Highest Duty

by Chesley B. Sullenberger

  Airline service was a lot more civil and accommodating back when I started. On most major airlines, whether you were in first class or coach, you got a meal. Children flying for the first time were given wings and tours of the cockpit. Flight attendants would even ask passengers if they’d like a deck of playing cards. When was the last time you were offered playing cards on an airplane?

  From the start, I was very happy to be an airline pilot. True, I had honed skills I no longer needed. I wasn’t going to have to refuel my aircraft in-flight from another aircraft. I wouldn’t be dropping any bombs or practicing aerial combat. I wouldn’t have to fly at a hundred feet above the ground at 540 knots. But I appreciated being given the opportunity to join such a prestigious profession—one that only a few people get to join, but that many would have liked to.

  It’s interesting. After you fly for an airline for a while, you realize that it doesn’t really matter what your background is. You could have been the ace of your base, or even a former astronaut. You could have been a war hero. Your fellow pilots might respect you for that, but there’s no real impact on your career. What matters most is your seniority at that particular airline. How many years have passed since you were hired? The answer to that decides your schedule, your pay, your choice of destinations, your ability to decline flying red-eyes, everything.

  Over the course of my career, working harder or being more diligent didn’t lead to faster promotions. I spent three and a half years as a flight engineer, followed by four and a half as a first officer. After my eighth year at PSA, I checked out as a captain. My advancement came fairly quickly, but it wasn’t because my competence was being recognized. It was because my airline was growing at the time, enough people senior to me were retiring, and enough new airplanes were joining the fleet, necessitating more captains. I was OK with how my promotion was decided.

  I also understood the history behind our profession’s dependence on a seniority system. It started in the 1930s, as a way to avoid the favoritism, cronyism, and nepotism rampant in the early days. It was about safety as much as fairness. It insulated us from office politics and threats to hinder our careers if we didn’t “play the game.” A layman might think such a seniority system would lead to mediocrity. Nothing could be further from the truth. Pilots are a pretty proud bunch and they find it rewarding when they have the respect of their peers. The system works.

  What the seniority system does not do is afford lateral mobility. We are married to our individual airlines for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, until death do us part (or until we get our last retirement check).

  WHEN YOU share a cockpit with another pilot, even before you leave the gate, you notice things. You can tell how organized a pilot is, his temperament, his interests. What ways has he found to handle the distressing and the distracting issues of pay cuts and lost pensions, which all of us now face? How does he interact with the flight attendants, especially if his ex-wife used to be one?

  After you fly with him for a while, you build on your impressions. Everyone I fly with is competent and capable. That’s basic. But is the guy in the next seat someone I can learn something from? Does he have such skill that he makes everything look easy (when we all know it’s not)?

  Pilots I have known who make it look the most effortless have something that goes beyond being competent and beyond being someone who can be trusted. Such pilots seem able to find a well-reasoned solution to most every problem. They see flying as an intellectual challenge and embrace every hour in the sky as another learning opportunity. I’ve tried to be that kind of pilot. I’ve derived great satisfaction from becoming good at something that’s difficult to do well.

  Before I go to work, I build a mental model of my day’s flying. I begin by creating that “situational awareness” so often stressed when I was in the Air Force. I want to know, before I even arrive at the airport, what the weather is like between where I am and where I’m going, especially if I’m flying across the continent.

  Passengers usually don’t realize the effort pilots put into a flight. For instance, I try pretty hard to avoid turbulence. I will often call the company dispatcher to see if changing the route of flight might yield smoother air. During the flight, I’ll ask air traffic controllers for help in determining if changing altitudes will offer a better ride, or I’ll ask them to solicit reports from nearby flights. I want to give my passengers and crew the best ride possible. Turbulence is often unpredictable and sometimes cannot be avoided, but I like the intellectual challenge of finding smooth air.

  I’VE CARRIED about one million passengers so far in my twenty-nine years as a professional airline pilot, and until Flight 1549, not many of them would ever remember me. Passengers may say hello if they meet me as they board, but just as often, they never see my face. After we land safely, they go on with their lives, and I go on with mine.

  It’s likely that hundreds of thousands of people watched coverage of the Flight 1549 incident, not realizing that they had once placed themselves in my hands for a couple of hours. It’s all part of how our society works: We briefly entrust our safety and the safety of our families to strangers, and then never see them again.

  I’ll often stand at the door to say good-bye to passengers after a flight. I like interacting with them, but you can understand that after all my years of flying, a lot of the passing faces can become a blur. Some passengers stand out—the cranky ones, the first-time fliers who seem so enthralled, the recognizable faces in first class.

  One night in the late 1990s, I was flying an MD-80 from New Orleans to New York and the comedienne Ellen DeGeneres was in first class. Shortly after she took her seat in 2D and before we left the gate, my first officer left the cockpit, walked into the front of the cabin, and gave her an enthusiastic greeting. “You are one funny-ass lady!” he told her.

  I watched this scene, laughing. I wouldn’t have complimented her quite that way, and I’m sure in some HR manual, we’re told that we’re not supposed to address any passenger as “a funny-ass lady.” But Ellen smiled and seemed to take the comment in the right spirit.

  We headed back into the cockpit and then flew Ellen, and any other funny-ass passengers on the plane that day, up to New York.

  FLIGHTS ARE almost always routine, but every time we push back from the gate, we must be prepared for the unexpected. About a decade ago, I was flying from Philadelphia to West Palm Beach, Florida. At 9 P.M., we were at thirty-five thousand feet, just about fifty miles south of Norfolk, Virginia, when I got word from a flight attendant that a fifty-seven-year-old woman was not feeling well.

  From the cockpit, we began the process of getting a radio-to-phone patch to contact a medical advisory service, while flight attendant Linda Lory attended to the woman. Linda got a bit of medical history from the woman’s brother and another relative traveling with her, and passed the information up to us in the cockpit. The relatives said the woman had a history of emphysema but hadn’t been to a doctor in years.

  A few more minutes passed, and as soon as we established communications with the medical service, we got word that the woman was unconscious. Because the aisle was narrow, laying her flat on the floor of the plane was difficult. Passengers nearby were watching it all unfold.

  “You have the aircraft,” I told the first officer, Rick Pinar. I called air traffic control, declared a passenger medical emergency, and received immediate clearance to a lower altitude and a left turn direct to Norfolk.

  “Make an emergency descent and divert to Norfolk,” I said to Rick.

  What are a pilot’s obligations to a sick passenger? We aren’t doctors. So how do we determine when a passenger is so ill that an emergency landing is required, diverting the flight to the nearest airport that has appropriate medical facilities, disrupting other passengers’ travel plans?

  We have access to advice from contract medical services and they and the airline dispatcher help a captain make an informed decision about whether to divert and to what
airport. When making such a decision, we have a legal obligation, but more than that, we have a moral obligation to protect life. It’s one of the responsibilities we signed up for. It’s part of our commitment to safety. If in my judgment I have to land a plane to save a life, I do so.

  On this particular flight, we flew as fast toward Norfolk as the airplane could go. There are federal aviation regulations about maximum speeds below ten thousand feet. For jets, it’s 250 knots, or about 288 miles an hour. In an attempt to save the woman’s life, we went above that speed—over 300 knots. We also made a rapid descent.

  Once we touched down, we used heavy braking to shorten our landing roll, allowing us to turn off the runway more quickly. We taxied as fast as was reasonable to the gate.

  It was all a bit disconcerting to the passengers. They could see the woman on the floor of the aisle, making no movements. They could feel the heavy braking. They knew we were taxiing faster than usual toward the gate.

  Linda, the flight attendant, didn’t strap herself into her seat for landing. She was hunched over the woman, trying to save her through mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. It was an heroic attempt on her part.

  When we got to the gate, paramedics were waiting for us right on the jetway. They hustled onto the plane as all the passengers watched. They brought a straight-back board, put it underneath the woman, and tried to lift her up. They had trouble turning her on an angle to get her out the door and onto the jetway. It took several minutes to get her off the plane.

  I stood on the jetway with the paramedics and the ill woman’s relatives. They told me they were on their way to Florida for a funeral of another family member, so an already tragic moment for them was suddenly compounded.

  The paramedics worked on the woman on the floor of the jetway for a number of minutes, using drugs, resuscitation equipment, and anything else at their disposal. But it wasn’t long before one of them looked up at me and said, “She didn’t make it.” It’s unclear when she died exactly. It may have been while we were taxiing to the gate.

  It was a difficult moment, standing there with the woman’s family. I tried to say a few consoling words. They weren’t weeping; they just looked sad and stricken. My heart went out to them, but I couldn’t stay out there for long because I needed to get back on the plane and say something to the passengers.

  The passengers had been understanding and cooperative, and had experienced this incident in full view. I felt they deserved to know the truth. And so I got on the public address system.

  “The woman who was ill on our flight was under the care of paramedics out on the jetway,” I said, “but attempts to revive her were not successful.”

  There was quiet in the cabin. It was a pretty sobering moment for all of us. Some of the other passengers had watched the woman come onto the plane just like everyone else, put her belongings in the overhead, and settle into her seat. Now, just over an hour after leaving Philadelphia, she was dead.

  Because Linda had used emergency medical equipment to help the woman while in flight, we had to wait forty-five minutes for the maintenance staff in Norfolk to replace our medical kit. We also needed to refuel the jet and get a new flight plan. The passengers sat quietly in their seats while we did that.

  The woman’s family removed their belongings from the plane—they’d be staying with her body in Norfolk—but their checked baggage, and the woman’s bags, would have to continue on to Florida with us. There was no time to find their specific bags and remove them from the cargo hold. They’d have to be retagged in Florida and sent back to the family.

  About five minutes before we were set to take off again, I called the four flight attendants into the cockpit to join me and Rick, the first officer. As the captain, I was the person ultimately responsible for the decisions made that night. I knew it had been stressful for all of us. I wasn’t sure whether the flight attendants felt they could have done more to try to save the woman’s life.

  First, I thanked them for their efforts. “You did your best. But as tragic as this outcome was, it would be even more tragic if a stressful situation allowed us to be distracted from our duties going forward.”

  The flight attendants looked a bit ashen and weary. “Rick and I here in the cockpit, we’re going to do what we were trained to do,” I said. “We’ll do our checklist. We’ll get the plane into the air. We’ll make it safely down to West Palm. I know you have all of your procedures to do, and I know you’ll do them as you always have. We’ll all need to just fall back on our procedures, and get back into the routine, safe operation that we work so hard to maintain.”

  The flight attendants headed back into the cabin. We pulled away from the gate with three fewer passengers than had arrived with us.

  The flight from Norfolk to West Palm was routine. We arrived just an hour and fifteen minutes late, and I stood outside the cockpit door as all the passengers deplaned.

  “Thank you for your patience this evening,” I said, nodding at them as they passed. They acknowledged my words with slight smiles or nods of their own. And all of us went to bed that night thinking of the family we had left behind in Norfolk.

  EARLY ONE Tuesday morning in September 2001, I was driving from my home in Danville to the airport in San Francisco. I had to catch a plane to Pittsburgh, where I was then based, to fly an MD-80 on to Charlotte. I was listening to the radio, an all-news station, and I heard that a plane had just crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York.

  How could someone be that off course? I thought. It must have been pretty foggy there. As I listened to the radio report, I was reminded of the infamous 1945 crash of a B-25 into the Empire State Building, when an Army Air Forces bomber pilot lost his way on a foggy Saturday morning, killing himself and thirteen others. I figured this World Trade Center crash must have been a similar accident.

  I parked my car in the airport lot, walked into the terminal, and that’s when I heard that another airplane had hit the South Tower and a third plane had hit the Pentagon.

  By 6:30 A.M. Pacific time, every airplane in the skies above the United States had been ordered to land, and the FAA had banned takeoffs of all civilian aircraft. It was clear I wouldn’t be getting to Pittsburgh that day to fly my scheduled flight. (My particular flight was one of some thirty-five thousand canceled that day nationwide.)

  I spent a little time in the US Airways operations office in San Francisco, and there were two crews there. Unlike me, they didn’t live in Northern California. They were stranded, and no one knew when planes might fly again. “You’d better get hotel rooms right now,” I suggested, “before they’re all gone.”

  I called pilot scheduling and told them that I couldn’t make it to Pittsburgh, obviously, and then I went home and watched CNN. As an American and as a pilot, I found the coverage very hard to take. It was so upsetting and disturbing that, at one point, I had to stop watching. I turned off the TV and went into the backyard to compose myself. It was a beautiful day in California, and it was remarkably quiet outdoors. Because all aircraft were grounded, you couldn’t hear any airplanes flying anywhere. My ears are always pretty attuned to the sounds of jets, and this saddened me.

  On Wednesday and most of Thursday, only the military was flying. I felt anxious about the terrorism and the national ground stop instituted by the FAA, and was eager to return to flying. Like so many pilots, I also felt a renewed sense of patriotism. I wanted to fly to prove our system could function, that we could take passengers safely to where they needed to go, and that the terrorists would not succeed.

  On Thursday night, I was able to get on a red-eye to Pittsburgh. On Friday morning, I was set to fly again.

  It was pretty chaotic in the crew room underneath the terminal at Pittsburgh International Airport. Not all crew members were able to make it in, and so a captain would say, “I have a first officer but need a flight attendant,” and a flight attendant would volunteer to take the trip with him.

  Eventually, I was assi
gned to fly from Pittsburgh to Indianapolis. Not many Americans were yet ready to return to the skies, so we took just seven people to Indianapolis and eight people back from there to Pittsburgh.

  There were so few of them, they barely outnumbered the crew. We put them all in first class. Some of the passengers said that they were nervous, and I tried to reassure them with small talk when they boarded.

  It was just three days after the attacks, and our planes were still vulnerable to terrorism. But I wanted passengers to know that even though the cockpit doors hadn’t yet been strengthened, there was a strengthened resolve among us in the cockpit, and the flight attendants in the cabin. The passengers had strengthened their resolve, too.

  “We’re determined not to let anything like this happen again,” I told a few passengers.

  The pilots murdered on September 11, 2001, were the very first victims. And so it was natural for pilots to discuss how we might have responded that day. The reality was that all our training until then had been aimed at preventing or managing a potential highjacking, not a kamikaze-style suicide mission.

  For airline employees, life is different now. The airline industry suffered a financial collapse after the attacks, and a great many people at the bottom of the seniority list were laid off. So many of them were good pilots, and they are missed.

  The attacks of September 11 don’t come into my head as often as they once did. That’s true for a lot of Americans. Time has passed. New tragedies have followed. I’ve piloted hundreds of flights since that day.

  But for someone who works for an airline, the reminders are still here, offering reasons for reflection. Sometimes I’ll be at Boston Logan International Airport, passing by the gates from which two of the flights departed on September 11—American Airlines Flight 11 from Gate 32 in Terminal B, and United Airlines Flight 175 from Gate 19 in Terminal C.