'Sully' film stirs vivid memories of Flight 1549 for Florence's Mike Nunn

Mike Nunn says the movie “Sully” is “a very faithful representation” of what happened when U.S. Airways Flight 1549 went down on the Hudson River seven years ago. Nunn was one of the 155 passengers on the flight.

He and other passengers who survived in the “Miracle on the Hudson” had the opportunity to see a private showing of the movie in Charlotte before it was released to the public.

“It was pretty interesting to see it all play out on the big screen,” said Nunn, a major in the Florence County Sheriff’s Office. “It was very well done.”

Nunn made his own silver screen debut, as he and a group of other passengers were featured in a short scene as the credits were rolling at the end of the film. Nunn said the scene was shot at the North Carolina Air Museum, where the plane now rests.

The scene, directed by Clint Eastwood, was meant to recreate one of the first meetings that passengers had with Captain Chesley Sullenberger and the rest of the flight crew when they first brought the plane back to Charlotte. Nunn described being directed by Eastwood as “pretty cool.”

“It was a pretty poignant moment for all of us,” Nunn said. “I was very pleased to be a part of the movie.”

The film “Sully” was released to the public on Sept. 9. It portrays what the flight crews, passengers, air traffic controllers and rescue teams experienced before, during and after the aircraft made an emergency landing in the Hudson River in January 2009. Nunn recalls vivid details about the events of that afternoon.

Nunn was a lawyer for a private law firm at the time and had gone to New York to give a deposition in a medical malpractice case.

He was originally scheduled to depart from LaGuardia at 5 p.m. but he finished his deposition early and contacted his secretary to switch to an earlier flight. “There was one seat left on the3 p.m. plane,” Nunn said. “So I took it.”

He described the weather as perfect for flying with not a cloud in the sky. He took his seat in row six by the window and could see the plane’s engine directly beside him.

Approximately three minutes into the flight, Nunn saw something get swallowed by the right engine as he was looking out of his window. Nunn said he could feel the plane rock and lose the sensation of forward thrust. The plane and its passengers went unnervingly quiet.

“And then Captain Sullenberger comes on the speakers and says, ‘This is the captain. Brace for impact,’” Nunn recalled. “At that point we knew, certainly I knew, this is a real problem.”

The plane began to descend rapidly, and Nunn said he didn’t see any other place for the plane to go but into the river.

“I just figured, OK, this is where it ends,” Nunn said. “I never expected to survive. If we somehow survive the crash, we wouldn’t survive the water until we could be rescued.”

In the minute or two that it took for the plane to descend, Nunn said, he thought about his family and all that would follow the crash. He wondered how his family would get closure and regretted having to put his family through this. Then the plane hit the river at approximately 150 mph.

“The deceleration was just massive,” Nunn said. “It was like nothing I’ve experienced at all. Ever. I really expected the seats were going to be ripped out of the floor, it was so massive.”

Nunn saw water shooting up and over the windows of the plane and expected the plane to fly apart.

“I figured this is probably going to be one of the last things I see,” Nunn said. “And then, surprisingly, the plane just kind of sat up on the water and we were floating.”

Passengers were quickly evacuated onto the wings and onto inflatable emergency slides that automatically deployed following the water landing. The air temperature that day was 20 degrees with a wind-chill factor below 5 degrees. The water temperature was 36 degrees. Nunn said he became very hopeful after seeing the plane was still intact and ferry boats en route for rescue, regardless of the frigid conditions.

“When the plane didn’t break up and we didn’t wind up in the water, I thought, ‘Wow, there’s a chance some of us might make it out of here,’” Nunn said. “The miracle was all 155 of us made it out of there.”

Following the crash, Captain Sullenberger was praised as a hero, both nationally and among the passengers and flight crew. In the movie, however, Sullenberger is reprimanded for his decision to land the plane in the river instead of attempting to return to LaGuardia. Nunn said that without Sullenberger’s knowledge and extensive flight experience, that landing might have yielded a much different result.

“What are the chances that guy’s unique abilities would come to play out on a flight that actually needed that?” Nunn said. “There were thousands of flights that day. But he was assigned to fly this aircraft on this day that actually needed his unique expertise. You can call that luck all you want. I call it something else. I call it God’s hand.”

Nunn said he sees the events of January 15, 2009 as nothing short of a miracle and knows that he and the other 154 passengers who survived that day “are still here for a reason.”

“It’s our job to seek every day to find out what that reason is and to make sure in the quality time left that we are getting the most out of that,” Nunn said. “I try not to leave the houses any day without telling those that I love that I love them. You never know when you leave whether you’ll be coming back or not.”

The morning after the crash landing, Nunn, along with several other Flight 1549 passengers, boarded the first flight from New York to Charlotte. Nunn laughed, admitting he was a bit nervous as the flight climbed to its cruising altitude.

“Once we got out of goose altitude, I felt pretty good about our chances,” Nunn said.