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Real leaders leave a legacy. They capture the hearts and minds of their teams. Their origin story puts the safety and well-being of their people first. Great companies ubiquitously have safe, yet productive operations. For those companies, safety is an investment, not a cost for the C-suite. It’s a real topic of daily focus. This is the Safety Guru with your host, Eric Michrowski, a globally recognized ops and safety guru, public speaker and author. Are you ready to leave a safety legacy? Your legacy success story begins now.

Hi, and welcome to the Safety Guru. Today, I’m very excited to have with me Dave Sanderson. He was a last passenger on the Miracle of the Hudson. He’s an author of four books and also a publisher of a magazine called Moments. Dave, welcome to the show. Very excited to have you with me.

Eric, thank you for having me today.

Let’s start with your background and how you got into the plane, essentially, the Miracle in the Hudson.

Well, thank you very much. Yes, for over 37 years, I was a sales producer for many different companies. You’re in sales and you travel a lot. That year, in 2009, 2008, I was with a company by the name of Oracle. I was in charge of what’s called consumer packaged goods in the Southeast. I was working with companies who made things, distributed things, and retail things. That the week happened during the Miracle on the Hudson, it was the end of a three-day business trip because we started in Florida early that week on Tuesday. That Wednesday, we worked in a manufacturing plant in Petersburg, Virginia. Then we went to New York City because the next day, we were working in Brooklyn at a distribution center. Now, I don’t know if anybody here has ever been or even worked inside of a distribution center, but they always open up very early because the trucks need to get going for their shipment. We were doing systems checks that day on the third day of that trip. We got in there early because we wanted to see how all this stuff was working. We started our day about five o’clock, so we got done about 10: 00.

I was excited because I gave me the opportunity to go home early because my traditional strategy because in business, you never know how things are going to shake out during the day, was always book the last flight out.

Being there many times.

Yeah. But now I get a chance to go home early. I called her Travel agent, worked with her, and she put me on US Airways flight 1549, the Miracle of the Hudson. I wasn’t supposed to be on that flight. That’s how I got on the plane that day. I gave up a first-class seat at five o’clock, received 15A on flight 1549 on January 15th.

Tell me a little bit about that experience. Obviously, it’s well known in terms of what happened on the Miracle of the Hudson, but maybe walk me through the early few minutes, and we’ll then get to some of the main the lessons that you took from it.

Sure. Thank you. I think a lot of people, not most of you know the public story of what happened. But there is a private story. There’s a back story, too. I always tell people the back story is usually more interesting than the real story. On my case, I was in C15A. When I heard the explosion, I never heard anything on a plane like that before. That woke me up because, Kaylee, I wasn’t paying attention. I tell people I was not paying attention. I didn’t know where those exits were, read the brochures, never pay attention to the flight. I didn’t because I knew everything.

You’ve done it many times.

Yeah, it flies a lot, no big deal. But then when I heard the explosion, I looked out the window because I was in a window seat. I saw fire coming out of the left wing. So, I knew something had happened. But when you fly a Swad, Eric and I were talking about, you used to travel a lot. Likewise, planes lose engines. There are always at least two engines on a plane.

Yeah, I’ve had multiple times single bird strike, not multiple times dual.

No big deal, right? Got another engine. We’re going to go back. I’m not getting home early, but at least we’re going back. That’s what made this one of the most amazing things is because that double bird strike took out both engines at the exact same second. I tell people one of the amazing things about that experience is we all heard this one explosion. Because I believe, it might be my belief, and other people might have different beliefs, we would have heard boom, boom. Then you’re over New York City, you may have a I have a different opinion on what’s going on. I think everybody is like, okay, we’re just going to go back to the airport. But as we started banking, I looked out the window and the skyline of Manhattan was right out my window. I had never seen that version of the skyline. I mean, I was right there. We were about to going down at the highest building. We were going right by. I’m like, wow, never seen this one before. Then I looked out the window a little bit, see where we’re going. All of a sudden, all I see was water and a bridge.

I’m like, never seen that one before. No. Those two things are starting to wake me up a little bit. I was like, okay, something’s going on that I wasn’t aware of. And then that’s when you hear the only words the captain said all day, this is your captain, Brace for Impact. And when you hear the word, Brace for Impact, you know something’s going on. That’s something you never heard on a plane, unless something’s going to happen pretty quickly. So that’s the one who really got my attention. I think everybody else’s attention, likewise.

And so, you went above and beyond that day because you were the last passenger, 15 A, is very close to the emergency exit over wing. Tell me a little bit about what happened because you did some pretty heroic things on that day.

Well, thank you. I think everybody really stepped up. I tell people, one of the things I grew up playing sports and athletics. When in sports, going into a game, we always had a game plan. We always had a game plan. My thought was, once I knew what was going on, once he said those words, If I survive this, which Dylan didn’t know whether we’re going to survive it or not, but if I do, I better have a game plan to get the heck out of here. My game plan was aisle up out. I’ve known with all my training; I was head of security for Tony Robbins for over 10 years. He was one of my mentors. I had proximity. I learned all these things. Now I’m putting him into practice. Because one of the things he teaches about, you say it enough in your head, writing grains in your body. I ended up saying, aisle up out, up, aisle up, aisle up, aisle up, in my head. So, if that moment came, I was ready to execute. So now we crash land. And the captain says he was roughly 120, 125 miles an hour when we hit.

That’s how hard it hit it was. So, it was a jarring hit. And I went back to my seat and up in my seat. And then I came up and I opened my eyes. I saw a light at the window, so I knew I had a shot. But now you’re the real problem start. Now you got water coming in this plane, and it’s rushing into this plane. Where I was, it was about knee deep already. As soon as I looked down, it was knee deep. But now you got to go. Then the picture most people remember, Eric, is the people standing on the wings. You always say, how did that happen so quick? Well, one of the greatest lessons out of this, and I think part of being in, we talk about safety, is if you’re working in safety, you have to get resourceful. You have to be resourceful. I think that was one of the greatest lessons that came out of this. Because what happened was when I saw people walking down in the seats to get out of the plane, that gave me a new metaphor, a new lesson. It’s like, when you think you only have one way to get something done, aisle.

That was the only aisle. That That’s the only thing I thought about was aisle, right? Ail up out, right? Right. All of a sudden, you see other people doing other things to get resourceful very quickly. When you get resourceful, other options and choices come into play. Sure. So, it lessens the risk. But now, it wasn’t my game plan. My game plan was aisle up out. I got to the aisle. Okay, now I’ve executed point one. I got to the aisle, now I’m going up and out. But when that happened, something changed that moment for me because when I hit the aisle, all of a sudden in the back of my head, I heard my mom start talking to me. My mom passed away in 1997, but there was something she would tell me when I was a kid. It just all of a sudden, I heard her tell me, it’s like, if you do the right thing, God will take care of you. The right thing for me was you take care of other people first. Sure. Because at that moment, I knew I was okay. I was alive, but is anybody in the back of the plane alive?

Instead of going up and out, I climbed over the seats to go towards the back of the plane. I got to the back of the plane. Things were moving pretty well. People were moving because water back there is about chest level deep.

Yeah, because it was slipping.

See, the angle you don’t see, right? You don’t see is the plane is actually like this. It’s not like this. It’s like this. The impact of the plane is underwater. I got behind the last person. And the impact, if you saw the plane impacted the Hudson River, it was a backside. It hit first, which took the brunt of the impact, which meant the bins had broken open, which means the luggage is floating in the water. You got to remember, look at the timing of this. This is approximately 3: 27 to 3: 30 in the afternoon on January 15th, when all this is breaking loose. Late afternoon, New York winters. It means it’s getting dark. So now you got darkness, water, loggie’s, a whole bunch of things. So, I got behind the last person, and I was just making my way out. And I looked at the right, I got to 10: 00 F. Like, Man, I am out of here. There’s light, there’s a door, I am out. And then I started to get out the door like everybody else, and I looked up, and there was no room on that wing for me.

And there was no room on the boat. So that’s why I was in the plane for seven minutes, way steep in 36-degree water. But people are already being rescued just a couple of minutes. That’s what part All part of the miracle. The first response was we’re there. But now you got to manage… There’s a lot of things you got to manage now. You got to manage your mind. You got to manage other people’s minds and states. Because what happened at that point, a couple of minutes later, I looked out the wing and something caught my eye. It was a lady, and she just wasn’t moving. She wasn’t moving. Now, all the training that I’ve had when I was in a security, primarily with Tony, is when you have somebody in that state of mind where they’re just shocked, they don’t know what to do, they don’t do anything, you got to do something to break them out of that shock because now you got to move quick. I mean, you got people stay on a wing, it’s 36 degrees water, it’s 11 degrees air temperature, and you’re not moving, and that means everybody behind you is not moving.

All I did was yell at her. I had to break her, so I started yelling at her. I got her attention. Somebody grabbed her arm and pulled her on the lifeboat. All of a sudden, you see people walking down a wing. When we talk about safety and risk and things like that. When you find somebody that state of mind, especially when you’re in a situation where you have to do something. I mean, in business, it happens all the time. I’ve been in a means where people just get stalled because they don’t know what to do. The way the world is moving right now, Eric, is so fast. You have to be able to make a decision and go. If you’re not doing that, you’d be able to help somebody be able to do that quickly because it could not only cost time and money, potentially somebody’s health. That’s what was going on the right side of the plane because another part of the equation that doesn’t get talked about, we talked about the back story. The flight attendant who was supposed to manage that door at 10F got injured. She had a piece of metal slicing her leg.

She went up at the first class exit on the left. The right side of the plane had to be managed by people like me who had zero training.

Sure.

I had no training on how to manage a board during a plane crash, which gives you another point of reference that you don’t have to know everything about something. But if you can lead people and you can influence people and you can give direction, and most importantly, give certainty in uncertain times. That’s when you become a leader, and that’s when you become a leader. That’s how you manage the risk of a situation, as you have somebody who can step up and give certainty to people in uncertain times. I think that’s what I was able to do. All I was able to give certainty because I had to manage a door, which I had no experience in doing that. I didn’t go to school for that, right. But it doesn’t matter. One of the lessons learned, Eric, is in a leadership, when you get in a situation, step up and lead. Just step up and lead. Give certainty to people because the person with the most certainty in uncertain times is the leader. It doesn’t have to be the CEO. It could be the janitor. If that janitor is giving you certainty to be able to do what you need to do, you’re going to look to that person.

Now, you’re the leader, and they’re looking for you to manage the risk of what’s going on.

Right. So, let’s capture some of those key lessons from the event. You just started by saying, Leader to step up. Tell me about some of the big takeaway lessons you took from this event.

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Yeah, there’s so many lessons. I mean, there’s communication lessons that I talk about being able to communicate effectively. I’ll even use the example of the captain. All he said is, this is your captain, Brice for Impact. He didn’t go along with big, long soliloquy about, this is what’s going on, and there’s a river. He said exactly what he had to do in the most succinct way. As a leader, in stepping up, you have to be able to communicate effectively, succinctly to people. That’s one of the big lessons that came out of this. One of the big lessons that came out. It was later on. One of the opportunities when I get to speak around the world, I got invited to speak at NASA’s Safety Day at Kate Fina.

Now, to me, that was one of the biggest experiences of my life because I grew up in the ’60s, where space was everything, man. I mean, these guys are going to the moon. They shut down class to watch these space launches. I mean, it was amazing, right? Sure. Nasa asked me to be their keynote speaker on Safety Day. There’s a negotiation that goes on, and normally that negotiation is money. For me, it wasn’t money. I want to be an astronaut for a day. They gave me a little bit of money to basically cover my expenses. But the agreement was, after I get done speaking, Dave’s going to be an astronaut for the afternoon.

Sounds fun.

I did three talks for all the three shifts. I did all the three talks. Now it’s time for Dave to be an astronaut. The first stop we Eric, was in a room at Cape Canaveral. It’s a sacred room with the remains of the space shuttle Columbia. That’s the space shuttle that went down with the teacher, Mr. McAuliffe. There’s one person who basically owns that room. The first stop was to really understand, look at that situation, how does something like this happen? Well, we get there, and the gentleman who owns that room wanted to talk to me about my experience, and I wanted to talk to him about this experience. But he said something to me, which was obvious I’m eye-opening, and I tell this story every time I speak because it’s so powerful about safety. He looked at me and said, Listen, he said, If Apollo 1 doesn’t happen, we don’t go to the moon. Now, I don’t know if anybody here remembers Apollo 1. I’m old enough to remember it. It’s when the three astronauts burned up on Apollo 1 in testing. At first, I was like, I don’t understand. What do you mean?

He goes, Listen, you got to remember, in the ’60s, everybody loved us. We had more money we knew what to do with. We could do anything. We got casual. That casual is led to casualty. Instead, if this happens out in outer space, we don’t go to the moon. They stop it. We don’t go to the moon. When he said casuals leads to casualties, Eric, I’m like, this is brilliant. When it comes to managing risk and safety, this is it right here. You cannot be casual with anything because if you go back, I don’t know if anybody remembers Columbia, but it was all about the O-ring. The O-ring. They forgot to check on the O-ring, which caused the explosion, which caused everything else. It’s not casual again. In your business and in life, let’s think if you can’t get casual with your money because what happens? You go broke. You can get casual with the way your health is. You get overweight or even worse. If you get casual with your clients. What happens? They go someplace else. Part of safety and risk is You got to be able to not be casual with anything.

That was one of the greatest lessons. When you’re looking at the things you’re doing in your world, ask yourself, are you being casual? Is it I’m just going through the motions? Or is this, Do I have intention? Do I have an intention My attention is when you lower the risk and hopefully improve the safety. Another thing I learned, and it happened on the miracle on the Hudson, and it’s happened ever since, this process saved lives. What I mean by that is you better have a process, a game plan, everything. That day, the captain, the first officer, went through their checklist. Now, the first officer gets all the credit because he had to take that book of thousands of pages and get it down to, okay, what do we have to do? The must, right? Yeah. The must. The first officer, I give Jeff Skiles all the credit for that. The captain gets all the credit for getting it down. Skiles gets your credit for doing the process.

Sure.

And the flight crew had a process. Likewise, he all manned their doors except the one we were at because she got injured. We’re still in business in life. If you have a process how to manage your money, you have a process for your relationship with your wife or spouse. You better have a game plan. So, when I go into something, like I mentioned, I’m going to have to speak here three times in the next five days, I’ve got a game plan for every one of these. I’ve got a little book over here, and I still have a book where I write down my game plan. Because I understand process saves lives. Process saves lives. That’s absolutely the one. I’ll leave you with one of the last ones. I had the opportunity years ago to escort a guy by the name of General Norman Swartz off when I was in it. I don’t know if you’ve ever been around a four-star general. It’s very intimidating. I’m sure. This dude won a war in 69 days, man. The guy has actually done it, right? A lot of people talk the big game. He’s actually done the big game, right?

I have 40 minutes of transporting him, and I had an opportunity to… You don’t talk to a four-star gentleman, but I ask him a couple of questions. One of the questions he told me, it was the difference between being a manager and a leader. It was something I remember this day. This is going back to 2000 when this happened, right? For 2011, 2000. He said, Listen, remember this, 5 plus 15 is greater than 15 plus 5. I’m sitting there going, I don’t get it. He goes, Listen. He goes; he’s not talking military terms. I’m going to talk military terms. He said, as a general, I’ve got my colonels, right? The way I do my thing, if I’m a general or a leader, I’m going to give the mission to somebody and give them five. They can ask me anything they want, but then they’ve got to figure out how the game plan is. He says, But the difference between a general lieutenant, lieutenant will say, Give people. Here’s the mission. This is how I want it done. This is when it’s got to be done, where it’s got to be done. They’ll give people five minutes to ask them questions.

They’ll tell them how to do it because that’s the difference. If you’re a leader, you give If you give them the mission. They can always come to you, right? Right. But if you give them the mission, they are responsible and accountable to get it done, right? They’ll put it in their game on how it’s done, get it done. Where a manager or a lieutenant will tell you exactly everything how they want it done because it’s all about them.

Sure.

So, 5 plus 15 is greater than 15 plus 5. One of the greatest lessons I learned about you from General Normal Score golf that day. There’s a lot of lessons like this that I’ve learned. It helped me not only grow, but also, like I talk about a lot, you heard me say this, manage my risk. Right. Manage risk. And as a leader, I want to help people manage risk, right?

And so, I love your example, the casual leads to casualty. I remember when we first spoke, you also talked about high velocity decision making and some of the elements around pattern recognition. Tell me a little bit more because I thought those were also quite interesting.

Yeah. And that’s one of the things I talk about. Being able to make decisions quickly Because like we talked about, the world’s moving so quick right now. The competitive advantage we all have is speed is your competitive advantage. You got to be able to make a decision. See, most people can’t make a decision because they don’t want it. They’re afraid to make the wrong decision. Then if you see these leaders are out there now, these innovators, these entrepreneurs, I mean, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, they made decisions and just went with them. Because what they understand is this, and I truly believe this, you only got to be 80% of it right. And if you find out, you go out and drive something that doesn’t work, you try it again, you try it again. Where then you look at a company like a Boeing who’s very slow and pedantic because they don’t want to make a mistake, and they never get anything done. They never get anything done. So, remember, be able to make a decision. I think it was one of the greatest lessons my mom and dad taught me. When we were kids, I have not been as good as my kids as my mom and dad were with me.  

Because my mom and dad always made all their kids make a decision, and you had consequences. So, you learn how to make a decision and then bounce back. So, speed is your competitive advantage. And the next thing we talk about, we talk about is pattern recognition, because the skillset that leaders are looking for now, it was really two skillsets we’re looking for. Creativity, right? They want somebody who’s creative. Give me something different. Give me something unique. And as Tony told me, what he looks for in a leader is the ability to anticipate. See where this before it’s going. And that’s why he actually chose me as a head of security, because he saw me in action, how I can anticipate. How do you anticipate? There’s a lot of ways to learn how to anticipate. But the one thing, very easy one is doing it through modalities, visually, auditory, kinaesthetically. If you can understand how somebody communicates either visually, through auditory or through kinaesthetically, you can anticipate the next thing they’re going to actually do. I learned that trick because as you’re in security and you’re looking at people and watching patterns of people, and you can see if there are they listening or are they watching or are they really into themselves kinaesthetically, you can anticipate how they’re going to respond to things.

When I’m working with somebody, one of the first things I do is understand what modality you reside in so I can anticipate how I’m going to be able to communicate with you most effectively. The ability to anticipate, I think, is a key, and do that through pattern recognition.

Last but not least, you talked about how to manage risk. You also talk about when you speak to audiences, how you manage your mind. Tell me a little bit more on that.

Yeah, managing your mind, it all starts with that. That’s what happened that day on the Miracle in the Hudson. The people always say, were people screaming and losing? I’m like, No. The term I used that day with Katie Kedrick on CBS News was, it was controlled chaos, where things were happening really quick, but no one lost it. The way I learned, and I implemented that day, and I think the captain did the same thing, is through the managing one, three ways how you manage this, how you manage your mind. Through your physiology, how you conduct your body, through the words you say to yourself, and third, what you focus on. If you want to manage how to manage your mind, you do one or three of these things. The fastest way is way to move your body because that changes the way your whole body reacts. But when you’re on a plane going down a plane crash, you don’t get up and jump up and down and get your body going. So, I had to actually do it through the words I said to myself and the questions. I asked myself different questions to keep my mind.

Like I said, I’ll up out, I’ll up out. I had to ask myself to keep my mind in asking different things. Now, the captain, on the other hand, he said this publicly, so it’s public knowledge. He had to focus. I’ve heard him say this, and I even ask him this question once. It’s like, were you praying when you were going to the night? 140, 54 other people praying for me. He had to focus. All There’s three ways to manage your mind. Through your physiology, the words you say to yourself, your internal dialog, as they would say, and/or what you focus on. You can change your state of how you go about things immediately doing one of those three things. That’s what happened that day on the plane, and that’s how leaders do it. They immediately be able to go use whatever technique they’re going to use. You might see a batterer going up to the batterer plane. All they’re doing is using physiology to get themselves in the state they’re hit, right? Sure. Or in football, where they’re banging each other on the shoulder pads, right? So, everybody’s got a pattern, all right? You got a pattern.

Is your physiology? Is yours the way you talk to yourself, internal dialog, or is it how you focus. If you understand how, you can turn yourself on and put yourself in the right state, you go in that right state, you can accomplish anything. Because it comes down to one thing, Eric, and we’ll leave with this. If you have a strategy, you can do anything. See, what I try to do is help people understand strategies. That’s what I try to do through these things we talked about, pattern, regulation. If I can help somebody build a strategy, we can get your outcome. This is what I do. I coach people and I work with companies. All I need to know is what your outcome is, and I can show you how to get the strategy on how to do that because you’re not the first person to ever do it.

Right. Phenomenal story, great learnings and takeaways from the American Hudson, and also your Cape Canaveral story. I think very good, powerful lessons because I like your casual leads to casualty. I think that is very visible at NASA, but in many other organizations as well when you start getting too casual of things. You speak to a lot of different audiences. Tell me a little bit more about your speaking as well as how somebody could reach out to you.

Well, thank you. I have the opportunity. I’m very blessed to not only speak at many companies, but I speak at a lot of safety days, as you can talk about, I’ve done Exxon, BP Mobile, Novelis, PG&E out West Coast. And the reason why is because I can relate a situation where safety and risk management had to be maintained, but in a chaotic situation. So that’s something I do. I’m very honored this year, Eric. I’m actually producing my own event in Charlotte in November, where I’m really actually taking people to two days, teaching them all these things, going deep into this. Because what I talk about now is what I really focused on, because it happened the day after the miracle on the Hudson, is I figured the day after the miracle on the Hudson that I did not have freedom of time. My company owned my time. I didn’t have freedom of money. They were capping my money. I didn’t have freedom of mission because I was working for somebody else’s mission. Sure. And I didn’t have freedom of relationships because my boss asked me to go to Michigan now next week. He didn’t even care I went through a plane crash.

What? He didn’t care. So not that the company didn’t care, but he didn’t care. So, I knew I didn’t have those four freedoms. And I truly believe everyone who’s listening to this, and you and me, we all want those four things, freedom of time, money, relationships, and mission. So, this is what I do to help people. So, everything we’re talking about today, I’m very blessed to be able in November, November 13th and 14th, be able to… I’m reducing my first event to show people how to do this. Live in a person, and we’re actually going to do a fire walk, too. So, if you’re a little afraid to do this, we’re going to show you how to break through that fear by doing a fire walk. So that’s… You just go out to Dave Sanderson on LinkedIn, check it out. And we’d be honored for you to come with us in November because it’s going to be a heck of an event.

Excellent. So, Dave Sanderson on LinkedIn.

Thank you. Yeah, very easy.

Thank you so much for sharing your story. Thank you on that day for going above and beyond in terms of trying to make sure everybody got out safely on an event that started out as a normal day, as you said, and turned into something that had never been experienced before.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Thank you for listening to The Safety Guru on C-suite Radio. Leave a legacy. Distinguish yourself from the past. Grow your success. Capture the hearts and minds of your teams. Elevate your safety. Like every successful athlete, top leaders continuously invest in their safety leadership with an expert coach to boost safety performance. Begin your journey at execsafetycoach.com. Come back in two weeks for the next episode with your host, Eric Michrowski. This podcast is powered by Propulo Consulting.