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okay I'm not sure a man who's been entertaining a group of stories and keeping these wraps faces out of their laptops needs an introduction I also don't think that Mike's working so I'm going to just talk how about this Oh photo op here we go again we can improvise this is awesome it is so I'm Karen May for those of you I don't know oh wow what an introduction I manage our talent team which is leadership development Learning and Development talent management and so forth and so what an honor for me to introduce this man I'm so close to to introduce to you Sully Sullenberger who you may you may know as a hero and you may think of when you think of the word hero but you may also think of as a leader as a man who's an expert who's responsible is creative and who's able to lead a team through a significant crisis to a very good end right yes he's standing here a very good end but I wanted to highlight three other characteristics leadership characteristics that really matter the first is that he's a curious man even after extraordinary success he stays curious and the second is that he's focused on learning from others even people who are quite different from him and then the third is that he seeks to share that knowledge to share what he learns he actually took this book that he wrote making a difference the one he's here to talk to us about as an opportunity to interview people eleven people that he admires leaders that he admires and to learn from them and then in turn to share what he learned with the world and he's here today to share that with you and what an honor for us so thank you thank you very much that was a very nice introduction thank you I'll try to live up to it but yeah I I have been intellectually curious my whole life and in the introduction to the second book making addicts stories and vision and courage from America's leaders I talked about why that's the case or why I think that's the case and one of the reasons is that even before my birth my family valued education all for my grandparents and these are people who were born in the 1880s and 1890s in the 19th century went to college and that was especially remarkable for women of that era my mother was a first grade teacher in the small town in Texas where I grew up just a first-grade teacher for 25 years and so from her you know I got a wonderful lifelong gifts of a love of reading and of learning and those of certainly well throughout my career and so I've tried to do what I've encouraged others to do and that's to continue to invest in yourself so never stop learning never stop growing either professionally and personally throughout your life and I think that's become a necessity now my cousin with the pace of change only accelerating I think most people cannot get through an entire working lifetime with just one skill set we have to keep learning have to keep growing sometimes reinvent ourselves like I did on January 15 2009 till to learn very quickly a way of living this entirely new life on January 15 2009 I had never given that public speech in my life never wanted to I was convinced I wouldn't be good at it I had never written the book I've been a professional pilot but it's a curious and so I approached these these new careers and I have four of them now to replace the the airline career I left as after 30 years two years ago as a speaker as an author as a consultant to industry and as a CBS News aviation consultant I approach that with the same discipline the dillons I did my flying career and we seem to have lost the speaker in the room or has it just been this had just been muted is it better without it okay I've got just enough that you can hear me let me know if you if you can't yeah okay so so why this book and why now I think like like the first book like highest duty my memoir a lot of this book was already in me that I had lived my life in a way that had prepared me without knowing it for that event and for all this attention there's a public figure in the aftermath I'd been thoughtful you know I grew up in an environment in which ideas were important in which education was important and strivings rec from for excellence was expected of me and so yeah I when I when I had these amazing opportunities to travel the world and meet world figures the last three years and I began to hear these very personal stories he's moving and inspiring stories sometimes funny but all all of them you know really really incredible about people who have changed the world who have changed the lives of others and done amazing things I just had to share them I had to put them on the page and so that's that's why and I intentionally chose a very diverse group of people from a variety of walks of life younger and older men women some well-known some you've never heard of but all people I admire and respect all people who have certain things in common one of the things they have in common is that I think they all view the world the same way they view the world as an opportunity for good and there are people who are willing to serve a cause greater than themselves greater than their own immediate needs they're people who like one of them literally says they're able to check their ego at the door they're able to do things for the right reasons and they're able to elite people you know I think people deserve to be let they want to be led we may manage things we may manage money but we must lead people and that requires human skills now some especially in really evidence-based domains and I've done a lot of patient safety work to trying to apply what we've learned over the last century and aviation to medicine some in these evidence-based domains like Edison met at medicine think of these human skills as soft skills as opposed to hard skills or clinical or technical skills but they're not really soft skills are human skills and and even in medicine even in the evidence-based domain like that these human skills have the potential to save more lives and technical skills too because much of what we're seeing in medicine right now is we have like in so many industries we have islands of accents islands of excellence in a sea of systemic failures we have some areas that are doing very well some they're very safe and some that are not and so I think these human skills are very important and now when we at the society are facing huge and intractable and ambiguous and complicated problems that are going to require generations to solve we need people now more than ever who can feel a sense of civic duty who can be willing to share sacrifices who can give us a vision of a possible future and help us to get there and be as Jennifer Granholm says a former michigan governor got profile in the book who can be more pragmatic and less dogmatic so you know with that in mind i can i'll tell you a few stories about some of the people in my profile and why it shows them and i'd like to open it up into a wide-ranging discussion about what these people mean what they've done and what we can learn from them and and take away as everyday things we can use in our lives and and one of the things i wanted to do in this book is to make it accessible you know there are our shelves full of leadership books but many of them are written by or for CEOs or salespeople but this book is for everybody whether you have a big job or a fancy title or not that you know everybody can learn to be a leader and everybody can learn to be a better leader than they are currently the very first profile I do is of Admiral thad Allen you may know the name he's a recently retired Coast Guard commandant just about a contemporary of mine and they get your two older it's been his whole life you know serving others saving lives and he was the one brought in in the darkest hours of the federal response to Hurricane Katrina to turn it around it was in chaos it was uncoordinated the the the rescue workers were being beaten up in the press on a daily basis they were completely demoralized and so when he finally got to New Orleans he turned to his military aide who happened to be interestingly enough named Katrina and and she said well Admiral now that we're here what are you going to do and he said I'm going to do the first thing that any new commander does I'm gonna call an all-hands meeting and she said Admiral there are 4,000 people in this building he said well I want you to gather as many of them in one place as you can and I want to talk to them right now and so on the first floor this large building they get their 2,500 people and as he entered the area he saw faces almost hanging on the floor and so he stood up on a desk he grabbed a microphone and then with a very simple message in just a few words he said I want you to listen to me I'm going to give you a direct order I want you to treat everyone you encounter as if they're a member of your immediate family as if they were your father your mother your brother your sister and if you do that two things are going to happen first if you make a mistake you're going to err on the side of doing too much not too little and second if anyone has a problem with what you've done then their problems with me and not with you and you said you could hear huge collective sigh of relief people actually began to weep because nobody before that had told them that what they were doing him was important or why or that their boss was behind them and then just a few words he had done that we're a very graphic exercise of leadership by his personal example and he did the same thing again with the BP oil spill in the Gulf and with the response to the earthquake in Haiti in 2010 and that's just one story on one profile in the first chapter in the book and there's some mini there like that Robert rice was here I know it and spoke to you last August I had an extended conversation with him I've admired him for many years and my conversation with him at his office over at Berkley was by far the most intellectually stimulating of them all it was almost a Socratic dialogue and we talked about many themes he talked about where he got his inspiration he's a little bit older than I and in the early 1960s during the civil rights movement one of his close friends a mentor a man a little bit older than he is Mickey Schwerner who you may remember was murdered along with two other civil rights workers in Mississippi that letter to the the story in the end the movie Mississippi Burning and when when Roberts when Bob learned about this man's death it shocked him to the core that such evil could exist in our country in this time and he he made a promise to himself that he would do what he had the inclination to do and what he said was an assumption that he would do he would assume that he would spend his life in what he calls public service now that sounds like an archaic term doesn't it there's not one we come on they'll hear these days but that's it's literally what he means that he intended to spend his life serving the public it wasn't that he was going to go into politics to become a politician or to work in government his goal was to public servant which is what he did he relates to me another example of his personal leadership when he first got to the Labor Department as the new labor secretary under President Clinton he had a meeting with his staff and he opened it up to questions a large group of employees at Labor Department and someone asked mr. secretary why do we still have time cards why do we have to mess with that what's the purpose of that and so he canvassed his ik lieutenants and they decided that there really wasn't a purpose to the time cards and so he said okay starting next week no more time cards and people were stunned but then more suggestions came and people became more engaged and had other ways to make things better and more productive and more useful and one of the best ideas that came out of this kind of meeting was - as changes to the economy took place to try to very quickly identify which jobs were likely to go away and never come back and which jobs in which someone could be quickly retrained to do something else similar and then redeploy the forces and the resources to do the most good the BA cents are you doing triage one name that you haven't heard is sue Sheridan and through my patient safety work I became familiar with her story through a physician friend of mine sue Sheridan is a mother of two from Boise Idaho and the reason that profiled her is because sure her family endured two awful and preventable medical tragedies first her son Cal when he was born as many babies do became jaundiced he wasn't diagnosed he wasn't tested he wasn't treated in time and he he suffered brain damage he has cerebral palsy and he requires special care the rest of his life and not long after that her or her husband Pat had a tumor that they were initially told was benign he had surgery to remove of it as much of it is that this could be done and then when the tumor recurred the surgeons at that time wondered why he wasn't treated for cancer earlier at the time of his first surgery and they kept saying well because we were told it was benign and after about the third or fourth doctor or per solitaire pathologists asked her the same question why wasn't he treated earlier for cancer she went down to the records room and checked out his records herself and saw in the original pathology report malignant sarcoma and so again a systemic breakdown in communication led to a fatality and as he was dying he made her promise to go kick some ass to save others from that fate and to change the world and so rather than devolve into bitterness anger and despair as many would feel every right to do she educated herself she gained allies she took on the often imperious medical establishment as a mom and she single-handedly managed to change the care that we give newborns globally and she now has a new job that I helped her get as a patient safety advocate as part of the World Health Organization it's amazing what people can do and they choose to so so that's that's why I wrote the book and and for me that that's what it's about is that each of us can choose to do these things each of us can learn to be more fulfilled at work to be better leaders at home at school or at work so I'd love to take your questions we have some mics that will pass through the room and if if we all can't hear you clearly then I'll love repeat the question right over here yes sir I've never seen you before good to see you again good to see you again thanks for coming you in terms of making it a difference you've been single day went from being an airline pilot getting ready to retire to becoming an advocate for aviation safety I'm wondering if you've been making the use of this the bully pulpit to say these are things that we are seeing wrong with the way airlines are regulated with the way pilots and flight crews are being compensated recognized are you starting to see any any progress and he was from policy makers and from gear - to network some the answer in order is yes from some of the policy makers and pretty much no from the industry we have in this country a formal lessons learned process through the National Transportation Safety Board an independent federal agency that investigates major transportation accidents not just Airlines but rail pipeline highway and others as a result of the final report on flight 1549 the final report was issued just about two years ago some two dozen recommendations were made to make the state of the system safer to make this common accident less likely to happen in future and let me ask you what you think the result has been of those two dozen recommendations made by this independent agency that is charged with making the rezident recommendations but cannot themselves implement them it's it's the province of our regulatory agency the FAA to change the rules and the airlines to adopt them of the two dozen how many you think have been implemented thus far how many think that half have been raise your hands I may think five have been gosh you guys are a cynical budge how many think to have been okay and how many think one has been does anybody think none has been you're right you're right thus far none of the recommendations has been implemented and so to get back to your question right now aviation is ultra safe but if we're going to keep it at that level and make it better which is what our what we should be doing because our passengers deserve an expected we've got to do more work than we're doing right now unfortunately just a month after our flight in February 2009 in Buffalo New York there was a crash that claimed 50 lives the continent conduction coal canary 3407 49 on the airplane and one person on the ground who's whose house the crash hit the families of the victims of the Colgan air crash have been ardent and tireless advocates of safety and they've been very active on lobbying legislators on the Capitol Hill they've been lobbying the airline industry and it's largely through their efforts some help from me and my first officer of my flight Jeff Skiles that we've got through the Congress two bills they were that passed in fall of 2009 in the summer of 2010 that have required greater experience for pilots especially young pilots with regional airlines from the unbelievably low minimum level now of 250 hours to be in turn on pilot on this laughing it's laughably small to at least 1,500 hours and also to improve the rules that prevent pilot fatigue but you know what the airline industry and their lobbyists are fighting as hard as they can tooth and nail they're spending millions of dollars to fight this to weaken it to delay it to kill it I've had them cursed personally call me liar I've had them you know fight everywhere they can to say that this isn't necessary that we that we really it's okay the way it is it's good enough and of course it isn't so we're fighting entrenched interests to have a big financial stake in the status quo and and I don't see that's that's happening anytime soon and unfortunately in our society like every other it almost takes a crisis to focus the public attention and the political will to get these things done and as we as we recede in time from these events and we get back to business as normal and and those that were opposing can say well we haven't killed anybody lately so we're doing everything okay and ever and we're saying you can't define safety only that way you have to look proactively at the risk and mitigate them it's gonna be an ongoing battle yes sir it seems to me like the NTSB is unusually competent and effective if underpowered where is the FAA suffers from regulatory capture and terrible inertia and bureaucracy you can be forgiven forgiven if you want to punt on this question because it's political but why do you think that the NTSB has that spark where I think it's it's twofold first the NTSB is an independent agency it's somewhat more insulated from the political process although not completely by any means and also just a practical matter the rulemaking agency the FAA is the one that's when impose costs on the operators it's the one that's going to make the rules that determine how much it cost them to operate in accordance with the new standards how inconvenient it is for them and of course the industry and their lobbyists are finding anything that's that's deemed to be either the least bit more costly or the least bit more inconvenient for them and that they view as a regulatory burden quite frankly and so I think it's just a matter of practicality it's the rulemaking process that where the where the differences are made and that's where the costs are going to be felt so I I think it's not just the FA I think that many of the federal agencies have that problem and I I think it's whether it's in the financial world where we're seeing these kinds of things happen or on Capitol Hill the influence of money is is too great in our society and I'm not going to put on a political question even though this is not a really political book I don't shy away from a spring answering or dressing important questions that people care about that affect our lives and there's the the influence of money is too great in our entire political system and it's even worse now after that wrongheaded Supreme Court decision in citizens united that gives corporations the ability to donate unlimited sums and super PACs and it disenfranchises the rest of us because the lobbyists can get the rules written in their favor and it's not in the favor of the traveling public it's not in the favor of the average American it's in favor of specific industries or specific companies notice can you do you know of any recipe to have more agencies like the NTSB that could perhaps help to regulate the financial history and some the other risk areas I think having longer terms would help and having appoints appointees that are more based on competence and not political affiliation again I get to Mike I could get back to my eye my response to when people have on occasion ask me my political affiliation and I anticipated very early on I mean three years ago plus if that question would eventually be asked I've been shocked and surprised that has been asked only twice in three-and-a-half years but I had a ready answer and it's not a flippant one it's it's a real answer when people ask me if I'm a Republican or our American or a Democrat I say I'm an American and I think as an American and that vote as an American I wish more of us did that yes man back here in the back I'm sorry we have someone else first quick for the mic and you're loaded for all super you talk about your daughter I'm just curious to share with us how appendage through your own personal example by modeling the behavior you want to see in them they are not going to listen to what you say as much as what they'll watch what you do and from our daughters now in 1917 and my wife is a wonderful partner a wonderful mom and I think part of the reason that they've turned out the way they are is it's in their DNA and amaya daughters are adopted so they're not biologically related to us directly but you know part of who we are is our DNA but that's only a part of it but my wife has done a great job of being there for them mentoring them we read to them that from a very early age and cuddle with them even before they could understand the words and it was it was refund to see them then try to quote read even before they could through their stuffed animals or their dolls or the young all the older one - the younger one mimicking what we had done with them so I would say just just act around them the way you want them to act in every way the words you choose the way you treat shopkeepers or people on the you pass on the highway whatever it is they will notice what you have done it's one of the things I say in the book about my time as a captain and practicing for 22 years as a captain out of my 30 years as an airline pilot meeting a new group of people a new crew every week and trying to quickly take this collection of individuals some of whom may not even know each other and form a team so if something bad happens in the first takeoff we can work together effectively and solve the problem and and I say in the book that that few interactions with others went unnoticed or were completely real a consequence people noticed those things they or as I say about my friend Chris who died of cancer three years ago and I spoke at his memorial service Chris was able to live his life in such a way that his values were apparent he didn't have to tell you what he believed you could see in his actions and his toots why here that would be good I think yes over here right thank you oh gosh that's a great question fortunately just about everybody I asked to interview said yes they were very anxious to be a part of this progress process which was wonderful are there stories that I would like to have included they didn't have time to well there was yes absolutely there was one I touch on briefly one of the people I really wanted to interview and wasn't able to make our schedules mesh was now the Secretary of Veterans Affairs the former four-star army general chief of staff of the Army Eric Shinseki he as a young infantry officer in Vietnam badly wounded lost part of one foot served with distinction throughout his entire career rose to the highest rank in the army and as as now as Veterans Affairs Secretary trying to do his very best to give the best care for our veterans if he can one thing in particular really caught my attention about him in terms of his personal moral courage early in 2003 before the marched invasion of Iraq he was asked to testify before Congress about the numbers of ground troops that would be required to to control the pacify the country after that the invasion phase was over he testified truthfully Kortright Lee about the fact that several hundred thousand would be required which was a much larger number than then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was publicly stating along with the rest of the administration and he paid a political professional price for that ended up retiring and leaving and not being able to continue and I think that was just a perfect example of the kind of moral courage that I'm talking about that I admire many of these people I would like to have told more of his story and Andrian personally and I wasn't able to to make our our schedules work all opportunity that's a great question it's a it's a it's a big question I'll try to to distill it down to its essential elements what happened to us On January 15 2009 on flight 1549 was extraordinary it was very rare statistically to have an airliner hit either so many birds or such large birds that it basically disabled it and damaged the engines it turns out in reparable ii when leading to an engines out emergency landing in water just 208 seconds after we hit them just under three and a half minutes so that was something was a novel and unanticipated event for which we had never specifically trained so it was very much outside the box and there there wasn't an exact protocol to follow in that case and so yes it required a great deal of it improvisation it required a great deal of deciding that many of the things that were taught to do in less dire situations weren't really appropriate in that situation I'll try to go through a few of them up really quickly the fact that this happened so soon just 100 second time to take off at such a low altitude about 2,700 feet with so few options over this one of the most densely developed populated areas of the planet Manhattan meant that we had to act very quickly very decisively to make tough choices to get them right immediately based upon imperfect and ambiguous information the big advantage that we had was that unlike some other situations unlike Air France 447 for example where there was some ambiguity about exactly what was what's going on we knew clearly exactly what had happened exactly why and what that entailed for us there was no doubt about what had happened so that part of the situation was actually very clear and relative easy the difficult part was that the stress levels were so high that they were marginally debilitating it didn't leave me with the ability to do the math on the altitude and distance quite frankly so what I did was I I relied upon my my experience of having flown thousands of flights 20,000 hours and I was able to look out the window over my shoulder look at the the nearer runways and say no and be right very quickly under those conditions was remarkable because the NTSB as is their Charter spent a year and a half thoroughly investigating every aspect of this including computer simulations to determine if theoretically we had enough energy we had enough altitude speed you know the 1/2 MV squared part of it the kinetic energy to make it to a runway taking into account human reaction time turns out we did not buy a little bit and so after after you know never when you were a kid and they would say don't get into trouble we'll put it on your permanent record well if there is such a thing is probably having an NTSB report written about you were they were they were they they literally scrutinized for a year and a half every thought that we had every syllable we uh turd every choice we made every action we took and to have us be vindicated after that process I was very happy with one of the other things that we did that's not typical is you know in a less dire bird to see it's thought best and based upon the data we've we've had the studies that have been done for the captain not to fly the airplane but to be the decision maker to take in the whole situation be aware of all this of all the critical parameters to make a choice announce it and begin directing the first officer to take certain actions there wasn't time for that the workload was so intense the time pressure so extreme that Jeff Skiles my first officer night never had time to even discuss the situation we had to simply act and so it was best that I fly rather than time to tried to direct him because there wasn't time and so I called for the checklist I began making a left turn started taking actions by memory because there wasn't time to again one of the other protocols we we deviated from was rather than then wait until a minute plus later over a third of the way through the remaining flight time when we finally got to this part of the checklist where we first would heart start taking remedial actions like turning on you an engine ignition starting an auxiliary power unit to provide a backup source of electoral generation I took them in the first two seconds by memory so but there were several ways that we deviated from the normal course of things just due to the exigencies and that was critical had I not done so he couldn't have had as good an outcome so yeah there were this whole thing was one series of improvisation after another but done based upon you know 42 years applying $20,000 in the air and having a clear understanding of the end state I was just going to achieve and knowing what what and knowing which options were possible which ones were not by looking out the window I'm being right that's what we did now there was a question up here that we've been neglecting I'm sorry one more time what could you suggest engineers who are working on safety critical systems a couple of things to do it I would say the engineers who are working on safety critical systems to realize that just as in medicine just as an aviation just as in many other critical industries of what we have now are human technology systems that must function together seamlessly and we need to involve the end users as early as possible in the system design we need to take advantage of the limitations and the abilities of the technology and of the humans and assign them appropriate roles accordingly for example in aviation as in many domains technology is great it affords us wonderful functionality wonderful displays of information high levels of integration of electronic connectedness but the downside of that is that technology for the most part can only do what has been foreseen and programmed it's humans who can innovate and by way my favorite definition of innovation is changing before you're forced to by a regulation by competition by circumstance and so what we did that day was to innovate and and some of the technology helped us to some extent but it was basically hand manually flying making choices you know in terms of our human capabilities so I would say keep the human factor in mind that you could your engineering can be top rated first-rate and if you don't take into account sufficiently or appropriately the how how humans are going to use it the fact that humans are going to make mistakes and your systems need to be tolerant of that and make them as least likely as possible then you can still fail and fail spectacularly if you don't do that yes sir with that in mind how do you feel about Airbus's program flight envelope III the short answer us I prefer Boeing's philosophy which is that when you approach certain limitations it will warn you it would be this this dick may shake or it may make a noise but if you must go beyond that to avoid hitting the ground to avoid a collision it's possible to do so people have asked me if if we would have had a similar outcome in a Boeing airplane that day my answer is I think we would have as long as it was you know the the general geometric layout it was similar the airplane shape and size was same where we would had a similar outcome the the Airbus I was flying was a fly-by-wire airplane in which there's no longer a direct mechanical connection between the flight controls in the cockpit and the flight control services in the wings the tail instead there are flight control computers that interpret and mediate the pilots inputs and then send electrical impulses to actuators that move the control surfaces the the the flight envelope protections that the Airbus fly-by-wire system affords us we didn't need because we never got to the maximum zat which it would have essentially protected us from exceeding certain limitations and it in one important way it hindered us and this has not been well told what loan and we look at the digital flight data recorder that has all kinds of streams of data of all the flight control positions altitude airspeed acceleration etc and in the last four seconds of the flight that's right before we touched down I I was not yet achieving the maximum lift from the wings I was commanding more pulling back the left on the stick and the flight control computers prevented me from getting more lift therefore we hit harder than we have there was more damage underneath where water came in sooner one structural piece of metal was driven up through the back floor which cut doreen Welsh's the flight attendants leg and so that was not the way we were trained it would work and it turns out there's a little known software feature known only then to a few airbus software engineers and to no pilots no airlines that this was the case it's called a few going mode and it was not the way we were trained to your plane should work apparently it is the way that joins the airplane does work but that was not apparent to us and so in that sense it hurt actually hurt us no he's asking if we were indirect law and there were there are there are three categories of sophistication that are possible in the Airbus flight control system the highest level the normal level is called normal law in which everything is working and all these flight integral or protections are intact it prevents you from going too fast or too slow anything I was too high or too low with too much Bank too much acceleration in terms of G an alternate law you have some of those protections not all of them that's a degraded mode but the flight control protections are still somewhat active indirect law none of the flight control protections is active it's possible to aerodynamically stall the wing it won't protect prevent you from doing that and it flies more like a more conventional airplane now we say to normal all the entire time that caused in the first two seconds I started to our airplanes auxiliary power unit and by the time the left engine rep speed RPMs deep decayed below the point at which they'd left generator can quit continuing power or electrical buses the APU generator was on line and so we remained in Roma law all those protections were in attack we don't hear about okay all right let's see who else there must be some others yes sir right here you had mentioned about increasing flight time the firemen yes so what kind of advice how do you get from to if you want to be a pilot how do you get from 250 hours to 1500 hours well that's I think you'll do the same thing that we've always done and if you don't go through the military which there are fewer options now and even if you decide to go that route you owe the military more years I think up to 12 now versus the 5 or 6 it used to be you'll have to do something else but there are jobs out there and I think in one way there probably are a few better situations it used to be that you would go to one type of an operation to flies and maybe be a flight instructor and small single-engine propeller airplanes for a while and you would change companies so you go somewhere else to fly as copilot in a turboprop doing the charters and eventually you would fly a Learjet someplace else now there are a few more operations where it's more vertically integrated and you'll have more options to progress within that same company but it's it's a difficult thing to do you're right it's but there are options spite of what the regional airlines Association lobbyists say there are options besides just flying banner toll along the beach or being a flight instructor in small single-engine airplanes but it's always been hard and it's no easier now but does it really matter I mean do you would you want to put your kids on an up regional jet where the first officer has 250 hours I wouldn't I mean it doesn't matter how hard it is it's what's required yes do you think a less experienced pilot and ahead of her I think it would have been much harder I think in every way whether it had been night whether it did it still been snowing whether we were a little bit further from the river and if any of those things had changed they would have been much harder and had I had with me well I'm assuming you're talking about both pilots had had the captain been less experienced it might not have been as hardwired in his or her brain a way of synthesizing a lifetime of experience in training to come up with the way to solve this new problem you'd never seen before in 208 seconds had I had a less experienced first officer I still wouldn't have had time to direct them so it would have meant I would have had to do more things myself which I probably really couldn't have done there was I was maxed out and I would have has much help because Jeff Skiles had also been a captain before on a 737 before all the cutbacks forced him back into the right seat to be a first officer again he also had 20,000 hours of flying time like I did and so he intuitively it immediately grasped the situation as it develop as I did I didn't have to tell him what was going on he saw it we knew it he was able to listen to my conversation with the air traffic controller on the radio and infer my intent he knew intuitively and immediately to shift his priorities on his own initiative I didn't have a chance to tell him laid in this light - stop trying to regain usable thrust using the checklist but with what turned out to be these irreparably damaged engines and instead by it calling out airspeed and altitude to me he helped me judge that final critical maneuver the height above the river judging and visually at which I began raising the nose to start to land if I waited too long we'd hit too hard wouldn't have got the nose up enough if I began to raise the note too soon we'd get to slow and drop it in and it too hard so he had to call out the airspeed altitude to me to help being judge that critical so it had either one of us been not as experienced we we could not have had as good an outcome and everything we everything every part of it would have been harder that's why that's why you know we we make it look so easy being an airline pilot because so much goes so right so much of the time but at any given moment you have to be able to handle whatever the cosmos throws at you even if it's never been thought up before and you get it right the first time that's our job and that's why in spirit experience matters are we out of time