Dave Sanderson
Leadership Speaker, Author, Miracle on the Hudson Survivor
Last passenger off US Airways Flight 1549, now teaching leaders that resilience is accumulated years before the day you need it.
About Dave
Dave Sanderson is an internationally recognized leadership speaker, bestselling author, and resilience expert. He is best known as the last passenger out of US Airways Flight 1549, the Miracle on the Hudson. Before that day he was a top sales executive at Oracle, and he spent years as Tony Robbins' Security Director. He has since spoken to more than 1,700 audiences worldwide, equipping entrepreneurs and executive leaders to make better decisions under pressure, build resilient teams, and turn disruption into competitive advantage.
Sanderson separates the story of Flight 1549 into two parts: the landing, which the pilot earned credit for, and the evacuation, which he calls a team effort. Water came in immediately. He stood waist deep in 36-degree water for seven minutes holding a lifeboat that was still tethered to the plane. During the descent he repeated three words to himself — aisle, up, out. He counts twelve moments in his life before the crash that gave him reference points to draw on, the idea behind his book Moments Matter. He left Oracle in 2013 after naming the four freedoms he was missing.
On the Franklin Planner Podcast, Sanderson sat down with co-host George Wright III for a conversation about surviving the Hudson landing and what it taught him about leading under pressure. He walked through the evacuation, the day he returned to Oracle and heard his manager ask about an upcoming trip instead of his survival, and the two and a half years it took to leave. He laid out his VCR framework — Vision, Capabilities, Reach — and closed with the handwritten 1929 notes his mentor Bill handed him in 1997, with one request: don't let this wisdom die with you.
Key ideas from Dave’s conversation
Resilience is built across a lifetime, not discovered in the crisis.
Sanderson says most people define resilience as bouncing back, and that is only part of it. He points to twelve specific moments in his life before the crash that gave him reference points to draw on that day. Document your own before you need them.
Repeating a plan enough times moves it from your head into your body.
During the descent, Sanderson repeated three words silently: aisle, up, out. When the plane hit the water he did not have to think, he acted. Build a short mental script for the situations you can anticipate, and rehearse it until it runs without you.
High-performing teams choose trust over competence when building people.
Sanderson has worked alongside Navy SEALs and says they select for trust first. Competence can be taught. Trust cannot. That ordering changes who you hire, who you promote, and how much second-guessing your team does when conditions get bad.
Ask who can help you get this done, not just how you will get it done.
The Capabilities piece of Sanderson's VCR framework replaces the solo-effort question with a network question. Vision holds steady even when strategy shifts, Capabilities brings in the right people, and Reach builds genuine access to those who matter to the mission.
The meaning you attach to an event determines your emotional response to it.
The same crash landed as devastation for some passengers on Flight 1549 and as a blessing for Sanderson. He credits reframing, learned in part through his work with Tony Robbins, along with the principle that proximity to high-level thinkers changes what you believe is possible.
