successful return to LaGuardia or a diversion to Teterboro (New Jersey) Airport was not assured."
In their human performance summary of the accident, the NTSB's Dr. Katherine Wilson and Captain David Helson praised Sullenberger and Skiles "excellent crew resource management."
NTSB Board Member Robert Sumwalt, a former US Airways Airbus 320, pilot thanked Sullenberger for "representing the piloting profession as you do."
In May 2010 the NTSB's final report, based on 20,000 hours of investigation, "validated the Captain's decision to ditch into the Hudson River saying that it "provided the highest probability that the accident would be survivable.
"Contributing to the survivability of the accident was the crew resource management between the captain and first officer, which allowed them to maintain control of the airplane, increasing the survivability of the impact with the water."
In his memoir Highest Duty with Jeffrey Zaslow, the basis for Eastwood's big money maker, Sullenberger agrees. He writes that he was "buoyed by the fact that investigators determined that Jeff (Skiles) and I made appropriate choices at every step."
According to the NTSB no one on the Eastwood/Warner Brothers production team bothered to do fact checking with the federal agency. This appears to have been an oversight, considering that NTSB officials spent years fighting for some of the key safety improvements and procedures contributing to the survival of all 155 aboard flight 1549.
Screenwriter Komarnicki, perhaps best known as the producer of Santa driven comedy elf, is celebrating Christmas a bit early this year thanks to his ability to rewrite history and dramatize incidents that never happened.
Warner Brothers damage control experts, Eastwood, Sullenberger and Hanks can't explain why Komarnicki and Eastwood's narrative invent a series of events that do not show up in the 560 page transcript of the NTSB's three day June 2009 hearing on Flight 1549. It's hard to believe that Sullenberger who covers aviation stories for CBS and is universally recognized as a white hat in aviation safety, would not have caught these obvious and unforgivable mistakes in the script.
Eastwood's revisionism portrays agency investigators as no nothing amateurs eager to smear the pilots. The embarrassing and inexcusable factual errors begin when Hanks , playing Sully, wakes a union rep insisting that he put in an early morning call to Airbus in France.
The "nervous" US Airways Captain wants the pilots in Toulouse to speed up simulations of the Flight 1549 landing pattern at LaGuardia and Teterboro. This phone call never happened nor did Airbus pilots rush through the simulations portrayed in the film. In fact this sequence never happened.
At the hearing, bullying NTSB investigators (perhaps to avoid the possibility of libeling them, their names have been changed) make the case that Sully and Skiles could have kept their passengers high and dry by landing their plane at LaGuardia or Teterboro. A pair of Airbus simulations, supposedly made available for the hearing thanks to pressure from Sully's union, demonstrate they could have made it back to LaGuardia or landed at Teterboro.
In the Eastwood version, Sully brilliantly persuades the hearing officers to phone Airbus and ask them to instantly rerun both simulations. In the film this is done with a realistic 35 second delay necessary for the pilots to assess the bird strike triggered crisis at dangerously low altitude.
When the hearing reconvenes after a short recess, the French simulator pilots show a new more realistic scenario that plane could not have reached either airport. This is portrayed as a humiliating defeat for the big bad wolves in the NTSB lair.
The fact is, as Eastwood, Hanks and Warner Brothers know, none of this ever happened. Tom Haueter, who directed the NTSB's Office of Safety, at the time it oversaw the Flight 1549 investigation and final report says:
"We never got any pushback from Sullenberger. The movie's portrayal of the French rerun of the simulation of the crash never happened at our hearing.
"The movie makes it look like Sullenberger forced us to do additional simulations during the hearing. We had done those simulations months before and he had nothing to do with them.
"We concluded before the hearing that he was right, that he made the best decision he could have at the time, that he could not have made it back to either airport."
What about the scene in Eastwood's film where an investigator challenges Sullenberger on whether or not one of Flight 1549's engines was potentially capable of producing enough power to get the plane back to LaGuardia?
"Not true," says Haueter, now an independent safety consultant in Great Falls, Virginia. "They couldn't have produced full power if they tried. They weren't going to fly anymore.
"We concluded that they made the best decision they could have made. They could have tried to do x, y and z and land the plane in Central Park but that would not have been a bright idea."
"We believe 99.9 percent of all pilots in that situation would have done the same thing."
Another inexplicable Eastwood change was playing the cockpit voice recorder during the film, an event that triggers heartfelt words from the investigation team.
"We never played the cockpit voice recorder during the hearing, as shown in the film," says Haueter.
Missing from the script is the fact that some of the NTSB's safety recommendations resulting from the Flight 1539 investigation and hearing have been implemented to the benefit of American airline passengers every day, including people who work for Warner Brothers. Eastwood doesn't spend one second on this side of the story.
Should he, Tom Hanks (Sullenberger) and Aaron Eckhart (as Skiles) win Oscar gold , their Hollywood victory will clearly be at the expense of the "bureaucrats" at the NTSB falsely accused of trying to sully the flight crew's reputation.
Damage has already been done as some fans of the film stream out of theaters cursing a diligent and highly praised federal agency that has made many life saving significant contributions to aviation safety.
"I understand the need for a movie to make money," says Haueter "But I have gotten a lot of calls from pilots blasting the NTSB who believe the false story shown in the film is absolutely real. This is going to be detrimental to future accident investigations because people who see the film think they can't trust the NTSB.
"There are intelligent people who have seen the film who think it is absolutely accurate, that this is the way we are doing business. It says we don't trust the pilots . We are asked:
"'Why should we trust you people, you are only a shill for management trying to do in pilots. You are trying to make us look bad, why should we talk to you.'
"The people I have talked to from pilot unions who participated in this investigation are shocked by the movie. Unfortunately for the NTSB, it is not going to be pretty.
"I have not heard anything from Capitol Hill but I wouldn't be surprised if they are getting calls from Congressmen and Senators asking what is going on.
Hanks and Eckhart's convincing performances as Sully and Skiles have made the problem worse.
"People see the NTSB hearing scene," says Haueter, "and they absolutely believe 100 percent that this is what happened, that every word is true."
It's not going to be easy to undo the fictional dialogue in the film that has already crossed the $94 million mark worldwide, blasting away competition like Blair Witch and Bridget Jones's Baby.
"From the day the movie came out," says Hauter, "I have had people call and ask, 'how does the NTSB run an investigation this way.'
"People who really know me say, 'wow, it's a movie, it's not real.'
" But other people think that the film is telling it like it was, that we were out to screw Sullenberger."
"Eastwood believed it was true. I find it interesting that when they made the movie they never approached the NTSB.
"Sullenberger knows what happened. You would think he would have said something."
***
FSI Contributing Editor Roger Rapoport is the producer of the feature film Pilot Error. He can be reached at 231 720-0930.
Copyright Roger Rapoport, All Rights Reserved
Here are video links to the three day NTSB public hearing on US Airways Flight 1549.
http://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/Page ... s1549.aspx Video appears under "related video" on the left.
The accident docket, documents 110, 111 and 112 presents a transcript of the hearing.
http://dms.ntsb.gov/pubdms/search/hitli ... etID=47230
NTSB Report on Flight 1549
Executive Summary
http://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/Acci ... AR1003.asp
Il y aura toujours quelqu'un de mauvaise langue! Quelqu'un qui aurait mieux fait, quelqu'un qui aurait evite ce probleme..
