Heroic “Sully” soars above factual flaws

By Tom Siebert

As a young newspaper reporter, I covered the National Transportation Safety Board hearings into the worst single-airliner disaster in U.S. history, when 273 passengers died in the crash of American Airlines Flight 191 near Chicago’s O’Hare Airport in May 1979. So I know that the highly professional NTSB were not the villains who were portrayed in “Sully,” the otherwise truthful movie about Capt. Chesley Sullenberger’s heroic emergency landing on New York’s Hudson River that saved “155 souls on board” US Airways Flight 1459 in January 2009. As always, director Clint Eastwood films in you-are-there realism. And Tom Hanks, who plays Sully, should win the Best Actor award for every movie that he stars in.