There are many carry-overs between flying a jet and cruising the high seas. Some of the most common aviation terms are drawn from the nautical world, and the glamorous, nascent days of transoceanic flying provided the ultimate amalgamation of these two realms; Pan Am’s famous Clippers were, technically speaking, flying boats. Thus, as an airline pilot, it’s with unavoidable interest that I followed the plight of the hapless Francesco Schettino, renegade captain of the once majestic, then quite sideways Costa Concordia cruise ship.
The captain of a jetliner, no different from his cousin on the bridge of a ship, is charged with the safety and well-being of both a multimillion-dollar machine and its cargo of trusting passengers. Pilots train, retrain, and train again – a constant regimen that is nothing if not a long crisis-management rehearsal. Presumably it’s similar for those at sea, and so the image of Schettino scrambling into a lifeboat seems a touch, well, irresponsible. Maybe even pathetic.
On the one hand, Schettino looks like a coward. Under other circumstances, his exchange with the Italian Coast Guard would have been hilarious. “You go aboard!” commanded the coast guard captain, exhorting Schettino to return to his ship. “Don’t make any more excuses.”
In this light, Schettino is the anti-Sully, shuttling himself to safety while hundreds of his passengers remained behind in peril. Captain Chesley Sullenberger and his first officer, remember, stayed in the thick of things, ensuring that all were accounted for before their Airbus sank beneath the icy Hudson River.
Then again, the whole “down with the ship” thing shouldn’t be romanticized. Whether from a legal or moral perspective, self-sacrifice is a remarkable thing to expect of someone, regardless of his job. Would Schettino’s presence on the capsizing vessel have even made a difference? That’s unclear, but choosing to leave the ship could have been an entirely practical decision. He was not obligated to drown out of some perverse, old-fashioned sense of duty.
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It’s the same with pilots. You follow your training to the extent that you can – your checklists and procedures and, in the end, your good judgment. Preparing for an evacuation on the runway, for example, requires adherence to a set of steps as well as critical coordination with the flight attendants. Neglect these and a perfectly survivable crisis can become a catastrophe.
But if the plane is on fire or sinking fast, you do what there’s time to do, and then you get the heck out. Risking death to carry a victim out of a burning fuselage is certainly noble, but that’s a personal decision, not a professional one. This isn’t about chivalry; it’s about saving as many lives as possible – your own among them.
And that is what separates heroes, as they ought to be defined, from those “merely” doing their jobs.
As it happens, we should be a lot less concerned with Schettino’s post-accident behavior than with his apparent decision to go wandering off course for a thrill. He was reportedly playing it fast and loose with the Concordia’s route, straying close to the rocks to show off to viewers on shore. People’s contempt for airlines is duly noted, but I cannot come up with an airborne analogy for this sort of malpractice. Pilots – along with doctors, astronauts, and everybody else – occasionally make mistakes, it’s true. But, trust me, this sort of thing simply doesn’t happen.
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Neither do airplanes tend to crash the way boats sink – dramatically, in a sort of made-for-Hollywood slow motion. Airplane accidents, rare as they are, are often fast, furious, and entirely unexpected, with little or no time to prepare and little or no opportunity for heroics.
Which brings us back to Captain Sullenberger. One irony of the whole Sully-upon-Hudson thing was that, from this pilot’s perspective, I see a nearly total absence of solitary heroics. Rather, I see an entire crew – two experienced pilots and several experienced flight attendants – dealing exceptionally well with a serious emergency. And ultimately it was luck, more than anything else, that saved the day. Had it been dark, had the engines failed at a slightly different location or altitude, no amount of talent or experience was going to matter. Sully isn’t a hero so much as a consummate professional who did exactly what he was supposed to do.
Schettino, for his part, seems to have done everything wrong. Not only did he perhaps cause the tragedy, but his reaction to it is looking more and more undignified. We wanted him to be a hero because we love heroes – even if we can’t always define them correctly – and he let us down.
Somerville-based Patrick Smith is an airline pilot, author, and the host of askthepilot.com. Send comments to magazine@globe.com.