Lawyer survives Hudson River flight, loses job

Bill Dedman Investigative reporter • Profile • E-mail

In seat 24B as US Airways Flight 1549 fell silently toward the Hudson River, attorney Frank Scudere did not know that his name was on the list of lawyers that his firm planned to lay off the next morning.

In a one-in-a-million event, Scudere and his fellow passengers survived the plane's river ditching on Jan. 15, and he walked away with nothing worse than wet clothes. But he could not escape an everyday event that has claimed millions of other victims: He lost his job and found himself questioning his self worth.

Now he's a 48-year-old unemployed attorney. Like the Biblical Job, who lost and gained everything, Scudere searches for an elusive meaning in suffering and redemption. He's grateful, a bit angry and reflective. "I don't feel sorry for myself," he said. "It just shows the randomness of life, and the inevitability of loss. You can lose, and yet you can still be preserved. I lost my job, and yet I have my life."

Here's how he describes his trials of 2009:

‘I had the American dream’
On Wednesday, Jan. 14, Francis T. Scudere (pronounced skuh-DAIR) spent the evening with his father, Carmine, at Winthrop-University Hospital on Long Island. That day he found out his father's kidney disease had spread, requiring the amputation of a leg, but it seemed that his father would be well enough to go home soon.

On Thursday afternoon, Scudere was returning home to the Charlotte, N.C., area, in a middle seat near the back of the plane. He was a weekly commuter between work in New York City and home with his wife and two young daughters in Fort Mill, S.C.

"I had the American dream. My wife stayed home. Two great kids. Nice house."

Just out of LaGuardia Airport, the jet struck a flock of Canada geese and lost power in both engines.

"I looked at the gentleman next to me, and neither of us said a word. Everyone was quiet. We were making a turn. I saw skyscrapers. Water. Then 'Brace for impact' and I pretty much lost it."

After the jolt of a hard landing on the Hudson, he found himself waist-deep in cold water that was rushing into the plane. He made it out the side exit into the river, and then into a life raft. Uninjured but in a state of shock, he took the Long Island Rail Road to his mother's house.

A reprieve
The next morning, he was in his Times Square office at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, one of 2,000 attorneys employed at one of the largest corporate law firms in the world, when whispers went around about layoffs. An attorney he didn't know called him and asked him to come down to a conference room. Before he went, he told another senior attorney, "Oh, man, this can't be happening. I was on that plane yesterday." 

At the meeting, he was told he had been on the list to be laid off, but because he had been on the plane, he wouldn't be let go — at least "not today."

Video   What really happened Jan. 16: Less than five minutes into its ascent, US Airways Flight 1549's trouble began. Dateline's Dennis Murphy has the details. Dateline NBC

The next Tuesday, his father died at age 77.

On March 26, a little more than two months after the US Airways drama, he was called down to the HR office and informed that his position was eliminated.

"I was totally blindsided, because I had been told there would be no more layoffs," he said.

Still, he said, he has to thank Capt. Chesley B. Sullenberger III and his crew for giving him more time at the law firm.

"Sully saved my life, and he saved my job for two months," Scudere said. "It wasn't miraculous. It was skillful. He was an ultra-competent pilot."

He'd like to put to rest one aspect of the emergency landing, what he calls the fiction that a passenger opened the rear door, letting water into the plane.

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