The date: Jan. 15, 2009. The place: The sky over New York City.

Both engines of US Airways Flight 1549 were dead due to a bird strike. One was on fire.

With the lives of 155 passengers and crew in the balance, the pilot’s choices were to gamble that the Airbus A320 would stay in the air long enough to reach a nearby airport, or put the plane down in the icy Hudson River and hope for rescue before it sank.

Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger chose the river. Commercial pilots aren’t trained to land planes in water, but Sullenberger did just that in what has become known as the "Miracle on the Hudson."

His quick thinking and superb flying skills made him a national hero.

"I had no time for any extraneous thoughts other than how to fly the airplane, where to go and what to do," Sullenberger said in a phone interview from his home in Danville, Calif. "It’s not possible in our flight simulators to practice a water landing. Believe it or not, the only training we’d ever gotten for a water landing was a theoretical classroom discussion, and so we had to very quickly synthetize a lifetime of training and experience, take what we did know, adapt it and apply it in a new way to very quickly solve this new problem that we’d never seen before."

The retired pilot will be in Hawaii this week — appropriately, at a place that honors courageous aviators — as the guest speaker at Saturday’s "Destinations & Dreams" fundraising dinner for Pacific Aviation Museum Pearl Harbor. The museum is celebrating its eighth anniversary.

"It’s a very historic site, and I’m glad to help them raise funds for restoration work and for their education programs," he said. "I think we need to remind people of our history and our culture, and I think we also need to inspire young people to continue to choose careers in aviation — or at least to appreciate aviation, even if they do something else with their lives."

The evening’s honoree is retired Navy Adm. Ronald J. Hays, the museum board’s chairman for 13 years, who was a leader in the campaign to restore the historic Ford Island hangars and control tower, assemble the aircraft collection and develop the facility into a major visitor and research destination.

Sullenberger, 63, chose aviation as his career at an early age. He built models of planes and aircraft carriers, and watched the military jets flying from an Air Force base near his home.

"I can literally remember being 5 and knowing I was going to fly airplanes," he said. "I learned to fly in high school at age 16 and got my private pilot’s certificate at 17, my commercial license at 18, and was a flight instructor in airplanes and gliders by the time I was 20. …

"It’s been a lifelong passion and I still love it. It’s still something that gives me satisfaction and helps to bring purpose and meaning to my life."

After graduating from the Air Force Academy, Sullenberger flew F-4 Phantom fighter jets during his five-year military stint. In 1980 he left the Air Force with the rank of captain and spent the next 30 years as a commercial pilot, retiring in 2010. He participated in aviation accident investigations and in 2007 founded Safety Reliability Methods Inc., a company that provides strategic and tactical guidance in airline safety, performance and reliability.

Sullenberger describes himself as "one of those lucky people" who always knew what he wanted to do and was able to do it.

Considering the events surrounding US Airways Flight 1549, it’s easy to thank luck for the "miracle" landing, but more likely the passengers owe their survival to Sullenberger’s cockpit skills, training and experience. The pilot insists on sharing the credit with his first officer, Jeff Skiles. Both men had racked up more than 20,000 hours of flight time before the incident.

"So even though we didn’t have time because of the time pressure and workload to have a conversation about what had just happened and what we needed to do, he was able to understand the developing situation as I did and intuitively on his own know what he should do to help," Sullenberger said.

The elapsed time from complete loss of power to the river landing was 3 minutes and 28 seconds.

Aside from providing a testament to the remarkable composure and courage of the two pilots, the episode underscored the limitations of technology in flight operations.

"Technology can only do what’s been foreseen and for which it’s been programmed, while humans have the ability to quickly adapt to something they’ve never seen before, as we did on that particular flight five years ago," Sullenberger said.

"How do we improve human performance in complicated systems that all require inherent risk? The fundamentals are the same: Leadership, core values and institutionalized best practices really pay great dividends. That’s what sets apart the highest performers from the rest."