Fly Right: Invest in Learning

January 15, 2009. My mother turned 69. My mini American Eskimo turned 12. US Airways Flight 1549 lost both engines after striking a large flock of Canadian geese just after takeoff. Incredibly, all passengers and crew members lived to see another birthday.

The pilot crash landed the plane in a frozen river near New York City. All 155 passengers survived and were pulled to safety as the plane slowly sank. They called it the Miracle on the Hudson.

After Flight 1549 lost both of its engines, transmissions with the air traffic controller only lasted moments.  Within this narrow window, the pilot, Capt. “Sully” Sullenberger, quickly ruled out the possibility of landing the plane on available runways. “We’ll be in the Hudson,” he said. The controller, whether from disbelief or because the words were unintelligible,  responded with “Say again?…”

But there was only silence. They were Sully’s last words from the cockpit.

Normally, the landing procedure is begun at 35,000 feet. Flight 1549 was only at 3,000 feet when it lost both engines. The pilot and co-pilot were out of time. Landing gear up, nose up, they hit the watery runway. The jet glided across the water and came to a stop.

US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River, New York, USA on January 15, 2009

Sully gave the order to get the passengers off the plane – the injured and women and children first. Only one had serious injuries. The passengers stepped out onto the wings as the plane slowly began to sink. The water was cold – only 30 degrees. Within four minutes, rescue boats arrived.

In the weeks that followed, investigators simulated the flight 25 times to see what would have happened if the pilot had made the decision to land the plane on a runway at one of the nearby airports instead of the Hudson River. And twenty-five times, the plane crashed.

“I couldn’t afford to be wrong,” Sullenberger said. “The only thing long enough, wide enough and smooth enough to land on was the river.”

For the first time in 45 years, a major aircraft had crash-landed in the water – and every passenger made it out alive.

How did Sully do it?  How much of it was training and schooling, and how much of it was “Sully”? Could another pilot have done the same thing?  Captain Sullenberger said it was unknowable, but he believed that many could have done the same thing.

What he could say with certainty is that he was able to live his life in a way that prepared him for that event and its aftermath.

He said that he had found his passion at an early age, and when you are passionate about something, you work hard at it and gain a lot of satisfaction from it. You find purpose and meaning in life. You become an expert at it and you have a desire to strive for excellence. For most of his life, he had been plugged into his passion.

And Sully had a lifelong love of learning. He said it was one of the greatest gifts he received from his mother, who had been a schoolteacher for 25 years. He still tells his children, “Never stop learning or growing, either professionally or personally. Continue throughout your life to invest in yourself!”

Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger

Miracle on the Hudson? Captain Sullenberger had 40 years of flight experience. He had been a U. S. Air Force F-4 fighter pilot. He had served as a safety and emergency instructor and accident investigator.  For decades, he had contributed to the field of aviation safety. Throughout his career, he remained committed to his own ongoing development and education. In fact, before his fateful encounter with the Hudson, he had been studying the psychology of how a flight crew responds to emergency situations.

Many organizations tend to view training and talent  development as luxuries, not  investments. As the economy continues to falter, companies focus on cutting costs and training is  the first to go. Talent development is not an option.

But neither is failure. Only one month after the miracle on the Hudson, another plane crash landed in New York, and the outcome was very different. Continental Express Flight 3407 nosedived into a residential home on the outskirts of Buffalo. All 49 people on board were killed, as well as one man on the ground. An investigation revealed that a series of pilot errors led to the engine stall which preceded the crash.  The NTSB found that the pilot and co-pilot apparently lacked the proper training for flight conditions.

Training, learning, and development are the lifeblood of an organization, which thrives on the competence of individual employees. Employee competence includes experience, skills, talent, capacity to add value, common sense, business sense, values, intuition, perception, rules of thumb, and know-how. It is the type of knowledge that resists being written down, transmitted, or being captured in a database. It resides within employees’ heads and makes up about 80% of an organization’s valuable knowledge.

In “this economy”, are we viewing learning and development activities as an expense, or as an investment? Are we cutting back on training and education as we continuously downsize our workforces, or are we maximizing their performance, and investing in their talent? Do we make every effort to retain and retrain employees?

Training and development may have meant the difference between life and death for the passengers who tragically lost their lives on Flight 3407. After the investigation of the crash, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) stepped up inspection of its training programs for regional airline pilots.

Contrast the outcome of Flight 3407 with the outcome of Flight 1549. In an interview with CBS News anchor Katie Couric, Captain Sullenberger said:

For 42 years, I’ve been making small, regular deposits in this bank of experience: education and training. And on January 15, the balance was sufficient so that I could make a very large withdrawal.

Are you plugged into your passion? Do you have a lifelong love of learning? What do you want the outcomes of your job performance and your organization’s performance to be?  Do you make investments toward those outcomes?

“Both engines cut out and he actually floated it into the river.” – Joe Hart, passenger on Captain Sullenberger’s Flight 1549

Fly right.