Life or Death Page 3

  The emergency checklist was a three-page catalogue of steps to follow. Within thirty seconds, Skiles was at the end of the list. The engines wouldn’t start. It was unlikely they ever would. The plane was a 70-tonne dead weight gliding without power over Manhattan, one of the world’s most densely populated cities.

  Sullenberger radioed air traffic control. “Hit birds. We’ve lost thrust on both engines. We’re turning back toward LaGuardia.” His voice sounded calm in spite of the emergency.

  Air traffic control checked runways, looking for clearance at LaGuardia Airport for an emergency landing. In the seconds that elapsed, Sullenberger realized a few facts. The plane was quickly losing altitude, dropping at a rate of 300 metres per minute. LaGuardia was too far away. They’d never make it.

  “Could we land at Teterboro Airport instead?” he asked air traffic control. Teterboro was closer than LaGuardia, just across the Hudson River that separated Manhattan from New Jersey. Their chances would be better there.

  Controllers called Teterboro. In moments they radioed Sullenberger with an answer. Teterboro it was. They had clearance, a runway set aside for the crippled plane.

  By then the plane was flying lower, skimming above the skyline of Manhattan. Without engines, it was locked in a powerless glide. There was a good chance the plane would never make Teterboro, Sullenberger figured. It might slam into Manhattan instead. The death toll would be enormous.

  Sullenberger would need all his skills to avoid hitting the densely crowded buildings of Manhattan.

  In a double-engine failure when airports are too far away, the pilot normally looks for smooth pavement to bring down the plane — a major road, an empty highway. But Manhattan was crammed with buildings. There were no open spaces. Except one — the Hudson River, a wide ribbon of unruffled grey water.

  “We’re gonna be in the Hudson,” Sullenberger announced. There was confidence in his voice. Sullenberger knew the plane. He knew the river, too. He was sure he could land the plane safely there.

  Sullenberger wheeled the plane into a series of tight left turns to line it up with the river. “Brace for impact,” he told passengers.

  In the cabin, flight attendants gave directions. “Heads down! Stay down! Brace, brace!”

  It was hard not to panic. “Everyone started, to be honest, to say prayers,” one of the passengers reported. There was a rush of last-minute preparations. Martin and Tess Sosa hugged their two children. One was nine-month-old Damian, the youngest passenger on the plane. Vallie Collins texted her husband: My plane is crashing. She hoped it wouldn’t be her last message. Eric Stevenson took out a business card and wrote a note to his mother and sister: Mom and Jane, I love you. He tucked the card into his front pocket. If he didn’t make it, he hoped someone would find the card and get the message to his family.

  Ferries and boats patrolled the river, but there were broad, open patches clear of vessels, too. Sullenberger aimed for the middle of the North River section of the Hudson. It was clear of obstacles, but near three boat terminals that might come to their rescue.

  Operating the elevators and rudders, Sullenberger guided the plane. The aircraft had to be perfectly level when it landed. Too sharp a turn or too wide an angle and a wing tip might strike the water first, cartwheeling the fuselage, disintegrating the plane and spewing debris across the Hudson.

  Belly flat, wings perfectly level and travelling at 240 kilometres per hour, the plane sliced the river, carving a deep wake as it slid to a stop.

  “That wasn’t as bad as I thought,” Sullenberger and Skiles said to each other at the same time.

  The impact jolted passengers, yanking them forward. “Coming down was like a roller-coaster ride,” one said.

  The impact ripped holes in the fuselage. The cargo doors popped open. Immediately water seeped into the cabin from the rear of the plane. Caught in the river’s current, the downed plane floated south.

  While Skiles ran through the evacuation checklist, Sullenberger opened the cockpit door. “Evacuate,” he ordered.

  Flight attendants took charge, opening the two front doors and directing passengers to do the same with the mid-cabin emergency exits. With the plane submerged up to its windows, people clambered over seats, rushing to the front as they tried to escape.

  “It was controlled chaos,” passenger Dave Sanderson said. “We had survived the crash, but we were going to drown.”

  Once outside, some passengers leaped into the water. Others stood on inflatable sliders, knee-deep in the icy river. Most, though, gathered on the wings with the frigid water lapping at their feet.

  Passengers balance along the wings of the downed plane.

  Sullenberger, Skiles and a few passengers gathered life vests, jackets, coats and blankets to hand to people on the wings. The temperature outside was minus 6° Celsius, but the wind made it seem colder. The wing was slick — “Like an ice rink,” one passenger said.

  Twice Sullenberger calmly walked the aisle, making sure that no one was still inside. Then he joined the others on the wing, the last one to vacate the cabin.

  Within minutes a ferry pulled alongside the plane. Shortly after, vessels from the New York City Fire and Police Departments arrived. Still in charge, Sullenberger directed rescuers, advising them to take passengers off the wings first, since they were in greater danger than those on the inflatable sliders. Many were soggy and shivering. To ward off the cold, some of the rescue crew gave their jackets to freezing passengers.

  All 155 passengers and crew survived. David Paterson, the governor of New York, said, “I believe that today we have had a miracle on the Hudson.”

  Sullenberger was hailed as a hero, a man with steely nerves and quick-thinking determination. He downplayed the attention, giving credit to his years of flying experience instead. In his book, Highest Duty, Sullenberger wrote: “I did not think I was going to die. Based on my experience, I was confident that I could make an emergency water landing that was survivable. That confidence was stronger than any fear.”

  OUTSMARTING THE IMPOSSIBLE

  November 5, 2005 / Near Somalia, Africa

  Passengers and crew of the cruise ship Seabourn Spirit awoke to the sound of gunfire and rocket-propelled grenades being fired across the bow. Pirates in two powerboats were speeding toward the ship, aiming to board the vessel, rob passengers and take hostages for ransom.

  Quickly changing course, the captain, Sven Erik Pedersen, steered the Seabourn Spirit into open water to evade the attackers. When the pirates followed, Pedersen tried to ram their boats and swamp them with waves from the ship’s wake. In the meantime Michael Groves, the Seabourn Spirit’s security officer, unwound a high-pressure hose and blasted the pirates with a powerful jet of water.

  When the pirates continued the attack, Som Bahadur Gruing, the master at arms, scrambled to unleash the Seabourn Spirit’s secret weapon. Called a Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD), the device was about the size and shape of a TV satellite dish. When aimed at a target and activated, the LRAD emitted a deafening shrill, capable of causing permanent damage to hearing from a distance of more than 300 metres.

  The LRAD had been used by US troops in Iraq to disorient and confuse the enemy. It had been used to control crowds in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. With pirate attacks growing more frequent along the coast of Somalia, it had been rigged to the vessel as an experimental safeguard. It had never been tested on a ship zigzagging through open waters and never used against pirates with a history of bloody encounters. Would it work now?

  As Gruing tried to activate the LRAD, he was struck by a bullet to his upper body.

  Groves was nearby. “I saw a spray of blood and he just went straight down. I thought he was gone, but he opened one eye.”

  Quickly, Groves dragged the injured man away. After securing him in a safe place, Groves returned to the LRAD. He trained it on the pirates and opened fire, blasting a tight beam of sound at the moving targets.

  At first the pirates resisted
. They skirted around the ship, firing machine guns and grenades, looking for gaps in the liner’s defences. But after thirty minutes of ear-splitting screeching, they gave up. As the pirates retreated, the Seabourn Spirit escaped to deeper waters, putting distance between itself and the attackers.

  5.

  AN EPIDEMIC OF FEAR

  Typhus was a deadly disease, but exactly the tool the doctor needed.

  A dry cough wracked the young Polish man’s body. His forehead was hot to the touch, and his clothes were drenched with sweat. The man complained of headaches, muscle pain, constant tiredness and teeth-chattering chills that never seemed to go away.

  His doctor, Eugene Lazowski, recognized the symptoms. The patient had the flu. The flu rarely killed and, given proper treatment — fluids to drink, lots of bedrest, perhaps some aspirin — the doctor knew the man would recover.

  From his medical bag, Dr. Lazowski retrieved a small vial containing a liquid. He drew a sample with a syringe and swabbed the young man’s arm. Just a pinprick of pain, that’s all you’ll feel, he reassured the man. Then, just as he had with dozens of patients before, Dr. Lazowski injected the liquid into the man’s body.

  The law required that the doctor submit a sample of the man’s blood. He knew what would happen then, the panic it would create among the Nazis, the chaos that would follow. In German-occupied Poland during World War II, fear governed every move. The patient would survive, no worse for the injection, but the Germans would act quickly.

  It was exactly what the doctor wanted. One injection at a time, one blood test after another, he was saving thousands of lives by fighting a very different kind of war.

  * * *

  In occupied Poland, helping Jews was a crime punishable by death. Dr. Lazowski’s own parents had hidden Jewish families in their home, and he felt he could — and should — do something, too. “My profession is to save lives and prevent death. I was fighting for life,” he explained.

  German soldiers march into Warsaw, Poland, in early October 1939, shortly after the city was captured.

  He started with small but daring acts of disobedience. From his house in Rozwadow, Poland, the doctor could see the wire fence that separated his yard from the Jewish ghetto behind it. The ghetto was a heavily guarded section of the city where Jews were corralled and held like prisoners, their rights and freedoms denied. In the cramped, filthy living conditions, bacteria thrived, disease spread quickly and deaths were frequent. To the Nazis, who were intent on eliminating Jews, an outbreak of disease in a ghetto was a bonus. No medical aid was provided. No doctors were permitted to help, and those who did faced the stiffest of penalties.

  Dr. Lazowski arranged a secret signal. A white cloth tied to the fence meant that someone inside the ghetto was ill. Under the cover of darkness, he then smuggled medication and bandages into the ghetto, offered medical advice and tended to the sick. To throw the Germans off his trail, the doctor fudged official reports and exaggerated the quantities of medical supplies he used for his non-Jewish patients.

  His was a small-scale operation, one pain soothed at a time, one Jewish life saved every so often. It might have continued this way, but then a chance discovery changed everything.

  Of all the diseases common during the war, typhus was the one most feared by the Nazis. Many of the initial symptoms of typhus were similar to the flu — muscle pain, headache, exhaustion, chills. But with typhus, things quickly worsened. Patients with typhus developed a pink rash that turned bright red as it spread over the body. They developed high fevers and hacking coughs, and became delirious and dehydrated. And while many people recovered from the flu, typhus was often fatal. Untreated, it spread quickly, becoming a deadly epidemic.

  To the German occupiers, an outbreak of typhus inside a ghetto was viewed as a blessing. Outside the ghetto, though, such an outbreak was a huge problem. The disease wiped out entire regiments, leaving the Nazis weak and defenceless. Typhus also took the lives of healthy, young Poles, reducing the number of slave labourers available to work at German farms and factories and putting a huge dent in the Nazi war effort.

  Doctors who suspected that a patient had typhus were required by law to submit blood samples to German-controlled laboratories for testing. There the blood was mixed with a killed strain of bacteria known as Proteus OX19. If the patient had typhus, the sample clumped and turned cloudy.

  While running tests, Dr. Stanislaw Matulewicz, a fellow physician, made a curious discovery. Healthy patients injected with dead Proteus OX19 bacteria didn’t get sick with typhus, but their blood samples showed the same cloudy results. To those who didn’t know any better, it would seem that the patient had typhus when, in fact, the patient was typhus-free.

  When Dr. Lazowski learned of this discovery, he quickly spotted an opportunity to save even more lives. Together the two men launched a perilous but clever scheme.

  Whenever they encountered a gentile patient who was suffering from the flu or who had symptoms remotely resembling typhus, they injected dead Proteus OX19 bacteria into that patient’s bloodstream. As required by law, they drew blood samples and sent them to German-approved labs. Predictably, the patients tested positive for typhus. Just as predictably, this sent German officials into a frenzy.

  Signs were posted around infected areas: Achtung, Fleckfieber — Warning Typhus. The areas were quarantined to restrict movement. The deportation of workers was stopped. German troops kept their distance, avoiding neighbouring ghettos and halting their relentless killing of Jews in the area.

  Working this way, the two doctors created false epidemics in a number of Polish villages. To protect themselves, they referred some of their injected patients to other doctors who were not in on the plot. Working independently, these doctors “discovered” typhus, too.

  To the Germans, Dr. Lazowski seemed brave — working with those most infected, willing to risk his own life to save theirs. In private, though, he felt far from courageous. “I was scared, of course. I didn’t know if I would be arrested and tortured by the Gestapo [German secret police].”

  A German soldier guards a group of Polish men.

  Despite the cover-up, by late 1943 German officials became suspicious. Typhus had been diagnosed a number of times, yet strangely no one seemed to be dying. An investigation was launched, and a team of soldiers and doctors was dispatched to one of the quarantined areas.

  When Dr. Lazowski heard about the approaching investigation, he gathered the oldest, sickest, most frail-looking patients he could find. All of them showed symptoms of typhus, though none had the disease. He injected them with Proteus OX19 and then housed them in the filthiest quarters he could find.

  Dr. Lazowski met the visiting inspectors just outside the city. He welcomed them warmly and led them inside, where he served a hot meal. He filled glasses with vodka and passed them around the table. Then he soothed the inspectors with music and song. It was hard for anyone to leave, which is exactly what he hoped would happen.

  “They were having such a good time they sent the younger doctors to make the examination,” Dr. Lazowski said. “I told them to be my guest and examine the patients, but to be careful because the Polish are dirty and full of lice, which transfer typhus.”

  Plied with liquor and song, and stoked with false fears, the inexperienced doctors visited the sick. Worried for their own safety, they rushed through the examinations, drawing blood samples from only a few before leaving in a hurry. As planned, the samples tested positive for typhus and the inspection team cleared Dr. Lazowski of any wrongdoing.

  Still, the Germans watched him closely. Toward the end of the war, a young German soldier who had once been treated by the doctor pulled his motorcycle up to Dr. Lazowski’s office.

  “Doctor, run, you are on the Gestapo hit list,” the soldier told him.

  Dr. Lazowski heeded the warning. Taking his wife and young daughter, he fled.

  Working the typhus scheme, Doctors Eugene Lazowski and Stanislaw Matulewicz created fak
e epidemics in twelve villages during the war and rescued an estimated eight thousand men, women and children, Jews and non-Jews alike.

  “I was not able to fight with a gun or a sword, but I found a way to scare the Germans,” Dr. Lazowski said.

  6.

  “HOUSTON, WE’VE HAD A PROBLEM HERE”

  Three astronauts were stranded in space, marooned between Earth and the moon.

  On April 13, 1970, astronaut Jack Swigert flipped a switch on the control panel of Apollo 13’s command module. It was a routine act, one that had been repeated several times during the spacecraft’s mission to land a man on the moon. Flipping the switch started a “stir” of the service module’s Number 2 oxygen tank. Stirring the tank prevented liquid oxygen from turning gummy, and ensured a proper burn when oxygen mixed with fuel and was ignited.

  Ninety-three seconds later, Swigert and his fellow astronauts, James Lovell and Fred Haise, heard an explosive thump. A shudder raked the command module. Lights flickered and monitors fluttered.

  “Houston, we’ve had a problem here,” James Lovell announced.

  In the control room at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) station in Houston, Texas, lights on an instrument console flashed. An alarm sounded. Engineers and technicians scrambled. Three days into its mission, Apollo 13 was in trouble.

  At first the astronauts thought a meteor might have struck the spacecraft. They changed their minds after looking out the window. “It looks to me that we are venting something,” Lovell told the ground crew. “It’s a gas of some kind.”

  The service module held fuel and oxygen tanks, propulsion and electrical systems, and supplies for the mission. Although the exact cause of the problem wasn’t known until later, flipping the switch had started a chain reaction. An electrical short in the Number 2 oxygen tank sparked a fire, causing an explosion. The explosion ruptured the tank, blew out bolts in the service module, ripped off a hatch cover and fired debris into space. It damaged neighbouring oxygen tanks and disabled power systems. Pushed by the force of the explosion, Apollo veered off course.