http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/09/arts/television/09impact.html
“Brace for Impact: The Chesley B. Sullenberger Story” provides yet another opportunity to ponder the miracle of US Airways Flight 1549. Not the fact that an Airbus A320 was ditched in a river, and all 155 people aboard survived; that, while unlikely, was within the bounds of plausibility. TLC Capt. Chesley B. Sullenberger inspecting the damaged plane he landed on the Hudson River.
We’re talking about the extraordinary circumstances that conspired to make Mr. Sullenberger our reigning national folk hero: the urban, media-saturated New York setting of the crash, which in turn led to arresting visuals from surveillance and news cameras; the quick response of the Hudson River ferries that saved people from dying of hypothermia, as some easily could have; and of course the laconic, chiseled, Marlboro Man presence of the captain himself. Also that name, Chesley, odd and oddly perfect.
“Brace for Impact,” on Sunday night on TLC, presents the stories of passengers, air traffic controllers and rescuers, but devotes most of its screen time to Mr. Sullenberger. He travels the route of Flight 1549 by helicopter; he visits the ferry captains who sped to the scene; and he is reunited, in the program’s most touching moments, with the battered fuselage of the Airbus whose engines had goose for lunch. Every quiet nod, every well-chosen word serves only to burnish his already peerless image.
Nothing against Jeffrey B. Skiles, the first officer who was in charge until the engines conked out, but whom would you want deciding your fate? The man who looks back and says: “I was thinking that somehow we’re going to get some power back on these engines and we’re going to be arriving back at a gate. That’s what’s always happened, that’s what it’s always been, you know, and so I was always expecting to do that” (Mr. Skiles)?
Or the one who looks back and says: “The only option, the only place in the whole metropolitan area long enough, wide enough, smooth enough to land a jet airliner, is the river. There’s just no other place to go. We’re out of time. We’re out of airspeed. We’re out of ideas. This is it.” (You know who.)
One thing “Brace for Impact” does not provide is any mention of the controversy stirred byWilliam Langewiesche’s book “Fly by Wire,” with its suggestion that Mr. Sullenberger should share credit for the miracle on the Hudson with the sophisticated design of the A320. The only outside expert who speaks about the landing is an investigator for the USAirline Pilots Association (which is not identified as the union for US Airways pilots).
The mood is celebratory, and the facts occasionally fuzzy: a passenger says there were “no real injuries,” when in fact there were five serious injuries.
But just as he saved the lives of his passengers and crew, Mr. Sullenberger saves “Brace for Impact” from itself. The voice of calm and competence — “I can only afford to look at two things, outside and inside at my airspeed indication. Outside at the picture I’m seeing, inside at my air speed. Outside, inside” — he puts to shame the documentary’s writers (“Sully faces incalculable odds for a successful water landing. The situation is dire”) and its narrator, that lesser action hero Harrison Ford.
Mr. Sullenberger is now famous for two performances, the one he gave in the cockpit last Jan. 15 and the one he has been giving in public since. In the hero business, it’s hard to say which is the more important.
BRACE FOR IMPACT
TLC, Sunday night at 9, Eastern and Pacific times; 8, Central time.
Produced for TLC by Daniel H. Birman Productions. Mr. Birman, executive producer;Harrison Ford, host.
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