Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger, the now-retired captain known for his heroic role in the “Miracle on the Hudson,” let out a deep sigh when asked Thursday about President Donald Trump’s remarks on the midair collision that left 67 people dead in Washington, D.C. this week.
“Not surprised. Disgusted,” said Sullenberger after several seconds of silence when MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell asked about the president and cautioned that he didn’t want to draw the pilot into “politics.”
The reaction from Sullenberger — who safely landed US Airways Flight 1549 on the Hudson River in 2009, saving the lives of all 155 people aboard — comes after Trump blamed diversity hiring at the Federal Aviation Administration for the deadly collision.
Sullenberger, in a 2018 op-ed for The Washington Post encouraging voter participation in the midterm elections, noted that he was a registered Republican “for the first 85 percent of my adult life” but added that he’s “always voted as an American.”
He’d go on to endorse Joe Biden in his 2020 campaign and, in an ad with VoteVets and the anti-Trump GOP group The Lincoln Project later that year, declared that Trump “failed us so miserably” in the “highest calling of leadership.”
“Now it’s up to us, to overcome his attacks on our very democracy, knowing nearly a quarter million Americans won’t have a voice, casualties of his lethal lies and incompetence,” he said in the 2020 ad.
He’d later go on to serve as the U.S. representative to the International Civil Aviation Organization under Biden.
On Thursday, Sullenberger told O’Donnell he was “immediately devastated” when he heard the “shocking” news of the D.C. crash.
“It hit me deeply, intensely. The loss of those lives, those precious lives,” he said.
“I can imagine the families of those who are lost and the grief they must feel and they’re looking for some reason, some explanation that has yet, is not available to us, one day will be.”
Sullenberger, who referred to National Transportation Safety Board the “gold standard” of accident investigation, said the probe is a “long process” as he noted that it took 16 months for the final report on the 2009 crash to be written.
He added that the NTSB investigation may require listening to a cockpit voice recorder, looking at a digital flight data recorder or “old-fashioned detective work.”
“But they will follow the truth, they will follow the facts wherever they lead,” he said of the NTSB.
“And we can have great confidence that the results will be found, they will be made public and as we always do after such a tragedy, the entire industry will learn these terrible lessons that we learned at great cost.”
