Highest Duty

by Chesley B. Sullenberger

  On February 1, 1991, there was a runway collision at Los Angeles International Airport between USAir Flight 1493 and SkyWest Airlines Flight 5569. It happened in part because the local air traffic controller cleared the USAir jet, a 737–3B7, to land while the SkyWest commuter plane, a Fairchild Metro III, was holding in position to take off on the same runway. All ten people on the SkyWest plane died, and twenty-two passengers were killed on the 737. I was given the task of interviewing some of the sixty-seven survivors from the 737.

  The NTSB gave us a long questionnaire, with questions such as: What announcements do you recall hearing? Did the emergency exit lights come on? Which exit did you use to escape? Did you help anyone else get out? Did anyone help you get out?

  All of these questions were designed to help the airline industry learn from these events and improve the next outcome.

  It was not especially pleasant work investigating accidents, but I was grateful for the opportunities to do so. When I talked to survivors, I listened carefully, trying to understand, and I filed away the details, in case I’d ever need to draw on them.

  4. “MEASURE TWICE, CUT ONCE”

  I GREW UP in a home where each of us had our own hammer.

  When I think about the work ethic and the values that carried me through life, and through seven million miles as a pilot, I think at times about the hammer my dad gave me as a boy.

  He had married my mom in 1948, bought a piece of farmland from her parents, and borrowed $3,000 to build a house on it. It was a very small ranch house, just one bedroom. But over the years that followed, my dad devoted himself to enlarging the homestead again and again. He built a series of additions with the help of three not-always-willing assistants: my mother, my sister, and me.

  My parents were born in Denison, Texas, and my mom only lived in two homes her entire life, and they were within one mile of each other. The first was her childhood home, built around 1918 by my grandfather, Russell Hanna, who used materials he found right there on the property. He cleared the land of a great number of large stones, cut them with the help of a hired hand, and used them to build the house and other farm structures. From that home, my mom at age twenty-one moved just down the road to the little place she built with my dad. She’d live there, on Hanna Drive, for the rest of her life.

  Certainly, my maternal grandfather could have named that gravel road First Avenue or Main Street or whatever. But the road led to his property, and so it bore his name. That’s where I grew up, 11100 Hanna Drive, an ever-expanding house next to Lake Texoma, eleven miles outside of Denison.

  My dad’s father, who died before I was born, owned a planing mill—a final processing plant for lumber—and my paternal grandmother continued to be involved in the office operations after he was gone. It was right there in Denison, and when I was a young boy, I’d visit and play happily in the huge mounds of sawdust. The place was thick with the sounds of giant woodworking machinery and the wonderful smell of lumber. There was also a cool device on my grandmother’s desk, a coil-springed gadget shaped like a human hand and made of stamped-out sheet metal. My grandmother stored envelopes and paperwork between the hand’s fingers. Having grown up in that mill, my dad had a love and knowledge of woodworking, and of making things with his hands. By adulthood, he was a very able handyman.

  That helps explain why, every few years when I was a kid, my dad would announce that it was time to enlarge the house. He and my mom would decide we needed a new bedroom or a larger living room. “Let’s get to work,” my dad would say, and we’d pull out the tools. He was a dentist, but he had taken drafting courses in high school. He had a big plywood drafting table he had made himself, and he’d sit there for hours with his T square and a pencil, drawing up plans. He was always reading Popular Mechanics and Popular Science, clipping articles about the latest home-building techniques.

  The goal was to do everything ourselves, to learn what we didn’t know and then have at it. My dad taught himself to do the carpentry, the electrical installations, even the roofing—and then he taught us. When we were doing the plumbing, my dad and I would heat the copper joints together, holding the solder, letting it melt from the tip of a soft wire. When we did electrical work, we knew we had to get it right: If we didn’t, we risked electrocuting ourselves or burning down the house. None of this was easy, but it was satisfying on a lot of levels, and we were learning how to learn.

  My father liked to use craftsmen’s adages, such as “Measure twice, cut once.” The first time I heard that particular phrase was after I had cut a piece of wood to go in the framing of one of our hallway walls. I cut it without paying close enough attention and it turned out to be too short.

  “Go get another two-by-four,” my dad told me, “and this time, measure more precisely. Then start over and measure everything again. Make sure you get a consistent answer. Then cut the board a little wide of the mark, just to give yourself an option. You can always make a board shorter. You can’t make it longer.”

  I did as I was told, very carefully, and the board fit right where it belonged in the wall. My dad smiled at me. “Measure twice,” he said. “Cut once. Remember that.”

  THE FOUR hammers in the house, one for each of us, got a huge workout. In the morning, before it got too hot, my dad would send us up on the roof to pound nails into the shingles. He never considered hiring a contractor or a roofing crew. For one thing, we didn’t have extra money for that. And besides, as my dad saw it, this was a great family activity.

  My sister, Mary, smiles at her memory of my dad driving us into nearby Sherman, where he had once come upon a certain house owned by a stranger. He loved that house. So when we were in grade school, he’d bring the whole family to sit in front of it while he sketched on a drawing pad, studying the parts of the structure that he liked. One day he’d sketch the roofline. A week later he’d come back and sketch the front steps. He wanted our house to look like that house, and he found his way by sketching the particulars.

  My sister likes to say that watching my father expand our house showed her that anything is possible. “You can learn anything you want to learn,” she says, “if you sit and figure things out logically, if you study something similar, if you keep working at it. You can start with a blank piece of paper and end up with a house.”

  This idea that “anything is possible” has been a bit of a mantra in my adult life, especially in my marriage. Lorrie reintroduced me to those words. And at the same time, my father’s example remains there in the back of my mind, showing me the way.

  That’s not to say I always fully embraced my father’s sense of the possibilities. On Saturdays, when my sister and I would have loved to sleep in, he’d wake us up at 7 A.M. so we could get an early start on whatever the latest expansion was. We’d work until lunchtime and then he’d suggest that we take a nap so we’d have the energy to get back to work later in the afternoon.

  Even if we couldn’t fall asleep, we pretended, so he wouldn’t send us back to work right away. “Just keep your eyes closed,” Mary would whisper to me. “He’ll think we’re still sleeping.”

  Though we dragged our feet at times, I did feel I had a stake in all of the construction work. I wanted to do a good job so all the additions would look right. Even in grade school and junior high, I felt committed to getting the masonry right, because I’d have to look at it every day. Also, I didn’t want my friends to come over and notice that I lived in a place built by a bunch of amateurs.

  The house was a source of pride, but I also felt a bit of embarrassment. Sometimes I’d brood, wishing we lived in a professionally built house like everyone else. I told myself that when I grew up, I’d live in a house where all the floors were completely level, where all the joints were square. To save money, my father also kept the heat low in the winter. I vowed to live in a house where it was never cold.

  And yet, despite my mostly unvoiced complaints, I knew that working on the house was a special experience. Each time the place grew,
I felt a sense of accomplishment. The house expansion was a tangible activity, not theoretical or intellectual. We saw the progress we made. We’d put in long days, especially in the summertime, but by nightfall, we could see that things were different from when we started in the morning. I liked that.

  I’ve always liked seeing results. One chore I never minded doing as a boy was mowing the grass on our half-acre lot. When I was halfway through mowing, I knew how much I had left to go. When I was finished, I could tell I’d made a difference. The lawn looked neater. Flying for an airline offers equal satisfaction: We’re halfway there. We’ve landed. We’ve completed our job.

  MY GRANDPARENTS were all born between 1885 and 1893. All four attended college, which was especially remarkable for my grandmothers, given the times they lived in. My grandparents raised both of my parents with the belief that schooling was paramount, but that a lot also could be learned outside of formal education.

  My father was born in 1917 and kept a journal when he was a teen that he later allowed me to read. The Depression became vivid to me as I paged through all of his journal entries. Money was always an issue, and he had a series of overlapping jobs in high school. He’d balance his schoolwork with two paper routes and duties as a movie-theater usher.

  My grandfather would sometimes run out of money at the end of the month, and he’d borrow money from my father. In his journal, my father chronicled his pluckiness, describing how he’d find ways to cope in hard times. When he had a little bit of money and could eat at the local diner, he’d order a bowl of chili and fill it with saltines and ketchup to make it a more substantial meal. It kept him from going hungry.

  Reading my dad’s diary, I got to better understand his worldview. It was a reminder of how much easier things were for my generation. I understood why my dad kept the heat turned down, and his kids hammering away at the house. Those with the Depression-era mentality never could quite shake it.

  My dad ended up going to Baylor College of Dentistry in Dallas, graduated in June 1941, and decided to join the Navy. This was six months before Pearl Harbor was attacked.

  He had always liked airplanes, and hoped to become a naval aviator. He even passed the rigorous physical exam. But then, at the last minute, he decided that since he had been trained in dentistry, perhaps he’d serve his country best as a dentist. It was a fateful decision. He entered the service with friends who did go on to become Navy pilots. They were killed in the fierce fighting early in the war. My father always assumed that if he had become an aviator, he would have been shot down with them.

  He was stationed as a dental surgeon first in San Diego and then in Hawaii. He never was in combat, but plenty of men who saw the worst of it took their seats in his dental chair. Between 1941 and 1945, hundreds of those who’d been in battles told him their stories as they passed through Hawaii.

  He took his work as a military dentist very seriously, and he learned things from the men who came through his dental office, especially the officers. When I was a boy, he would talk about the great obligations of a commander to look after every aspect of everyone’s welfare who served under him. My dad made it clear to me how hard it would be for a commander to live with himself if, through lack of foresight or an error in judgment, he got someone hurt or killed.

  When I was a boy, he impressed upon me that a commander’s job is full of challenges, and his responsibilities are almost a sacred duty. I kept my father’s words with me during my own military career, and after that, when I became an airline pilot, with hundreds of passengers in my care.

  My dad left the service as a full commander, and after World War II, he opened a dental practice in Denison. He loved talking to patients, and listening to what they had to say when his hands weren’t in their mouths. But he wasn’t much of a businessman. He had no ambition to run a large practice with a half-dozen associates, or to slave away for more than thirty-five or forty hours a week. Money didn’t motivate him, and he never made too much or managed it particularly well. He didn’t need a lot of material things, and figured we didn’t either. Paying for my flying lessons was an indulgence, but he thought my time learning to fly with Mr. Cook gave me a sense of purpose and a path into the future. He was happy to find the money for that.

  Unlike a lot of men of his generation, my dad thought of being with his family as his priority; work was secondary. I wouldn’t say he was without ambition—after all, he built his own house—but he was content making less money if that meant he could spend more time with us.

  It was almost as if he wasn’t in dentistry to earn a living. A lot of the nuns from the local Catholic school were his patients. Sometimes they had the money to pay him, sometimes they didn’t. He had other patients like that. Some people didn’t get charged. Some didn’t get charged much.

  My father could also be a bit whimsical and impulsive. Or perhaps, as I’d later suspect, he was just looking for ways to brighten days when he was weighed down by darker moods. In any case, some mornings he’d wake up and say to my mother, “I don’t feel like working today. Let’s go to Dallas.”

  My mom would get on the phone and cancel all his patient appointments, then she’d call our school to say we wouldn’t be coming in. My father figured my sister and I were smart kids; we could make up any missed schoolwork. And besides, he felt we could always learn something down in Dallas.

  It was exciting. The whole family would drive the seventy-five miles listening to Top 40 songs on KLIF-AM on the car radio. When we got to Dallas, we’d see a movie and have an inexpensive dinner together.

  We always stayed at the same little roadside one-story motel, a typical fifties-era row of rooms right off the freeway: the Como Motel. We’d swim in the small swimming pool in the middle of the parking lot. And we always ate at a Mexican restaurant called El Chico. Every meal, no matter what you ordered, came with rice and beans. I’d always get the cheese enchiladas, which I loved because of the diced onions inside.

  El Chico had one large, open dining room with a high ceiling, and on the west wall was a huge mural of a Mayan—or maybe it was an Incan—outdoor scene. The focal point of the mural was a man with a native cloth around his waist and a bare upper torso. He was filling a jug with water, and I’d sit there eating my enchiladas and studying that guy in the mural. Every time we ate there, he was still filling that water jug.

  We went to the same movie theater, the Inwood Theater, which had great air-conditioning at a time when it was a rarity in public places. That’s where I saw two James Bond movies, Dr. No in 1962 when I was eleven, and Goldfinger in 1964 when I was thirteen.

  Dallas was pretty cosmopolitan for us. It wasn’t that large a city then, but it looked big to us, with its freeways and traffic and businesspeople walking around. John F. Kennedy was shot in 1963, and we may have driven by Dealey Plaza a few months after the assassination on the way somewhere. But we weren’t gawkers. We didn’t make a special trip to see it.

  These spontaneous little getaways to Dallas were a continual reminder to me about my dad’s appreciation of the distinctions between work and family. Family came first. Ahead of work and ahead of school. That’s how my dad lived long before “work-life balance” became a popular catchphrase.

  I have great memories of my family life closer to home, too. We had a small boat, and on weekends we’d take it out on Lake Texoma, which covered eighty-nine thousand acres. My mom was a terrific water-skier, and she could make it halfway across the lake, like the Energizer Bunny on skis.

  We’d also take the boat out to one of the sandy islands in the middle of the lake. We’d camp out for the night, sleep in a tent, wake up in the morning and cook breakfast, and then we’d just cruise around in the boat. My dad often let me take the wheel—to captain the ship for the afternoon. I’d get badly sunburned, but it was all worth it.

  One year, my dad bought a sailing magazine which had plans in it for a simple boat. He got out his woodworking tools, and we used the plans to build a dinghy out of
plywood, with a bamboo pole for a mast and a bedsheet for a sail. I taught myself how to sail in that boat. I feel like my dad and I did almost all the projects I could have hoped for. Using our hands to create things, we shared a lot of great hours together.

  People have asked if my dad is my hero. I never really thought of him in those terms. To me, he was just a great role model on a lot of fronts, from how he found his own ways to appreciate life, to the honorable way he conducted himself. He was always a perfect gentleman, a man who almost never raised his voice. I don’t recall ever hearing him say a disparaging word about anyone.

  Of course, looking back, there were sides of his personality that weren’t easy to understand at the time. My parents never wanted us to see them fighting, or even having a frank discussion. They would go into the bedroom, close the door, and later come out presenting a united front. They went to great lengths to shield us from any bickering. So I never saw the messy details of how a couple might find agreement. As a young adult, I ended up with an unrealistic expectation that marriages were free of conflict.

  There was something else about my father. He’d have days when he’d say he was in a “blue funk.” He didn’t fully explain himself, and outwardly, he seemed OK. But I now realize that he suffered from depression, probably for his entire life. In those days, when we thought of the word depression, we thought of the 1930s. The fact that being depressed could be a medical issue didn’t occur to a lot of people. And so my father never got help, and just tried to cope with that “funk” on his own.

  Sometimes that meant passing out the hammers and building an addition to the house. Sometimes it meant loading up the car and heading down to that roadside motel in Dallas. And sometimes it meant going alone into his room, where he’d deal with demons never discussed with the rest of us.

  MY MOTHER was ten years younger than my dad, and especially at first, they had a very traditional marriage. She left college at age twenty-one to marry him, and later regretted not graduating. When I was a teen, she went back to school, majoring in education, and went on to get her master’s degree. She taught kindergarten at first, and then spent most of her career as a first-grade teacher at Sam Houston Elementary School in Denison.