More of
Al Haynes interview
...Another piece of luck was where we were....The weather was an amazing piece of luck....The time of day was also very advantageous....Our luck ran out about fifty feet in the air, but it lasted for a long time... So luck played a very important part in getting the airplane to Sioux City, and having the survival rate that we did have....
So why would I know more about getting that airplane on the ground under those conditions than the other three. SO if I hadn't used CLR, [Command Leadership Resource Training] if we had not let everybody put their input in, it's a cinch we wouldn't have made it. It was, I don't know if any of you remember the old movie Marty, I kind of refer to that, it was Ernest Borgnine, and a group of his cronies, trying to find something to do on a Saturday night, and they said, what do you
want to do Marty, and he said, i don't know, what do you want to do Joe, and that's kind of the way we flew the airplane now. What do you want to do, I don't know, and let's try this, and you think that'll work, beats me, and that's about the way it went, really. If you read the cockpit voice recorder transcript, there's a lot of that on there....
...The second big factor was ommunications. ...extremely calm young man that you just heard, Kevin Bockman. He's a controller that happened to be on the radar station at approach control when we turned it over....But the calmness of his voice, the communications with him was outstanding. ... the cockpit voice recorder shows numerous times we were asking where we were in relation to the airport and how far out and he was right there every second giving us every bit of information,...
Communications in the air was tremendous.
