Clint Eastwood to make biopic of pilot 'Sully' Sullenberger

denverpilot said:
The text of my FB post for the uninitiated tonight ... Reality vs Hollywood. I'll still see the flick and enjoy it, but don't believe everything Hollywood makes, of course.

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For those headed out to see "Sully", keep in mind that there's the real world, and then there is Hollywood drama.

For those interested in what the NTSB actually does after an accident, the report is available here:

http://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/AAR1003.pdf

Most interesting line for non-pilots and folks seeing the Hollywood drama:

"Simulation flights were run to determine whether the accident flight could have landed successfully at LGA or TEB following the bird strike. The simulations demonstrated that, to accomplish a successful flight to either airport, the airplane would have to have been turned toward the airport immediately after the bird strike. The immediate turn did not reflect or account for real-world considerations, such as the time delay required to recognize the extent of the engine thrust loss and decide on a course of action. The one simulator flight that took into account real-world considerations (a return to LGA runway 13 was attempted after a 35-second delay) was not successful. Therefore, the NTSB concludes that the captain’s decision to ditch on the Hudson River rather than attempting to land at an airport provided the highest probability that the accident would be survivable."

You decide how much "dramatic license" Director Clint Eastwood took. I'll leave that line direct from the NTSB above for you to compare to the movie.

Most interesting line for pilots:

"Although the flight crew was only able to complete about one-third of the Engine Dual Failure checklist, immediately after the bird strike, the captain did accomplish one critical item that the flight crew did not reach in the checklist: starting the APU. Starting the APU early in the accident sequence proved to be critical because it improved the outcome of the ditching by ensuring that electrical power was available to the airplane. Further, if the captain had not started the APU, the airplane would not have remained in normal law mode. This critical step would not have been completed if the flight crew had simply followed the order of the items in the checklist."

Your systems training happens for a reason. Starting the APU was critical. They never got that far down the checklist. Good thing it wasn't deferred that day, but they still had the RAT after that...

Enjoy the read. It's over 100 pages and the simulations of a return to a runway, gets a single paragraph about 90 pages in.
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See the movie. It accounts for everything in your post. They did a great job on it.
 
I saw it Friday night. I thought it was a well done movie and worth watching. I have a very specific code that I use to determine if I will enjoy a movie or not. If the movie contains wizards, dragons, of defiance of the laws of physics, I will not watch the movie so I'm pretty limited on what entertains me vs insults my intelligence. I can't watch a movie just to be entertained, if it is unbelievable I won't like it.

Sully was a good movie.
 
Wait...A Clint Eastwood movie, and Clint does not come out of a restaurant and shoot people all while calmly eating his sandwich..??? :confused2::confused2::lol:
 
BillTIZ said:
Just got back from the movie. Well done, but it is Hanks and Eastwood. You would not expect anything less.

Walking out, an oldster at the movie, older than I, commented. That NTSB guy was mean, he wanted to hang Sully out to dry.
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Yeah, I was fairly certain that people less knowledgeable about such investigations would have that sort of dumbass reaction.
 
Cajun_Flyer said:
See the movie. It accounts for everything in your post. They did a great job on it.
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Kinda, but I need to go research a couple of things. It brought up other questions that are trivial, but I'm interested in.

I'm only 40 or so pages into the transcript of the public NTSB hearing now.

The really funny part was the BS of "piping in the simulator runs" into the hearing. I worked in videoconferencing back then, and the tech wasn't even there... It barely was, perhaps, but nobody really had it.

Hollywood. The land where nothing goes wrong with even a PowerPoint slide presentation. LOL.

Most interesting trivia tidbits learned:

Even though nearly everyone else in the movie was portraying a real person, not a single NTSB investigator's name was real.

The ferry boat captain of the first arriving vessel wasn't played by an actor. The captain played himself in the movie.

The real chairman of the public NTSB hearing was not only a former US Airways pilot, but had flown the accident aircraft. (Because aviation really is a very small community after all.)

The transcript is a lot more painful to read than the report, of course.

Interesting note from the transcript...

The chairman said they would play an animation with only captions from the CVR because they could not play the CVR over the air, as it would be illegal. I assume he meant there's something against broadcasting the CVR transmission? An FCC reg?

Curious about that one.

ATC comms however had no such limitation.

Perhaps the concern is the "mayday" call being re-broadcast? Funny considering the movie trailer being broadcast over and over contains it.
 
Finally saw Sully today. It was pretty damn good though I can see why the NTSB guys might be a bit miffed at how they were represented especially if it was not accurate. That fact notwithstanding, it is definitely worth seeing.
 
denverpilot said:
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The chairman said they would play an animation with only captions from the CVR because they could not play the CVR over the air, as it would be illegal. I assume he meant there's something against broadcasting the CVR transmission? An FCC reg?

Curious about that one.

ATC comms however had no such limitation.

Perhaps the concern is the "mayday" call being re-broadcast? Funny considering the movie trailer being broadcast over and over contains it.
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I think it's standard NTSB policy to only make the CVR transcript public, not the recording itself. Privacy reasons, I think, let the final moments the flight crew stay private as much as possible.
 
denverpilot said:
The really funny part was the BS of "piping in the simulator runs" into the hearing. I worked in videoconferencing back then, and the tech wasn't even there... It barely was, perhaps, but nobody really had it.
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Video conference didn't exist in 2009???
 
Just saw this movie, really good


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Just saw this tonight w/ My wife and parents.
We all liked it but at the end we all said "That seemed kind of short"

Without getting into too much detail, there were a few seeds planted in the movie that never grew into anything.
It was good nonetheless.
 
The guy flew into a river instead of the buildings. Seems like anyone would have done the same.

I don't get the hubbub.
 
MichiPilot said:
Video conference didn't exist in 2009???
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Not in the format seen in the movie. See many HD quality video conferencing units with multiple cameras installed in simulators at Airbus much? Haha. The special ones with no latency on the call between a couple of continents?

More of an observation than anything. It's Hollywood. Whole scene had to use the fake videoconference system to make it look like Sully scolded the NTSB in real-time when no such thing ever occurred.

No such video conferencing silliness took place in the real transcripts I've read so far (over 400 pages). In fact, I can find no transcript that ever shows any representative from Airbus even so much as joining an audio conference call "live".

The point was, the fake/non-existent video conference gear was used as a plot device to change the order of events to look like a real time can of whoop ass pulling by our plucky protagonist.

Which is all fine with me, but it ain't how it happened. So it's worth noting as "Hollywood".

They did seem to have trouble getting idiots to turn the microphones off in front of them so the entire room wouldn't squeal with feedback, more than once, however. Those are in the transcripts and they're, as always, funny as hell.
 
Matthew said:
I think it's standard NTSB policy to only make the CVR transcript public, not the recording itself. Privacy reasons, I think, let the final moments the flight crew stay private as much as possible.
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Fair 'nuff. I've heard so many of them (assumingly edited) that have been released that I wonder if that policy has been busted in those cases, or what?

Especially "save" recordings or recordings of near misses and what not where nobody died. Those are all over the Net.

I assume for those they have the permission of the live pilot to release them or whatever. And in this case, nobody dies, so I guess someone didn't give permission at the airline, which I could see happening.

Plenty of airliner involved recordings in those "save" and "something bad almost happened" recordings on the Net, too.

NATCA used to publish a recording per region for their annual awards. Very difficult to find them on their website today, if they're even still there. But I have a small collection of interesting ones stored here from previous year's downloads.
 
^^^

The "save" recordings, and similar: were they CVR or ATC? I know they will release the live ATC audio, but I thought NTSB stopped releasing the CVR audio a while ago. Doesn't mean someone else did, though.

edit:

Found this:

http://www.ntsb.gov/news/Pages/cvr_fdr.aspx

>>>
The CVR recordings are treated differently than the other factual information obtained in an accident investigation. Due to the highly sensitive nature of the verbal communications inside the cockpit, Congress has required that the Safety Board not release any part of a CVR audio recording.
<<<
 
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Matthew said:
^^^

The "save" recordings, and similar: were they CVR or ATC? I know they will release the live ATC audio, but I thought NTSB stopped releasing the CVR audio a while ago. Doesn't mean someone else did, though.

edit:

Found this:

http://www.ntsb.gov/news/Pages/cvr_fdr.aspx

>>>
The CVR recordings are treated differently than the other factual information obtained in an accident investigation. Due to the highly sensitive nature of the verbal communications inside the cockpit, Congress has required that the Safety Board not release any part of a CVR audio recording.
<<<
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IIRC there was a big push from the ALPA about this. It makes sense when you consider what it would be like if everything you said at your job was recorded and available to be played on the internet. The result would be countless lawsuits, divorces, etc.

Saw the movie last night and I agree with most of the reactions here. Although the did run a multiple re-enactments of the short flight that really wasn't the focus of the film. It was about the thoughts and actions of the people involved. As far as I can tell the only significant fabrication was the conflict between the NTSB (which on occasion appeared to be confused with the FAA) and the pilots, something clearly added for dramatic effect. The only surprise for me was that there was no disclaimer at the end regarding the fictional nature of that adversarial behavior and lacking that I can see why the real NTSB might be a bit ticked off. I'm pretty certain that many viewers came away believing the NTSB was on a witch hunt and is an evil government organization.
 
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Does anyone know if Sully has admitted to suffering from the alternate reality nightmares and daydreaming where the plane crashes into buildings? I found those sequences hard to believe. Was that added for dramatic effect as well or is that actually based upon what Sully experienced?
 
SkyDog58 said:
Does anyone know if Sully has admitted to suffering from the alternate reality nightmares and daydreaming where the plane crashes into buildings? I found those sequences hard to believe. Was that added for dramatic effect as well or is that actually based upon what Sully experienced?
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You could always ask him: http://www.sullysullenberger.com/contact/
 
He stated in his TV interview with Charlie rose that he did indeed have some rough nights following the incident comprised of bad dreams etc. with his background and experience I doubt he's much of a BSer.
 
SkyDog58 said:
Does anyone know if Sully has admitted to suffering from the alternate reality nightmares and daydreaming where the plane crashes into buildings? I found those sequences hard to believe. Was that added for dramatic effect as well or is that actually based upon what Sully experienced?
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There are interviews of him saying he went through some pretty bad PTSD after. I'm reading his book right now, so I'm sure he'll talk about it at some point in there.
 
denverpilot said:
The really funny part was the BS of "piping in the simulator runs" into the hearing. I worked in videoconferencing back then, and the tech wasn't even there... It barely was, perhaps, but nobody really had it.
Hollywood.
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Sorry, I need to correct you on this.
I was doing overseas videoconferencing back in the late 1990's with a product called P2P. By the 2000's IBM had a world wide video conferencing system, and we used to do some pretty amazing things on it.
By 2005, we even set-up conference rooms in "Second Life" and ran video conferencing in the "Second Life" "buildings".
By 2008 we had "video immersion" conferences, where it was hard to tell where the video began and left off. What they showed in the movie was more than doable in 2009.

I saw the movie today. I liked it.
Even my wife liked it.
 
Shepherd said:
Sorry, I need to correct you on this.
I was doing overseas videoconferencing back in the late 1990's with a product called P2P. By the 2000's IBM had a world wide video conferencing system, and we used to do some pretty amazing things on it.
By 2005, we even set-up conference rooms in "Second Life" and ran video conferencing in the "Second Life" "buildings".
By 2008 we had "video immersion" conferences, where it was hard to tell where the video began and left off. What they showed in the movie was more than doable in 2009.

I saw the movie today. I liked it.
Even my wife liked it.
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I also worked in that biz. IBMs system you mention was incredibly proprietary and not widely available. PictureTel arguably had the first commercial success and it was around that timeframe but would not have been anywhere near the quality shown.

Polycom, and the Israeli company I can't remember at the moment made the tech "medium business available" but the systems were entire rooms with an immense setup cost due to use of well positioned mirrors to hide the cameras.

To do any of that in that large "hall" room would have been a bear to get right and would have required a *seriously big* network pipe between the NTSB room and Airbus, and then you'd still have the problem of camera positioning and quality in a full motion sim, and audio mixing.

So you're correct that enormous global entities did have the tech by then, but even today it's in very controlled room environments.

Lifesize and others spun out of the two big companies and made it kinda work for conference rooms with the advent of huge bandwidth becoming cheap, but prior to that it took bonding a pile of ISDN B-channels which was only really working in very controlled carrier environments between locations that were pre-defined, pre-configured, and usually if they were used for something that public, pre-tested heavily.

I think our cheapest immersion system back then ran close to the tune of half a million bucks, and we literally shipped the entire room on a tractor trailer and assembled it inside the office or other space.

One CEO of a large company built his basement office around the specifications for the room module. He had to have double French doors to bring the panels into the basement through -- and a ceiling high enough to allow the crew to assemble the unit from the "outside" and have access to the mirrors and projectors and MCU and multiple endpoints running the special firmware necessary to treat multiple video streams as a single "call" from the touchscreen control on the table.

We even had a cute problem once where a consulting firm anyone would recognize the name of, bought a gazillion of those rooms and one couldn't be delivered in Europe because the necessary truck was too big to fit down the street. They ended up paying a bunch of labor costs to carry all the room panels a number of blocks up from the closest parking that could hold the truck -- to the office space they wanted converted to an immersion style room.

Historically the first user of multiple endpoints as a single call for an immersion room was Pixar to Disney and HP designed that system. HP never marketed or scaled up production which is where everyone else came in, as soon as people saw the animators drawing things like they were sitting across from each other. At least that's the non-military/government history. Some agencies had some similar custom designed one-offs long before that, but they also had some "interesting" rules about encryption on those devices.

Fascinatingly, almost all of the really great mathematical breakthroughs for the CODECs to compress the snot out of HD video as it came along, all came out of Israel. American companies bought entire engineering divisions in their equivalent of Silicon Valley just to remain competitive in bandwidth utilization.

I'd have to ask around to see if IBMs system was a re-badge of someone else's or their own home spun thing.

Cool that you used it. We, of course, were required to -- eat your own dog food, as they say -- and everyone had a video phone at their desk as well as every conference room had massive systems. We found more often than not that it didn't really add much value for most conversations. We could even have customers dial our desk videophones. Then we'd all see the side of someone's head while they typed. Especially in technical troubleshooting or customer service roles. Your lovely smile would be seen for about 30 seconds at the beginning and then to accomplish anything, you had to look at multiple computers and monitors off to the side.

Most of us also got in the habit of aiming the phones at a wall clock or similar for the customers who were a little time zone challenged. Haha. They'd call at 2AM and get a nice shot of our cubicle clock. Haha. Hint hint.
 
I liked it. My wife (surprisingly) liked it too, but couldn't understand why the NTSB was trying to fault the flight crew. I explained to my wife about some of the creative license in the movie with the NTSB, and why the NTSB might be miffed. But good story nonetheless.
 
More than creative license - that part was fiction.


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