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‘Sully’ Flight Survivors Embrace a Story That Lives On

Plane Speaking

Jorge Morgado

Jorge Morgado says the saga of Flight 1549 has lived on well past the proverbial moment, through books, reunions, and, most recently, the movie Sully.

 

Jorge Morgado acknowledged that the words ‘based on a true story’ give film writers, directors, and producers a large degree of latitude when they’re telling a story.

Still, he went to one of the area’s first showings of Sully with the almost singular goal of seeing if Hollywood, and specifically Clint Eastwood, would get it right, meaning an accurate portrayal of the events of Jan. 15, 2009 and thereafter.

And he was pleased to report that — even though, for starters, his golf group of six that was such a significant part of the so-called ‘Miracle on the Hudson’ was reduced in size by half for this movie (and he wasn’t part of it) — they did.

At least when it comes to the part about the ditching of the plane and the subsequent rescue of all aboard.

“I thought they did a great job of telling the story without exaggerating,” said Morgado, vice president of Baystate Rug & Flooring in East Longmeadow and Chicopee. “I went to see if they would add ‘Hollywood’ to it, and for the most part, they didn’t.”

Jim Stefanik, who is one of the three written into the script, agreed, while noting, as one might expect, that it is quite the experience to see an actor, in this case, Max Adler (Glee, Love and Honor), play you in a movie and see his name next to yours as the credits roll.

“It’s definitely weird, and that’s been one of the more interesting things about this whole experience,” he said, adding quickly that Adler looks nothing like him and is almost a foot taller, but he doesn’t mind Hollywood taking those liberties.

“I’m five foot, five, and he’s about 6’4,” Stefanik, the former golf pro turned Chicopee firefighter, explained with a laugh, adding that it’s certainly difficult to describe the sensation of watching a movie depicting a scene from your life, and he has struggled with that assignment.

The simple exercise of trying to articulate these experiences explains how Sully has in some ways put the six golfers, all from Western Mass., back in the spotlight, even though some have kept a very low profile for years now and have every intention of keeping it that way.

And it also helps explain how a story like this lives on long after the proverbial ‘moment’ — in this case, it was literally only 10 or 12 minutes — is over. Indeed, there have been books, reunions, consistent contact on social media among the passengers, a gathering when the now-famous Airbus A320 was moved into a museum in North Carolina a few years ago, and other happenings to keep the story in plain view.

But in most respects, keeping this saga front and center hasn’t been a burden, emotionally or otherwise, because it is in many ways different from other newscast-leading events in recent years, many of them also turned into movies (Deepwater Horizon is now in theaters, for example, and there are two films on the Boston Marathon bombing now in production).

Indeed, this is a feel-good saga in about every way imaginable, one where no one can be described with the word ‘victim’ — except maybe in reference to an unyielding media blitzkrieg, as we’ll see later. There were no fatalities, only one serious injury (to a flight attendant), no real blame to be laid, and hardly a hint of controversy, although, according to many accounts, Eastwood felt the necessity to create some.

And when we all survived … from then to now, I think I realize just how good I have it. I think I appreciate it more than I would if I wasn’t on that plane that day.”

Specifically, in the film, National Transportation Safety Board officials make the case that the pilots could have flown the plane back to LaGuardia Airport instead of ditching in the Hudson River, but Morgado says he’s heard rumors that the NTSB is not at all happy with this depiction of events.

No, the story of Flight 1549 has a happy ending in seemingly all ways, and that’s why Morgado, Stefanik, and Dave Carlos didn’t mind going over all this ground one more time nearly eight years after they were unwittingly thrust into the spotlight.

“When people ask me, I say this whole experience was a blessing in disguise,” said Carlos, chair of the Math Department at Springfield’s Central High, soon to open his own business on the side, a pizza shop. “I have an 8-year-old and a 6-year-old, and the 6-year-old wasn’t born when this happened. When Sully said ‘brace for impact,’ what I thought about was not being able to see my daughter and what she looked like, and not being able to see my son again or my family again.

“And when we all survived … from then to now, I think I realize just how good I have it,” he went on. “I think I appreciate it more than I would if I wasn’t on that plane that day.”

For this issue, the three talked about that fateful day in January — again — but mostly about what’s happened since, and how events of this nature can change someone’s life in ways that couldn’t be imagined.

Last-ditch Efforts

“It was like sneakers in a clothes dryer.”

That’s how Morgado chose to describe the sound of a flock of geese getting in the way of the engines on both sides of the Airbus he and his golfing buddies were scattered throughout. Only no one actually knew that this is what it was.

All that would soon become apparent is that something was clearly wrong, he recalled, adding that the cabin, which he was near the front of (window seat, row 5 in coach) was soon filling with smoke.

“The cabin started shaking and it smelled like burnt bird —   you could tell something was wrong,” he said, adding that, like all those around him, he spent the next few minutes trying to simply absorb what was happening around him.

Backing up a little — kind of like a movie flashing back several hours — Morgado said he and the rest of his golf party were not supposed to be on this flight. Instead, they had chosen to fly on Spirit Airlines for their regular winter-season trip to Myrtle Beach in South Carolina. But that Thursday morning came up white, and the light show was enough to ground smaller planes, but not larger airliners.

So Morgado and his companions — Stefanik,  Carlos, Rick Delisle, Rob Kolodjay, and Jeff Kolodjay— would secure the last six tickets for US Airways Flight 1549, a number that, like most everything else about this story, no one will ever forget.

Returning to that moment when Morgado heard the sneakers in the dryer, he said that noise, which occurred only a few minutes after the plane lifted off LaGuardia’s runway, was followed by general silence. There was nothing, he said, until the man the world would soon come to call by his nickname said those words have become so famous — “This is the captain; brace for impact.”

By the time those words came, though, passengers could see that the plane was out over the Hudson and ever closer to the water, said Carlos, adding that stewardesses began saying the phrase that would come to dominate the movie trailer: “heads down … brace yourselves.” And as much as the words themselves, it was what he thought they meant that has stayed with him all these years.

“They kept chanting it over and over again,” he recalled, that it was an agonizing, terror-filled three minutes before the plane actually hit the water. “I kept thinking, ‘is this the last thing I’m going to hear? This is awful.’”

Eventually, although very quickly, it seems — “you were just in survival mode,” said Morgado — passengers made their way out of the aircraft, with most of them winding up on the wings, as captured in those iconic photographs, one of which now graces the wall of his office at the Chicopee location. What those pictures don’t effectively convey is how quickly the plane began to settle into the icy Hudson.

“When I stepped onto the wing, the water was only ankle-deep, but by the time the boats came, I was waist-deep in water — the plane was sinking pretty quickly,” said Morgado, adding that, while he was having a hard time comprehending and coping with all that was going on around him, he still had the presence of mind to keep his cell phone dry.

Because he did, he got his first real taste of how immediate, intense, and sometimes infuriating the media assault on Flight 1549 and everyone involved with it that day would be.

“I called my wife to tell her I was in a plane crash; she didn’t even know I was on that plane,” he explained. “I said, ‘I’m OK; I’ll call you when I get on dry land.’ I then hung up, and she turned on the TV to see what was going on.

“She later called and said that, just after I hung up, the home phone started ringing off the hook — it was all these New York and Boston media people calling,” he went on. “She remembers talking to Diane Sawyer’s producer, who said, ‘let me know where your husband is; we know he’s asthmatic, and we’ll get him treatment.’ They knew my medical history, and I was still standing on the wing of that plane. That was how quick they were able to get my information and get to my house. They were all out to get a story.”

Overall, Carlos, who joked that he wasn’t written out of the script, he just wasn’t written into it, said the movie made the rescue appear easier and less traumatic than it actually was.

“In the movie, the rescue seemed very nonchalant; they made it look easy to just climb on those boats and get out of there, that everything was just standing still,” he noted. “In real life, we were floating down the Hudson; the plane was moving, the boats were moving, the hulls of the boats were 15 to 20 feet above the water, not the five feet like they depict in the movie.”

Wing and a Prayer

Fast-forwarding a little, Morgado and the others said what happened on the Hudson was certainly just the first chapter in this story. Others involve what happened after they returned to dry land and, later, their families, their businesses, and other facets of their lives.

Highlights, and there are many, include:

• Morgado being told that media members had snuck into his office in pursuit of … whatever, and wound up taking photos of pictures of his children and printing them (that’s a lowlight, actually);

• Getting to go on that Myrtle Beach trip eventually, with the Golf Channel in tow to record the occasion, and with new equipment and bags courtesy of Titleist, which wanted its name omnipresent during this outing, and succeeding with that goal (Morgado remembers the dozens of courses at Myrtle vying hard for the privilege of hosting them);

• Taking part in the book Miracle on the Hudson, featuring passengers telling their stories (Morgado leads off a chapter titled “Night in New York” talking about his phone call to his wife while out on the wing); and

• Relaying the story untold times to family members, friends, business customers, fellow Rotarians, and, yes, the media, a broad constituency (we’ll include TV talk-show hosts) that induced a wide range of emotions from those we spoke with — everything from fascination to incredulity.

Indeed, beyond his aforementioned experience on the wing, Morgado related another episode involving the fifth estate in the book Miracle on the Hudson.

As he relates the story, the six golfers were due to appear on the Today show the morning after the crash and rescue. They were to meet the show’s producer in the lobby of the Crowne Plaza hotel, and were told specifically by him not to leave the lobby, because competing networks, positioned outside with their own vans, would essentially hijack the story.

“It was insane,” said Stefanik of the media coverage, in terms of its depth and voracity. “They kept trying to find out everything they could about you; they were calling my mother-in-law, my mother, all in pursuit of a story. They can find out anything about you that they want.”

The movie Sully has brought the media back, but not with anything approaching the ferocity witnessed in the weeks and months after the crash. Overall, the film has simply brought some new questions to be answered — everything from ‘how accurate was it?’ (perhaps the most common query) to ‘how did Tom Hanks do in the title role?’

“He was incredible as Sully,” said Morgado while answering the latter. “He captured him perfectly.”

And while that same adjective probably can’t be used for the sum of the film and its attention to accuracy, said those we spoke with, it does an adequate job of capturing the heart of the story — the courage and skill of the pilots.

Roll the Credits

Spoiler alert: Morgado said Sully starts off in an intriguing way — by showing what might have happened if Sullenberger and co-pilot Jeffrey Skiles hadn’t pulled off the miracle on the Hudson (let’s leave it at that).

The powerful footage has to leave audience members, not to mention survivors like Morgado, Stefanik, and Carlos, more cognizant of how lucky everyone was that day.

Carlos enjoyed and appreciated the movie, but didn’t really need it to appreciate his good fortune and remember never to take anything for granted.

“The incident helped open my eyes to things, and it’s enabled me to enjoy what I have more than I used to,” he told BusinessWest.

This is a sentiment that — like the story of Flight 1549 itself — lives on well past the moments that made history.

George O’Brien can be reached at [email protected]