He had just over three minutes to decide if 155 people would come home.
On January 15, 2009, US Airways Flight 1549 took off from LaGuardia Airport in New York. Approximately two minutes later, while the Airbus A320 was just under 3,000 feet of altitude, it crossed a flock of Canadian geese.
Both engines lost push.
From that moment on, according to the subsequent reconstruction of the incident, Commander Chesley Sullenberger and the first officer Jeff Skiles had about 208 seconds before the impact with water.
There was no time for a long discussion.
Air traffic control proposed two possible airports for an emergency landing. Sullenberger evaluated the position, share and ability of the plane to plan and concluded that they would not have been able to reach them.
His decision entered the history of aviation:
they would end up in the Hudson.
In front of them there was no track, but a river moving, crossed by ferries and surrounded by one of the most densely populated cities in the world.
Sullenberger managed to keep the wings leveled and let the water touch the plane without destroying the fuselage.
There were 155 people on board.
They all survived.
Within a few minutes, the ferries that sailed on the Hudson reached the plane and began to recover passengers and crews, many of which had already gone out on the wings while the water entered the cabin.
Sullenberger did not leave immediately.
He traveled twice the inside of the plane that was flooding to check that no one remained.
It was the last to leave.
Later investigations also showed how delicate the decision was not to attempt the return to an airport. In the simulations, the pilots managed to return only when the maneuver began almost immediately after the impact with the birds, without giving themselves the real time necessary to understand what happened and evaluate the alternatives.
That day was not only a matter of reflection.
It was the result of experience, training and thousands of apparently ordinary decisions taken during a career.
When they asked him what he had done all those years as a pilot, Sullenberger used a simple image.
He said he had accumulated small deposits of experience little by little.
On January 15, 2009 the time came to withdraw them all.
And the balance was enough.