Risky business

Rating: 8/10 (8 May 2017)

Late in the day, my thoughts have returned to Sully, Clint Eastwood's engaging movie that tells of US Airways's pilots Captain Chesley Sullenberger and co-pilot Jeff Skiles who successfully landed their plane full of passengers on the Hudson river after the plane's engines were disabled by hitting a flock of geese. The passengers lived but the geese and their kith and kin were not so lucky as the accident precipitated a cull of the dastardly, life threatening feathered fiends.
Sully became a popular hero, but the communications and data gathering Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System lead to an investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board which used computer models to suggest that Sully should have followed instructions and headed for a near by airfield. Here, Eastwood draws on themes from science fiction, pitting human 'gut feeling', experience and decision making against the apparently inescapable logic of the machine.
Sully himself is presented as a distinctly American type of hero, an average type of guy who you know would make a good neighbor. In Hollywood, this type is often contrasted with 'egg heads' ( in this case the investigators with their computer projections) and suspect bureaucratic types. Even his nickname 'Sully' suggests an amiable sort of guy. In Britain Sullenberger would have been nick named 'Sullen' or some sort of derogatory reference to beef burgers and made fun of until he actually became sullen (or obese from being driven to comfort eating fast food).
It is worth noting that the inquiry is just one area where Eastwood has used artistic license to create a dramatic conflict. In reality, computer models failed to predict a successful landing at either of the two available air fields. And Sully and the NTSB raised concerns about the way the film depicted the investigation as an adversarial process. But having just watched The Andromeda Strain, I can tell you a dispassionate investigation makes for boring viewing and, even though we know the outcome, Sully is never less than gripping.
What gives Sully a lot of its emotional power, is the film's up front echoes of 9/11. The safe landing is good news from the skies above New York. I did found a scene where Sully imagines his plane crashing into a tower a little on the nose, but this film is all about healing the psychic wounds of that terrible day in September. No one conveys a quietly troubled mind better that Tom Hankes, staring out over the New York skyline while waiting to appear before the investigators.
So a lot of narrative work has gone into dramatizing what would seem an already dramatic situation. We are not watching reality in the raw. And nowhere is the film more fictionalized that its treatment of risk. Miy mind kept turning to Tom Wolfe's book 'The Right Stuff' that explores the culture of test pilots flying some of the most dangerous planes ever created, prototypes of the jets and rocket engines that eventually helped Man journey to the Moon. These were planes that were so experimental that repeated failure was a likelihood and yet the pilots saw accidents as the result of a failure of pilot competency.
Sociologists have found that a similar culture exists among middle aged men who turn to motorcycling. Objectively, motorcycles are inherently dangerous where as cars are safety cages on wheels. Yet motorcyclists continually attribute accidents to errors of judgment on the part of the cyclist. What this means for the film Sully is that audiences become trapped in an unrealistic either or scenario in which the outcome is entirely dependent on Sully's decision making and skill. Either he was a rogue pilot incompetently defying his orders to land at an airfield and putting the lives of his passengers at risk or he was a highly competent and skillful pilot who drew on years of experience to save the lives of passengers by achieving a safe land few if anyone else could.
But there's a third possibility Luck. By chance, on this occasion everything turned out well. But it needn't have. And Sully's skill might not have been the deciding factor. A whole host of other things were. But that's hard to take on board. Not least because this powerful human drama plays to our deepest bias, so deep it is called Fundamental attribution Error. We want the world to be under our control even when events are the outcome of the situation.
And with well made, well acted, well scripted films like Sully it is hard to be a nay sayer.