Capt. Sully retires

I'm happy for him and hope he has a long, enjoyable retirement. A lot of airline pilots took a salary whuppin' during restructuring and that is often life changing, especially when you're trying to set up for retirement.

 

I met Al Haynes when he was on the lecture circuit following his retirement. Maybe I'll meet Capt. Sully the same way. I hope that the captains on all my flights are as capable as these two gentlemen.

 

There are a lot of guys like Haynes and Scully. I have known many but they go unnoticed. Today the professional isn't like the ones that I flew with....not in their airliners but in their tail draggers. Perhaps the greatest was Jack Leffler, a late friend who flew with United. He had a series of classic airplanes with which he shared with me many times and learned first hand what a real pilot is all about. He said that he flew nose draggers for a living and tail draggers for fun and he was good at both. he had a Monocoupe 165 AW ( if I have that correct) and I flew it several times with him. We mentioned the capability of the aircraft once when we were on a X country to PDX. He took the airplane and cleared for traffic and said , " Now this is what this airplane will do." He put the stick hard over, yanked back on it and did a 360 at 4 G and rolled it back to course and continued flying. Flying back several days later we entered broken IMC and I was flying trying to pick my way through as I had done in the past. He took the stick and said that he had had enough and decided to land at a nearby airport. We called our wives to pick us up and I learned why he had survived so many "iffy" flights. He mentioned a DC-8 flight from New York to SFO that was socked in. His flight engineer said that when they would arrive they would only have 13,000 lbs. of fuel left. He elected to divert to the alternate much to the ire of the pax but he did it because if he botched his instrument approach and had to do a go-around, he would not have made it. A DC-8 or 707 consumes fuel at an astonishing rate at full power and he knew it. I saw him fly Ernie Gann's Bucker one day when he did an outside loop that went into a roll at the finish. Here is a UAL big jet pilot giving us lessons in what it is to be able to fly ANYTHING THAT HE IS IN. Gann said that he was the last of a breed and I had to agree. All are not like Jack but many are like he was in an airliner, extremely capable, clear thinkers, excellent pilots, and in control every minute, and all because they had a plan in place before the emergency erupted. Scully is one of those.
Switches

 

Al Haynes came to our base a couple times when I was active duty and in Mishap Investigation school and I got to talk to him. An aquaintance of mine was on that flight with his family and they all walked away from it. He had the utmost respect for that aircrew obviously. That was some nervy aircrew coordination that day and calmly executed.

Like Bob said, there are other well trained crews out there, you just don't hear about them until they pull something like this off when the chips are down.

 

The real hero was Denny Fitch the Check Airman flying the plane on his knees with the thrust levers. Haynes had enough sense to call for him when he was riding in 1st class. Haynes caused the rolling moment when he closed the throttles and emliminated the asymetric thrust required to maintain wings level. Haynes gets the percieved credit for being a hero when in fact it was Fitch. I find it ironic that Haynes lectures on this for money. I will credit him for good CRM, but the real fact is he caused the rolling moment and the cartwheel. The plane was in a pefect wings level position to land level prior to him doing that but was high and fast. The CVR includes expletives from Fitch as they started to roll.


"Dennis E. (Denny) Fitch (born 1942) was an off-duty DC-10 training captain who helped captain Al Haynes minimize loss of life on United Airlines Flight 232 when all flight controls were lost, on July 19, 1989. Fitch used differential throttle adjustment to steer the airliner to an oblique crash-landing at Sioux Gateway Airport, in Sioux City, Iowa, resulting in the survival of 185 out of 296 on-board. After the crash, in which he was injured, he returned to flying duties with United Airlines.

He was commended by then-President George H. W. Bush and in Senate Resolution 174 of the 101st Congress, as a result of his feat. A safety consultant to NASA as a member of the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, he is also president of his own aviation consulting firm, specializing in Cockpit Resource Management and human factors, and gives motivational presentations to corporate groups and associations on teamwork, drawing on his experience on Flight 232. He was formerly a pilot in the Air National Guard, and attended Duquesne University. Dennis Fitch was interviewed by Errol Morris about United Airlines Flight 232 for the documentary series First Person."