The pilot who was the Captain during the QF32 (A380) incident wrote up a good review of the movie:

https://qf32.aero/2016/09/28/review-sully-movie/

 

 

It is the producer/screen writere/etc's portrayal of their impression of a real life storyas a movie & certainly NOT, as a documentary, as pfflyers quite rightly said!! 

 

If a movie starts with "This is a true story..." or is a depiction of s real-life event that happened within most people's living memory, then as far as 90% of the cinemagoing public is concerned, it is a documentary, or as near to one as makes no difference, and those people will come away with the impression that the NTSB is an organisation of vindictive nitpickers, in the thrall of the insurance companies (eh? ...well I suppose Eastwood had to explain the nastiness somehow...) when in fact the NTSB is. as someone put it "...the airline passenger's best friend they've never met."

 

I might still go and see it, though.

The pilot who was the Captain during the QF32 (A380) incident wrote up a good review of the movie:

https://qf32.aero/2016/09/28/review-sully-movie/

Do read First officer Jeff Skiles comments on that review. It answers many questions in this thread. 

The pilot who was the Captain during the QF32 (A380) incident wrote up a good review of the movie:

https://qf32.aero/2016/09/28/review-sully-movie/

 

Thanks for sharing that.  Excellent article that sheds a lot of light.  Even more helpful is Skiles' comment, as Larry (ladamson) points out.

 

I take Skiles' point that the hostility of the NTSB was a way to represent the pilots' stress - but I don't think the way Eastwood did it was skillful or helpful.

 

Interesting about the union rep insisting on the run with the 35-second delay - not really a surprise that it was added on, since there was only the one simulator run with the delay.  If it had been a systematic part of the setup, there would have been more.  I still find it striking that even without the delay, the success rate wasn't very high - 53 percent, roughly one chance in two.  Those aren't odds I'd feel confident about.

 

Since we're on the topic of distorting stuff for the sake of drama, here's one from Apollo 13 that I don't like - it always irritated me that they portrayed the Grumman engineer as a self-protective buffoon, when in fact the Grumman reps played a central role in managing the LM to save the crew.  That treatment ("corporations are stupid and bad") was lazy on Howard's part - reflexive leftism.  Personally I'm left-leaning, as you can probably tell, and I'm in favor of good agencies like the NTSB.  But the main point is to be fair and get things right, even if you're making them more dramatic.  There's quite a lot of journalism in my background and my family's, so that's what's coming out here, too.

What Eastwood is doing is putting in scenes that are the complete opposite of what happened - and slandering good people in the process.  It's not about drama, it's about politics.  "Based on true events except that the events that are central to the film aren't true."  I'll pass, thanks.

 

Every movie (Hollywood or not) is about politics. And in the vast majority of cases, skewed to the opposite side of the one of Clint Eastwood. And yes, this is also true for all the movies listed as "based on true events".

 

Any adult person who still thinks movies "based on true events" really depict true events in a more than remote way, and that they do not mainly reflect the ideas and politics of its writers/directors, is very naive.

Every movie (Hollywood or not) is about politics. And in the vast majority of cases, skewed to the opposite side of the one of Clint Eastwood. And yes, this is also true for all the movies listed as "based on true events".

 

Any adult person who still thinks movies "based on true events" really depict true events in a more than remote way, and that they do not mainly reflect the ideas and politics of its writers/directors, is very naive.

 

Well, yesterday, in my neighborhood, there was a guy shooting up a very nice pizza place because of something he read on the Internet.  So I'm sort of in favor of the truth.  As to naivete - maybe so.  But it's also disappointment.  Eastwood has been a brilliant director - especially from Unforgiven onward.  And he's sophisticated and broadminded enough to give us those two superb Iwo Jima films, one from each perspective.  But here the best he can do is turn the NTSB into Snidely Whiplash, tying poor, poor Sully to the railroad tracks.  It's just crude.  He's much more talented than to have to fall back on than that.  

From: Jeff Skiles, First Officer, USAirways 1549 (that landed on the Hudson)

Hello Rich,

I’d like to thank you for the very insightful review of “Sully”. Your eloquent writing fairly captured the Sully that I know although you were far too kind regarding my own role in the incident. I believe that you brought a perspective that thankfully only a small cadre of our colleagues can convey.

No man or woman could understand the enormity of such an accident and its aftermath without having personal experience to draw from. I offer the following review for your readers:

Reality was far more dramatic than portrayed in the film.

As someone who was there, I thought the movie did an excellent job of capturing the incident and the thoughts and concerns of Sully who was hailed as a hero while simultaneously suffering under the burden of an intensive, invasive, and far reaching investigation into his life and conduct. Certainly part of the appeal of the movie is that it gives viewers an alternative glimpse into a story that they remember and in many cases thought they knew well.

The producers hung the various pieces of the film from this overall framework. The producers weren’t airline pilots and had no expert consultant on set. Some of the movie was not absolutely factual but it overall was pretty good. I think we need to keep in mind that the movie was never intended to be a documentary but rather was meant to tell a broader story and it did that very well. I don’t want to be an apologist for the movie and where it took liberties with facts, but I do understand why sometimes absolute accuracy was sacrificed to convey that broad focus view.

don’t place too much blame on the NTSB itself for the realities of the investigative process. They were doing their jobs, just as we did ours

Before I delve in, let me say that I receive nothing from this film. See it one time or ten, it doesn’t put an extra penny in my pocket. Neither Sully nor I had much involvement at all with the filming or editing of the movie.

Everything I saw and heard said in the movie actually happened, although events may not have been in the place or time as conveyed in the movie. For instance, the final line in the movie I believe I said on the David Letterman TV Show, not at the hearing.

The accident and rescue was fairly accurate. There were certainly small inaccuracies that only an Airbus pilot would know to criticize and the representation of the cockpit scenes was not particularly factual.

Reality was far more dramatic than portrayed in the film. In the movie Sully and I had plenty of time to look “concerned” while low volume, almost melodious, emergency warnings were playing soothingly in the background. It felt like we were in an elevator listening to musak. Quadruple the volume of those warnings and alert bells and wipe the concerned looks off our faces and it would have been more accurate. We were busy and didn’t have time to even make eye contact. The cockpit was a very loud and brash place.

The other large area of deviation from facts was in the hearing and the demeanor of the NTSB officials. The film took 17 months of investigative work and telescoped it into a few days. There was no live simulator testing played on screens at the hearing, the simulator testing was concluded long before. The main drama point of allowing a reasonable response time to fairly represent our procedures and training was a battle fought in the investigation committee, not at the hearing. The NTSB interviews were not conducted as a crew, they were separate. And, the investigators themselves were respectful in their demeanor throughout the investigation. They were not antagonistic, condescending, or personally insulting.

The NTSB did not allow me legal assistance and I was questioned after not having slept for three days

That’s not to say it wasn’t a very stressful experience. My interview lasted for three hours. The NTSB did not allow me legal assistance and I was questioned after not having slept for three days. It was a very confusing time in my own mind.

To make you feel that level of stress, the movie portrayed the NTSB as Hollywood villains. They weren’t villains. But, in such an investigation there are powerful forces integral to the investigative process working against you. The investigative committees are populated with engine manufacturers, airframe manufacturers, and airline representatives who would think nothing of casting blame, even unfairly, on the pilots to protect their corporate brand. It wasn’t their representatives that influenced the NTSB to allow 35 seconds to reflect reasonable reaction time, transference of aircraft control, and evaluation of the situation. It was Larry Rooney, our pilot’s association representative on the NTSB Operations/Human Factors committee that did that. Without Larry, the results of the investigation would have been far different for Sully and I and there certainly would have been no movie for you to see.

The paragraphs above would be difficult to portray in a film format however. The producers chose to give you that perception by making the NTSB investigators personally antagonistic. Sully successfully petitioned the producers to remove the NTSB cast members actual names from the movie but otherwise was unable to alter their portrayal. This was certainly unfortunate for the NTSB.

Inaccuracies aside, I thought the movie did a good job of depicting the incident and a Sully’s-eye view of the many months of investigative purgatory that followed. Just don’t place too much blame on the NTSB itself for the realities of the investigative process. They were doing their jobs, just as we did ours.

Jeff

Another excellent and more in-depth review from Jeff Skiles can be found on his website: http://www.jeffskiles.com

 

More specifically:

http://www.jeffskiles.com/sport-aviation

 

Even more specifically:

https://media.wix.com/ugd/f9554c_882f3b7dfe184c0fa49522ebb0f87ca0.pdf

 

Cheers,

Matt.