Plane and Not-So-Simple: TFT Review of Fly By Wire by William Langewiesche

Photo by Janis Krums

Ever since Chesley Sullenberger landed a U.S. Airways plane in the Hudson River, the man has gotten plenty of attention. Here’s my favorite Sully moment: in mid-October, he was interviewed on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. A few minutes into the interview, Stewart pointed out that Sully had ditched the plane in the Hudson just blocks from the Daily Show’s studio in New York City, then asked: “Did you at any point, during the landing or anything like that, think to yourself, ‘Oh my god, the Daily Show tapes there?” Sully laughed and said, “Not so much, not so much.” Stewart added, “So you were able to hold it together, knowing that I was maybe a block and a half away?” “I was cool like that,” Sully said.

Sully indeed has been celebrated for his coolness under pressure, and has seen plenty of fame since January 15, 2009. But what has been less prevalent in the news coverage of the story is the kind of airplane that Sully and Jeffrey Skiles, the first officer, were flying: an A320, made in Toulouse, France by the European consortium Airbus. In a new book, “Fly by Wire: The Geese, the Glide, the Miracle on the Hudson,” William Langewiesche looks at this event from pretty much all angles possible, but the main character is the airplane itself, and the flying system that it uses called “fly by wire.” The book itself is slim and concise; it grew out of a roughly 10,000-word article in Vanity Fair. “From takeoff to splashdown, the flight had lasted just five minutes,” Langewiesche writes of Flight 1549, and the resulting book, like the flight itself, is rightly short.

What’s so interesting about the specific kind of plane that Sully was flying? It has to do with the way the controls the pilot uses are connected to the movable surfaces on the exterior of the aircraft, and, controversially, limiting factors that Airbus has built into those controls. The A320 is flown using a joystick, and that control sends electric signals to the plane’s movable surfaces—there is no physical, mechanical connection between the two. The A320 has, as Langewiesche describes it, “a no-compromise, full-on digital fly-by-wire control system that radically redefines the relationship between pilots and flight.” The most controversial—and to Langewiesche’s mind, the most brilliant—part of this system is a set of self-protective measures in the plane’s design that prevents the pilot from, say, maneuvering the plane into a stall or a turn so steep the plane crashes or comes apart. From “wings-level flight,” as Langewiesche describes it, “if you slam the sidestick fully back, the airplane will pitch up rapidly, but … will impose no greater gravity load than the maximum safe 2.5 Gs. You can be as rough as you want, and you won’t shed your wings or tail.” I’m not a pilot, but I’ll take a stab at an analogy: the anti-lock braking system in a car. You can’t step on the brakes hard enough to make the car skid—the computer intervenes.

I was fascinated by this event, in part because when it happened I was just about to start working as a blogger covering air travel news for a website owned by the Travel Channel called WorldHum.com. I was living in New York City at the time, and the day after the plane landed in the water, I took a trip down to where the plane had been tied up at Battery Park City, snapped some photos, and wrote a somewhat solemn blog entry about it. Most of all, I felt keenly about the event what I think most people did—that it did seem miraculous that the plane touched down without any loss of life, and that rescue came so quickly on that freezing day.

Langewiesche’s thesis is basically this: Sullenberger is a brilliant pilot, but the unique design of this plane helped him in the critical moments. In other words, because the plane was of such good design and such a dream to fly, Sullenberger could focus on making the important decisions: deciding where to land, and then doing so smoothly—all the while Skiles was trying to restart the engines. “They could have done it in a Boeing, too,” Langewiesche writes, but adds that “it was helpful to their immediate cause,” that they were flying this type of plane.

What gave me the most pleasure in reading this book was Langewiesche’s dry, understated sense of humor. About that flock of geese the plane hit? They were “tending to business as usual, with nothing special in mind.” About the extraordinary range of vision a goose has? “This means they would see every word on this page simultaneously, though comprehension would be a problem.” About the early career of Bernard Ziegler, the French engineer who developed the fly-by-wire system for the A320? He went to war in Algeria, flying a fighter plane and “doing the usual thing of bombing and strafing rebellious peasants.” The book is an excellent work of long-form journalism that thoughtfully dissects a complicated incident.

The book has spurred some controversy. The New York Times reported that Sully questioned the factuality of the book, and it has gotten people talking about the role of automation in the cockpit, and about the extent to which a human or a computer should have ultimate control over how a plane is maneuvered. For anyone interested in this debate—and it’s a debate much more relevant to pilots than to passengers—a good place to start reading is Patrick Smith’s excellent “Ask the Pilot” column in Salon.com (Smith points out how much luck was a factor in the event, too).

But, as for the debate about where the credit for their safe landing is due, I have this to say: Why not praise both pilots and plane?