Highest Duty

by Chesley B. Sullenberger

  It was a great kick to be my mom’s son in Denison. People tend to love their first-grade teachers, and my mother was especially kind and nurturing with kids. She was absolutely beloved in town. It’s not a stretch to say she was something of a minor local celebrity.

  My mother was a terrific pianist, too, and I just loved listening to her play Chopin. When I was in grade school, I’d always say to her, “Will you play more Chopin?” I’m not sure a lot of kids today, plugged into their iPods and cell phones, are calling out to their mothers for more Chopin. But my mother helped instill in me an appreciation of classical music. She was my favorite performer.

  I always like to say that my mother gave me three important things: a lifelong love of reading, learning, and music. These are three very special gifts.

  I also saw in my mother a commitment to service. She was a leader in a local chapter of the woman’s group PEO (Philanthropic Educational Organization). Founded in 1869 in Iowa, its mission was to promote educational opportunities for women. In my mother’s day, there were plenty of people who didn’t think much of the idea of women going to college, and PEO’s platform was somewhat controversial in some circles. And so my mom was very secretive about this PEO “sisterhood.” She wouldn’t tell me what they stood for, what they did, what happened at their meetings, or who attended. There was a desire by these women to be quiet about their work. Looking back, I salute them for the work they did to encourage young women to fulfill their potential, but I realize theirs was a form of feminism that hadn’t yet found its full-throated voice.

  My mother was an advocate for children, too. She believed that young kids could handle more responsibility than adults might imagine. She saw this in her first graders, but she felt it long before she was a teacher.

  From the time I was very young, she and my dad impressed upon me the importance of looking after my sister, who was just twenty-one months younger. My father had the traditional sense that men should take care of women. And so he anointed me a kind of “second dad.” But my mother just thought children can rise to the responsibilities they’re given.

  “When we’re not around, we’re counting on you,” my mom would tell me. My dad would say, “You’re in charge.”

  I wasn’t always the perfect older brother. When I was five and Mary was three, I once took her out to play in the gravel on Hanna Drive. Some of the stones were smaller than a pea, and I thought it would be fun to feed these tiny stones to my sister. My mom caught me and told me a five-year-old should know better than that. Maybe I did know better, but at that age, feeding gravel to your kid sister doesn’t necessarily seem like a bad way to pass the time.

  My sister now says that I was a pretty good big brother most of the time. She thinks that looking after her helped me develop the sense of responsibility that has carried me through life, and into my career as a pilot. A couple of times as a teen, she went out with guys who were too forward, or who weren’t completely respectful. I took it upon myself to go talk to them and set them straight. My sister feels that even when the two of us were arguing, I was protective and committed to keeping her safe.

  We weren’t a hugely demonstrative family when it came to showing affection. But we were there for one another, and we felt a sure sense of duty. We also had faith in one another. My mother knew my capabilities and encouraged me to have confidence in them. That’s why she was comfortable flying as my passenger when I was a teenager. She knew that I knew I could do it.

  My sister also was never afraid to fly with me. “Maybe it’s the invincibility of youth,” she now tells me, “and I just figured nothing could happen to me. But I think the main reason I had no fear is because I had an innate confidence in you. I knew you’d protect me.”

  I WAS very sure of myself and directed as a kid in the 1960s. I expected to serve in the military and then be a commercial pilot. Looking back, I think I was a very earnest, serious boy still struggling to figure out where I fit in the world.

  In one eighth-grade school essay, titled “The Way I Am,” I wrote: “I have good habits as well as bad ones. Being polite is one of my good points. My parents have taught me the manners I should know. I think my table manners are what they should be.

  “I have bad habits, too. I am not very patient sometimes with other people. I would like to do everything exactly right, and I would like others to do the same. I should realize that everyone is not perfect.

  “I know many people who have better personalities than I do, but I am doing the best I can.”

  My teacher wrote at the end of the essay: “You are doing fine.” That’s the way things went in those days. Teachers and parents didn’t spend a lot of time stroking kids, telling them they were special. Back then, “you are doing fine” was what passed for a compliment.

  I see my adult self in that essay. I remain regimented, demanding of myself and others—a perfectionist—though I think that has made me a better pilot.

  In another essay, celebrating my family, I wrote about my sister “of whom I am proud, despite her behavior at times.” I wrote of how fortunate I felt to be my mother’s son: “She cares for me day and night.” As for my father: “He guides me and teaches me and makes me wiser and more able to profit from my mistakes.”

  In the end, it didn’t matter that some of the floors in our house were slanted, or that my dad wasn’t paying attention to making money. I was supremely lucky to grow up on Hanna Drive, to know where every nail was, and to be nurtured and taught by two people who got so many things right.

  5. THE GIFT OF GIRLS

  I HAVE SEEN breathtaking sunrises and sunsets from the highest altitudes. I have seen the brightest stars and planets from what feels like a front-row seat. But there are things I haven’t seen—things that happened down on the ground while I was up in the air, earning a living and appreciating the view.

  Being away from home so much, I’ve missed milestones in my daughters’ lives. Many pilots can recite a litany of missed moments. Our children don’t wait for us before they take their first steps, say their first words, or need a visit from the tooth fairy. And it’s not just early-childhood rites of passage that we’re sorry to miss. We also miss nuanced changes in our children’s lives as they get older.

  Just before Christmas last year, I was off for a few days, and Lorrie and I took our daughters, Kate and Kelly, on a skiing vacation at Lake Tahoe. It was so nice to have this extended time with the girls when they weren’t rushing off to school and I wasn’t hours away from returning to the airport. It was just a perfect, relaxed vacation.

  Tahoe has always held a special place in our hearts. When we take Interstate 80 and cross over the Donner Summit, a part of us feels like we’ve come home. There’s the smell of pine in the air. The sky is clear and crisp. It’s just invigorating.

  We always try to stay at Northstar, the resort where both Kate and Kelly learned to ski when they were three years old. The resort resembles a European village with cobblestone walkways, and the family programs there are great. We have many wonderful family memories of visits there.

  On that particular trip, the first big snowstorm of the season had ended the day before, and the trees were still heavy with fresh snow. Decorated for the holidays, Northstar was covered with little twinkling white lights in the trees. It had a real magical, fairy-tale feel. The lights, the snow, the European village.

  Late one afternoon, we had just parked the car, and we decided to do some window-shopping before heading to dinner. It was very cold out, and we were all dressed in heavy jackets, gloves, and hats. We were walking into this valley of buildings, on this cobblestone walkway, when I noticed that the girls, twenty feet ahead of us, were arm in arm and skipping along the sidewalk, Kelly’s head on Kate’s shoulder. I was so happy to see this, to realize that they had come to a place, here in their early teens, where they could publicly show physical affection for each other. Siblings, of course, are sometimes at odds, and here they were expressing so effortlessly what the
y meant to each other.

  I pointed them out to Lorrie. “Take a look at that,” I said. I thought I was noticing something very special and new.

  Lorrie took my arm and smiled. “They’ve been doing that for five or six months now,” she said. “It’s just that you’ve missed it.”

  She said she had frequently seen them walking in the mall, holding hands. She said it was happening very easily and naturally, and she had loved watching it.

  I had never fully noticed this. Not until that afternoon. And I felt sadness at the realization of how much of their daily lives I had missed—their activities, their interactions. How could I have missed witnessing these acts of love between my daughters for all these months? Lorrie looked at me sympathetically and saw a sense of loss and remorse in my eyes.

  I put my hand over my heart. It’s a gesture I sometimes fall back on when the girls do something endearing, or that I feel grateful about. It’s a sign between me and Lorrie, a reminder of how lucky we feel about our girls.

  I know why it hit me so hard. This was almost like a dream come true. When the girls were very young, one wish Lorrie and I had for them was that they’d be close when they were older. Seeing them together like this was a wonderful realization; I felt like maybe we had done something right. But it was also a painful reminder to me that I am so often not present in my children’s lives.

  Lorrie says this was one of those “pilot moments”—a pilot comes home and notices a change in his home or family—and seeing my mixed emotions was emotional for her, too.

  I took Lorrie’s hand, and a few seconds later we made a right-hand turn and came upon a large plaza in the village. Laid out in front of us were twinkling lights. Holiday music was playing and people were ice-skating and roasting marshmallows. There was a large outdoor fire pit. I held tight to Lorrie’s hand and enjoyed all of it.

  When I go over that day in my mind, I think of the girls, but I also think about Lorrie. I know what a loving mother she is. Yes, I’ve tried my best to instill values in the girls, to help them find more reasons to care about each other. But Lorrie is on the front line, nurturing them, setting an example, being there for them day and night when I am far away. I marvel at how she has created such a wonderful home life for our family.

  I am fortunate to be her husband, and to have her as the mother of my children.

  JULY 6, 1936, is a red-letter day for me, and not just because it’s the day federal air traffic control began operation under the Bureau of Air Commerce.

  Yes, I’m taken with the history, but that day stands out for me on a more personal level. Fifty years later, on July 6, 1986, a fiftieth-anniversary celebration was held at the Oakland Air Route Traffic Control Center in Fremont, California. Organizers invited the public to tour the facility, to see where controllers direct the flow of air traffic over Northern California. Pacific Southwest Airlines agreed to send over a pilot and a flight attendant to talk to the guests, and I was asked to be the pilot on hand.

  I had flown a red-eye the night before, as a first officer, so I’d been up a lot of hours and was pretty beat. But I was more than happy to explain how pilots interact with air traffic control.

  The flight attendant who had been selected to join me got sick and couldn’t come. So PSA sent over a vivacious twenty-seven-year-old from its marketing department, a young woman I had never met before. She told me her name was Lorrie Henry, and I introduced myself.

  “Hi, I’m Sully Sullenberger.”

  I have an uncommon name that she must not have heard clearly, and she never asked me to repeat myself. So that entire day, she didn’t know how to address me. She just knew I had a lot of Ss and Ls in my name.

  Lorrie will tell you it wasn’t love at first sight. Despite my pilot’s uniform, I looked tired, and she noticed my eyes were bloodshot and I wasn’t freshly shaved. And she kept thinking: What’s this guy’s name again?

  At the time, Lorrie had sworn off dating. She’d had a few relationships she considered unhealthy, and had told herself she was taking a break from men. I was thirty-five years old, had been in a short, childless marriage, and I wasn’t exactly looking for long-term love either. But I was taken with Lorrie. She was attractive—tall and elegant, with a great smile—and she seemed smart, too. She was very engaging with all the passersby. Pretty quickly after meeting her, I knew I wanted to ask her out.

  For about four hours, we stood next to each other greeting the public beside a large model of a PSA aircraft, the BAe-146. A lot of people who came by wanted to share tales of their most memorable PSA flights.

  Lorrie wasn’t at all flirtatious toward me, and I also remained professional toward her. But I was waiting for my moment. As the event wound down, I said to her, “Why don’t we go get a drink?”

  “There’s a commissary down the hall,” she told me. “If you’re looking for a vending machine, you can find one there.”

  She wasn’t getting it, but I wasn’t giving up just yet. “I meant a cocktail,” I said. “In a bar.”

  She looked at me, this weary pilot with a lot of Ss and Ls in his name and a confusing opening line, and I suppose a part of her took pity on me. She agreed to accompany me to a nearby Bennigan’s. We had that drink, talked for a bit, and as she’d later admit, there wasn’t any wild attraction on her part. She assumed she’d never see me again. But I was interested. I asked for her phone number and she gave me her PSA business card, which had only the 800 number on it for the airline’s marketing department.

  I tried to be clever. “You must be in great demand,” I said, “if you have your own eight-hundred number.”

  She resisted rolling her eyes at me and just smiled, and then she gave me her local phone number. I gave her my card and she finally saw my name spelled out. We made a date for a couple of days later.

  By the time Lorrie got home, however, she had decided she wasn’t ready to date anyone, and in any case, she wasn’t really up for dating me. She called me and left a message on my answering machine that she had to work the night of our date.

  Listening to her message, I clearly sensed her lack of interest, and I figured that was that. But days later, Lorrie told a close friend that she had decided not to go out with me. Her friend told her, “No man is going to find you if you’re sitting home on the couch.”

  Lorrie argued that the couch was just fine for her. She wasn’t looking for a man, anyway. Still, her friend’s words stayed with her, and a week later, she was surprised to find herself calling me.

  When we spoke she admitted that she had been less than truthful when she canceled on me, and that she was nervous making the call. She said she’d like to accept a date with me if I was still interested. Of course, I was.

  We lived fifty-five miles apart, but we ended up seeing each other for dinner three Friday nights in a row. After the second dinner, I walked her to her car, leaned toward her, and kissed her. Lorrie thought I was being forward. The way she tells the story now, she was “taken aback a little bit.” But I kissed her for a reason. I wanted her to know that I wanted to kiss her, and that I found her attractive. I’m glad I kissed her. I’d do it again. (In fact, I have.)

  That kiss was a turning point, and she began warming up to me, too. For more than a year, we went back and forth between her home in Pleasant Hill and mine in Belmont. Eventually it just felt right to move in together. In early 1988, we settled into my place.

  I’ll never forget coming home to Lorrie for the first time after being away on a four-day trip. The house was glowing. She had music on, the food on the stove smelled wonderful, and the house was warm and inviting. “If I had known it would be like this,” I told her, “I’d have insisted we move in together sooner.”

  Marriage was the obvious next step, and on the morning of our wedding, June 17, 1989, I wrote Lorrie a letter: “I can’t wait to marry you. I want you and need you and love you with all my heart.”

  I meant every word of that, but it’s hard for a groom on his wedding da
y to fully understand all the challenges of marriage. Lorrie and I would have to learn to face a lot of obstacles together. There were adventures ahead that we never could have predicted.

  LORRIE PROVIDES a lot of the color in our lives. She’s intuitive, emotional, creative, more at ease with people, and more outgoing. In certain ways, she’s more innately optimistic than I am. It can take a lot to get me to smile, but you’ll often find Lorrie walking around with a smile on her face for no particular reason. Before Flight 1549 made me recognizable, we’d go to parties and everyone would remember Lorrie. As for me, couples would drive home saying to each other, “I think he said he was an airline pilot.”

  I’m analytical, methodical, more of a scientist. I am able to fix things. I’m optimistic if I’ve reviewed the information and decided that I can make something work. Otherwise, I’m pretty much a realist. Together, Lorrie and I like to say, we become one whole person. So in a lot of respects, we’re a good fit.

  Of course, our differences also get in the way. “When you’re the emotional one, you want your spouse to emote more,” Lorrie says. I do try, but I’m not always good at it. She wants to have detailed discussions about our relationship and our family dynamics. I’m more specific. What are the issues? What steps can I take to correct a problem?

  I’ve asked Lorrie: “If things are going OK, why do we need to talk about them so much?”

  I can feel close to Lorrie by touching her hand or giving her a hug. I’m nonverbal. She says it takes more effort than that to have a real relationship—and that means conversation.

  I try. But sometimes, by the end of the day, you can feel you’ve said everything you’ve wanted to say. I’ve had to learn that it’s important to save something for Lorrie—an anecdote, something I’ve read, something funny that happened on a trip. Lorrie has discovered that I become a better talker when she gets me out of the house and into the fresh air. When we take a hike or walk together, she says, it’s easier to engage me in conversation.