Highest Duty

by Chesley B. Sullenberger

  THERE WAS one upperclassman, a year older than I was, who wasn’t vindictive about his hazing. But he knew exactly how to make his point.

  One day, we were getting ready to march to the noon meal. It was a warm morning and we were in short sleeves. I was standing at attention, and he came up to me, asking if I thought I’d done a good job polishing my black uniform shoes.

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “How confident are you?” he asked.

  “Sir, I am very confident,” I answered. (I wasn’t allowed to say: “I’m very confident.” I had to say “I am.” Freshmen were prohibited from using contractions.)

  This upperclassman decided to make this into a challenge. “Are you willing to match shines?” he asked. My shoes versus his.

  “Yes, sir.”

  He defined our rules of engagement: “If you are confident that you have a better shine than I do, and it turns out you are right, then I will make your bed tomorrow. If my shoes have a better shine, then you’ll make my bed as well as your own.”

  All of us, including the upperclassmen, had to make our own beds using hospital corners. We had to pull our sheets and blankets tight enough so they wouldn’t show any wrinkles. The test was to drop a quarter on the bed. If the quarter didn’t bounce, we’d have to pull off all the bedding and start again. It was no fun. So if this upperclassman made my bed the next day, it would be wonderful.

  He gave me permission to stop looking straight ahead, and to look down at my shoes and then at his. Our shoes seemed equally shiny. But I chose to be bold. “Sir, I win,” I told him.

  “Well, it’s pretty close,” he responded, “but we’re not finished yet. Let’s compare the soles of our shoes.”

  He stood on one foot, allowing me to see his instep, the arched middle section between the heel and the ball of the shoe. The leather on each of his insteps had been polished to a sheen. My insteps, of course, were not. He was like a good trial lawyer who never asks a question without knowing the answer. He had set me up.

  “Sir, you win,” I said. He saw my lips turn into the hint of a grin, and even though doolies weren’t allowed to smile while in formation, he cut me some slack by not calling me on it.

  There were plenty of other times I had to stifle my smile.

  While marching in basic training, we were required to take turns counting off in cadence: “Left, left… left, right, left…”

  Early on in my life, I noticed that accomplished people on TV, especially newscasters such as NBC veterans Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, enunciated perfectly and seemed to have no real accents. I tried to sound more like them, and less like some of the people in my town, who had thick Texas accents. So when it was my job to count off in cadence, I don’t think the other cadets could hear Texas in my voice.

  But there was one fellow doolie, Dave, who came from West Texas—and you knew it every time he opened his mouth. Whenever he led us, he would count off in cadence: “Lay-uff, lay-uff… lay-uff, raah-yut, lay-uff…”

  I’d chuckle inside, but my face remained expressionless as we marched around. “Lay-uff, lay-uff… lay-uff, raah-yut, lay-uff…”

  We were truly a melting pot at the academy, and sometimes it felt like the clichéd casting in a World War II movie. We had the guy with a Polish name from Chicago, the Texan, the Jewish kid from one of the boroughs in New York, a guy from Portland, Oregon.

  It’s funny, the things you remember.

  When my daughter Kate entered high school in the fall of 2007, Lorrie and I went to back-to-school night, and her math teacher looked familiar to me. As he spoke, it hit me: He was two years ahead of me at the Air Force Academy. He had been one of the upperclassmen asking me mealtime questions my freshman year. So after his presentation, I walked up to him and said: “Fast, neat, average, friendly, good, good.” He looked at my face and he had a flash of recognition, too. He knew exactly what I was saying.

  At the conclusion of every meal, freshmen at the end of each table had the additional duty of filling out Air Force Academy Form 0–96—the critique of the meal. It was another useless ritual. By tradition, we always filled out the form the same way. How was the service? “Fast.” What was the appearance of the waiter? “Neat.” How was the portion size? “Average.” What was the attitude of dining-room personnel? “Friendly.” How was the beverage? “Good.” And the meal? “Good.”

  Kate’s math teacher and I shook hands and smiled, two older men recalling the rhythmic, long-ago language of our youth.

  IN MAY of 1970, near the end of the freshman academic year, the hazing stopped, and we had what was called “The Recognition Ceremony,” formally acknowledging our new status as upperclassmen. That was the day we no longer had to address the older cadets as “sir.” We could eat in relative peace. Eventually, when it was my turn to quiz freshmen during meals, I asked questions about flying, as opposed to barking out demands for mindless memorization. I was more comfortable making it educational for the younger guys.

  Despite all the regimentation, there was also a sense that your superiors and professors tacitly condoned unauthorized schemes that showed spirit or initiative. Every year, tradition dictated that the freshman class had to assert itself in some way, to prove itself worthy by coming up with antics that equaled or surpassed the stunts tried by previous freshman classes.

  Our class seized on the idea of redecorating the outside of the planetarium, where cadets gathered to study astronomy. The large domed building was white like an igloo, but one day well after taps, my classmates sneaked out in the dark of night and covered the building in black plastic, sticking a number eight on the center of the dome. When the entire academy gathered for the march to breakfast, it looked like a huge eight ball. I wasn’t involved in the stunt, but I felt a nice charge that day. That and a few other stunts definitely helped our morale.

  In the summer before sophomore year, we all endured survival training. We were each sent into the woods for four days without food and water. This was called SERE training, which stood for “survival, evasion, resistance, and escape.” It was designed to teach us survival skills, how to avoid being taken as prisoners of war, and how to behave if captured.

  The upperclassmen dressed up like communist soldiers and came looking for us. The drama was a bit over-the-top, but it all felt like serious business. I struggled during those days, overwhelmed at times by lack of sleep and food. I was luckier than some of my classmates, because I managed to sneak into the upperclassmen’s encampment unnoticed and grab a loaf of bread and some jelly. Others went all those days without eating.

  By sophomore year, I realized how much all of these experiences had helped me mature. I had been very homesick in my first six months at the academy. But when I returned home for visits, my homesickness ended. Here I was, not yet out of my teens, but I had met people from all over the world. I had done hard things I didn’t know I could do. It was as if I had become a man, and my hometown seemed so much smaller to me than I had remembered.

  We hadn’t been allowed to fly an aircraft at the academy until the end of our doolie year, so when I got back to Mr. Cook’s grass strip on breaks, I was pretty rusty. I didn’t have enough flying time to really have the total mind-muscle connection that one has riding a bike. I had to get my bearings again.

  Starting in my sophomore year at the academy, I got an amazing amount of flying instruction and experience. I’d get a ride down to the airfield every chance I could.

  I also signed up to learn how to fly gliders. I loved flying the gliders because gliding is the purest form of flight. It’s almost birdlike. There’s no engine, it’s much quieter, and you’re operating at a slower speed, maybe sixty miles an hour. You feel every gust of wind, and so you’re aware of how light your airplane is, and how you are at the mercy of the elements.

  Gliding in Colorado, I learned that the way to stay aloft longer is to carefully use the environment to your advantage. The sun heats the surface of the earth unevenly, especially in su
mmer, and so some parts become warmer than others. The air above the warmer parts is heated and becomes less dense, so you have rising air over these areas of the earth. When you fly through a column of rising air, you can feel it lifting the airplane. If you enter a very tight turn to remain in that air, it’s like riding an elevator as long and as high as it will take you. It’s called “thermal lift,” and going from one thermal to another, you can end up soaring for hours.

  In the wintertime, you have “mountain wave lift.” The winds in the air are stronger in winter, and if the wind is crossing a mountain or ridgeline, it’s like water flowing over a rock. If you stay in the rising air downwind of the mountain, you can remain aloft for long periods.

  While I was at the academy, in addition to all the hours spent in gliders, I got my flight instructor certificate. I began to teach other cadets, including a dozen friends, how to fly both airplanes and gliders.

  Because I had so much experience, when I graduated from the academy in 1973, I was named “Outstanding Cadet in Airmanship.” It was an honor that came because I’d been tenacious in honing my skills through all those hours in the skies.

  THE AIR Force Academy gave me an education on many fronts—about human nature, about what it means to be a well-rounded person, and about working harder than I’d thought possible. On campus, the education we received was called “The Whole Man Concept,” because our superiors weren’t just teaching us about the military. They wanted us to have great strength of character, to be informed about all sorts of matters we might easily dismiss, and to find ways to make vital contributions to the world beyond the academy. We cadets often dismissed it as “The Manhole Concept,” but in our hearts we knew we were held to high standards and difficult tests that would serve us well.

  It seemed almost as if the goal was to prepare each cadet to be chief of staff for the Air Force. Only one of my classmates, Norton Schwartz, actually made it; he was appointed to the highest-ranking Air Force job in August 2008. But many of the rest of us did OK, too, in our own way, graduating into the world beyond the academy with a full set of skills and a high sense of duty.

  Fast, neat, average, friendly, good, good.

  7. LONG-TERM OPTIMIST, SHORT-TERM REALIST

  LIKE MY FATHER, I was a military officer who never saw combat. When each of us joined the service, we knew that we might find our lives threatened in war. We soberly accepted that commitment to duty, but neither of us had any visions of martial glory. My father felt honored to serve his country as a naval officer. I saw my years of peacetime Air Force service as a high calling, because every day of training and practice better prepared me to defend my country if called upon.

  After spending years readying for tasks they never had to carry out for real, many military men are left to wonder how they would have fared in combat. I understand that, yet I don’t feel incomplete because I never saw wartime service. The fighters that I flew were designed to destroy those who would do us harm. I’m glad that I never had to inflict grievous damage on someone else, or to have it inflicted on me.

  But I’ll never fully know how I would have performed under the pressures of battle. Yes, I faced certain risks on almost every flight I flew as a fighter pilot; it’s a dangerous job, even during training missions. Still, over the years, like many who serve in times of peace, I have asked myself questions: If ever faced with the ultimate challenge, a life-or-death moment in battle, would I have been able to measure up? Would I have been strong enough, brave enough, and smart enough to endure the demands of such a test? Would I be able to preserve the safety of those under my command?

  My sense is, I would have performed as I was trained. I don’t think I’d have panicked or made a grave mistake. But I have accepted the fact that I will never know for sure.

  I expected that my commercial airline career would follow a similar pattern. I would take off and land again and again without incident. Yes, airline pilots are trained for emergencies—we practice in flight simulators—and we know the risks, low as they are. The good news is that commercial aviation has made such great strides and is so reliable that it is now possible for an airline pilot to go his entire career without ever experiencing a failure of even a single engine. But one of the challenges of the airline piloting profession is to avoid complacency, to always be prepared for whatever may come while never knowing when or even if you’ll face an ultimate challenge.

  Because a commercial career can feel routine, I truly didn’t think I’d face a situation as dire as Flight 1549. On reflection, however, I realize this: Though I never saw battle, I spent years training hard, paying close attention, demanding a great deal of myself, and maintaining a constant readiness. I survived my own close calls and carefully observed the fatal mistakes made by other pilots. That preparation did not go to waste. At age fifty-seven, I was able to call upon these earlier lessons, and in doing so, answer the questions I’d had about myself.

  I GRADUATED from the Air Force Academy on June 6, 1973, and within a few weeks, I enrolled in the summer term at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, getting my master-of-science degree in industrial psychology (human factors). It’s a discipline focused on designing machines that take into account human abilities as well as human limitations. How do humans act and react? What can humans do and what can’t they do? How should machines be designed so people can use them more effectively?

  It was a cooperative master’s program designed to fast-track academy graduates, allowing us to get a graduate degree from a civilian school very quickly, without delaying entry into flight school, which was the next step for many Air Force officers. I had taken graduate-level courses my senior year at the academy, so once the credits were transferred to Purdue, it took me just six more months to get my master’s.

  At Purdue, I studied how machines and systems should be designed. How do engineers create cockpit configurations and instrument-panel layouts, taking into account where pilots might place their hands, or where eyes might focus, or what items might be a distraction? I believed learning these things could have applications for me down the road, and I was right. It was helpful to get an academic and scientific perspective on the underlying reasons for procedural requirements in flight. When you’re learning how to be a pilot, you’re often taught the correct procedures to follow, but not always why those procedures are important. In later years, as I focused on airline safety issues, I realized how much my formal education allowed me to view the world in ways that helped me set priorities, so I understood the why as well as the how.

  After my six months in Indiana, the Air Force sent me to Columbus, Mississippi, for a year of what is called UPT—Undergraduate Pilot Training. It was a mix of classroom instruction about flying, flight simulator training, and a total of two hundred hours in the air. At first I got to fly the Cessna T-37, which is a basic twin-engine, two-seat trainer aircraft used by the Air Force. It was twenty-nine feet long with a maximum speed of 425 miles per hour. Eventually, I graduated to the Northrop T-38 Talon, which was the world’s first supersonic jet trainer. It could reach a maximum speed of over 800 miles an hour, which is more than Mach 1.0.

  I’d come a long way from the days of slowly circling Mr. Cook’s field in his Aeronca 7DC propeller plane, barely topping a hundred miles an hour. Now I was being taught skills that would allow me to fly at high speeds in formation, my wings just feet away from the jets on either side of me. And I was sitting on an ejection seat, ready to bail out if my jet became unflyable.

  I was twenty-three years old then and my two instructors in the T-37 and then the T-38, both first lieutenants, were a few years older. They were from Massachusetts and Colorado, and they had something wonderful in common: They weren’t just teaching me because they were required to do so. “I want you to succeed,” they each told me, and they offered every bit of guidance they could give me.

  After Mississippi, the Air Force sent me to Holloman Air Force Base near Alamogordo, New Mexico, a base with a stori
ed history. During World War II, it had served as the training ground for men flying Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses and the Consolidated B-24 Liberator, which was the most common heavy bomber used by Allied forces.

  The B-24 was designed to have a long range, and more than eighteen thousand of them were manufactured quickly during the war. But flight crews found that the plane was too easily damaged in battle, and given a design that placed fuel tanks in the upper fuselage, it was too likely to catch on fire. The B-24s delivered their payloads—each plane could hold eight thousand pounds of bombs—but a lot of lives were sacrificed in order to do so. Many of those lost men passed through Holloman before me.

  Holloman was known for other historical achievements, too. On August 16, 1960, Captain Joseph Kittinger Jr. took an open balloon gondola to 102,800 feet to test the feasibility of high-altitude bailouts. He stepped out of the balloon over Holloman and fell for four minutes and thirty-six seconds, at a velocity of 614 miles an hour, the longest free fall a human being had ever endured. His right glove malfunctioned, and his hand swelled to twice its normal size, but he survived and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.

  Like Holloman, every base where I was stationed had a history that inspired me. It was almost as if you could feel the presence of heroes in the winds over the runways.

  I was at Holloman for “FLIT,” which stood for “fighter lead-in training.” We worked on basic air combat maneuvers, tactics, and flying formation in the T-38. I knew I wasn’t a true fighter pilot yet, but training at Holloman, I knew I was going to be. I had a lot to learn, but I had the confidence that I could do it.

  You couldn’t avoid the feeling that you were in elite company. There had been thirty-five men in my pilot training class in Mississippi. Many of them wanted to fly fighters. Just two of us were chosen to do it. So I took seriously that my superiors had faith in me, and I worked hard at Holloman to live up to their expectations.