Writers capture a miracle in ‘Miracle on the Hudson’

William Prochnau published his own newspaper, the Everett Eagle, when he was 9.

By 17, he worked in The Everett Herald’s sports department. Soon after his 1955 graduation from Everett High School, he was a Herald news reporter.

Since then, the 72-year-old journalist and author has achieved so much that any official resume is apt to skip his Everett beginnings.

He was a Washington, D.C., correspondent for The Seattle Times, which in the 1960s sent him twice to Vietnam to cover the war. His acclaimed book “Once Upon a Distant War” chronicles young reporters in the early days of U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

During the Reagan era, he was a reporter for The Washington Post. His novel “Trinity’s Child,” about a nuclear war, was made into a TV movie. And the feature film “Proof of Life” is based on his Vanity Fair article about kidnapping in Colombia. He is now a contributing editor at Vanity Fair.

Prochnau’s latest project, written with his wife Laura Parker, is a riveting account of what went on inside the US Airways jetliner piloted to safety on New York’s Hudson River last January by the now-famous Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger.

In “Miracle on the Hudson,” published this week by Ballantine Books, Prochnau and Parker tell a gripping suspense story from accounts shared by about 120 passengers of Flight 1549.

“It reads like a novel,” said Parker, a former reporter for The Washington Post, USA Today and The Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Parker also has roots in Everett. Her parents, Bruce and Shirley Parker, both graduated from Everett High, and she grew up in Mount Vernon.

Parker, 56, did much of the interviewing for the book.

“Everybody feels they know this story because they saw it on CNN. They saw that iconic image of an Airbus (plane) floating on the Hudson with everyone standing on the wings,” she said. “In this age of Twitter and instant news, often there’s more to the story than you can see in those initial images. That’s what this book is about.

“You ride down to the water with this group. In the back of the plane, they’re up to their necks in water,” Parker said. “A number of them were completely convinced that after having survived a plane crash, they were now going to drown inside the plane.”

While physical descriptions shared by passengers were often similar, Parker said that what went through their minds differed greatly. “The 118th person was just as interesting as the first,” she said.

Passengers revealed innermost thoughts from what many thought would be their last moments. Minds filled with images of children, messy houses left behind and long-ago romance. Imagine what you’d think if, on an airline flight, you heard what Sullenberger said: “This is your captain. Brace for impact.”

“All through it, they thought they were going to die in a crash,” Prochnau said. “Suddenly they’re in the river. They were terrified.”

One passenger in the back of the plane had water up to his necktie, Prochnau said. “The back doors were jammed, and he was looking for a way out. A hundred feet ahead, there was a solid mass of people, some coming their direction trying to get out the back.”

Some prayed and some comforted others with a hand on a shoulder. One woman, Eileen Shleffar, talked on a cell phone to her husband throughout the ordeal — until she fell into the icy river and her phone died.

Outside, survival was hardly a given. The air was 22 degrees, the river water about 35 degrees.

“There were people who don’t remember any of it,” Prochnau said. “Time collapsed and time expanded. Religious feelings were altered.” In interviews, he said, “even these rough and tough men, frequent fliers, would just break down crying.”

Sullenberger is the flight’s undisputed hero. Everyone aboard the plane survived. There were other heroes. Prochnau singles out passenger Brian Moss.

“He waited for everybody to get out, walked out in the freezing cold and saw people on the wing, and went back inside, in the water, to pull more life preservers out. Finally, Sullenberger had to tell him to get off the plane.”

No one spoke of screaming, or of mayhem, Parker said.

“That’s Hollywood. The plane was pretty silent,” she said. “More often than we think, in a time of crisis, people do the right thing.”

Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460, muhlstein@heraldnet.com.