A hero’s welcome for Tom Hanks in Sully: Miracle on the Hudson

WHEN a passenger plane hit a flock of Canada geese over the Hudson River in 2009, the situation could have been dire.

However, pilot Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger kept his wits about him, and landed his plane in the river below him.

It was a risky manoeuvre, but Sully saved all 155 people on board and became a national hero and instant celebrity.

The story struck a chord with Hollywood and, this week, a new release, Sully: Miracle on the Hudson, starring Tom Hanks in the lead role, is out in cinemas.

Directed by Clint Eastwood, the film reveals how Sully had liaised with ground control as to whether to turn his plane back around and return to La Guardia airport, or whether he could make it to New Jersey.

Sully realised that neither option was a possibilty — he was going to have to land in the water.

“It was a day like 10,000 I’d ever had,” reveals Chesley, who advised the cast and crew on set.

“I’d been an airline pilot for almost 30 years, but nothing can prepare you for that.

“Had even one person died, it would have changed the day for me. And so I’m very, very grateful for what we achieved.”

Actor Tom, who was seen earlier in the year in Inferno, and who described his character as heroic, was quick to heap praise on the pilot.

“It was a day that could have been one of the blackest in the history of aviation and a very black one in the history of the United States, but it ended up being an extraordinary day,” says Tom.

“His heroic act was to step outside himself, and to follow his instincts, as opposed to the book.

“At one point, all of the sinews and synapses said: ‘There’s only one place to land — that big, flat expanse of water.’

“If you were going to take the time to have the longer discussion with yourself, you’d have gone through: ‘This has never been done before, it’s going to rip the engines right off the wings and we’re going to cartwheel and we’re going to fall apart, and I probably won’t survive.’

“Sully didn’t think that. He thought: ‘No, I can make this. I can make this landing.’

“He’d never say he’s a hero, but that was one heroic thing he did.

“The screenplay, I thought, was so perfectly a blend of behaviour and procedure that whatever shortcuts, whatever moments that we had condensed or altered somehow, still have the pure DNA of what I think the moment meant.”

In fact, filming the movie resulted in Tom receiving a hero’s welcome everywhere that he went.

“Because I had the white hair, I was getting a lot of: ‘Sully! Way to go, man!’” he laughs.

Modestly, he plays down the attention that he received off the back of the film, saying: “It’s the power of the cinema. It already felt part of something.

“Clint Eastwood is a master film maker and you can tell that from any number, it goes on and on, of the movies he’s made.

“I think he has encapsulated a moment that was very important to people and somehow binds us all together in the best of possible ways.”

Sully: Miracle on the Hudson is out on Friday, December 2

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