"Captain Sullenberger, a big hero for me!" said a post in a WhatsApp group of pilots, referring to the character played by Tom Hanks in the biopic Sully.

"Amazing movie, must watch!" said a fellow pilot working for a private airline.

"Seen it twice," replied a third.

Pilots can't stop raving about Sully, the Clint Eastwood film based on the 2009 emergency landing of a commercial jet on the Hudson in New York that mirrors the life-and-death decisions many of them would have made inside a cockpit.

One of the pilots involved in the WhatsApp discussion on the film recounted how he had to land an aircraft in Port Blair on the day of the 2006 tsunami. Another said that watching Sully gave him the feeling of being seated inside a simulator.

Hanks plays the role of Chesley Sullenberger a.k.a Sully, who along with First Officer Jeffrey Skiles, was piloting a US Airways flight from LaGuardia Airport in New York to Charlotte Douglas International Airport in Charlotte on January 15, 2009, when something potentially disastrous happened.

Barely three minutes after take-off, both engines of the Airbus A320 got disabled after hitting a flock of geese. Sully decided to ditch the aircraft on the Hudson since there was no landing strip within safe distance. All 155 passengers and crew survived the emergency, but for hero Sully it was just the beginning of a personal and professional crisis.

"The film reminded me of the day of the tsunami," said Captain Sarvesh Gupta, who watched Sully at INOX Forum last Sunday.

Captain Gupta had landed a Boeing 737 flight from Calcutta with 160-odd passengers and crew in Port Blair just after the tsunami struck on the morning of December 26, 2004.

The aircraft was about 25 nautical miles, or 46km, from Port Blair when air traffic control told Gupta that there had been a tsunami, but the extent of the damage was still not known. The aircraft was cleared for landing.

"We were less than 4,000ft above the ground when I saw that the topography around the runway had changed. There was water everywhere," Captain Gupta recounted.

He knew something was amiss but did not abort landing since air traffic control had given no such instruction. It was only after landing the Boeing 737 safely that Captain Gupta realised what had happened.

Large cracks had appeared on the runway beyond 6,000ft, leaving the pilot worried about how he would take off for the return journey. "I needed to take off because the flight was full and everyone wanted to be back in Calcutta. I spoke to the director general of civil aviation and took his permission to do so," Captain Gupta said.

One of the crucial decisions was to avoid carrying additional fuel so that the aircraft would be lighter than it is on a normal flight.

"The only thing going through my mind while approaching the take-off point was that the wheels should be airborne before we reached the cracked area of the runway. I was continuously talking to my first officer so that if I committed any mistake, he could point it out," Captain Gupta said of those nerve-wracking moments before the Boeing 737 became airborne.

He isn't the only pilot reliving an emergency situation through Sully. Captain Urmila Yadav of Air India hasn't watched the film yet but can identify with what Captain Sullenberger went through. "Rarely a moment comes like the one Sully faced. But when it does, the most important thing is to keep your cool and take a decision," she said.

Captain Yadav had weathered such a challenge in June 2012, when she made a successful emergency landing in Guwahati after realising that the ATR aircraft had lost its nose wheel during take-off in Silchar.

The ATR aircraft with 48 passengers on board circled Guwahati for about an hour before Captain Yadav made a safe landing without the nose wheel. She had asked the crew to shift some items from the cockpit to the rear to reduce the load on the front portion of the aircraft.

Captain Yadav intends to catch a show of Sully at the first opportunity. "All my pilot friends are talking about the movie," she said.

A fellow pilot working for a private airline said the film was a reminder to all pilots about the importance of training and routine tests. "You train yourself for a situation that may never happen in your lifetime. But if it happens, you need to act as if you have been tackling this challenge daily," he said.

Have you seen Sully? Tell ttmetro@abpmail.com