Highest Duty

by Chesley B. Sullenberger

  Each of the other pilots responded.

  “Two, armament safety check complete.”

  “Three, armament safety check complete.”

  “Four, armament safety check complete.”

  This ensured that all arming switches were returned to the safe position before planes left the range.

  The No. 3 pilot was George Cella. At the time there was a popular TV commercial for Cella Lambrusco wine. The lovable character in the commercial, named Aldo Cella, was a short, pudgy Italian guy with a dark mustache. He wore a white suit and hat, and had women hanging all over him because of his brand of wine. So George’s tactical call sign was “Aldo.”

  Aldo said, “Better do a controllability check.”

  When I got to a higher altitude, about fifteen thousand feet, I slowed down the jet to make sure it would remain controllable at a slower speed when the time came for me to attempt a landing. Loren, my WSO, turned to the appropriate troubleshooting page, E-11, in our emergency checklist and we verified we could control the plane.

  Aldo flew his jet very close to mine. He and his WSO inspected the exterior of my aircraft, looking for any obvious damage, fluid leaks, or other anomalies. “You look OK,” Aldo said as he chased me in his F-4.

  I contacted Las Vegas Approach Control and advised the civilian controller of my emergency status and of my need to return for landing at Nellis. The controller put certain constraints on how I might return, and how long I could take to line up. He wanted a tighter turn to my final approach.

  “Unable,” I told him. That’s the standard response when a pilot can’t do what a controller is asking him.

  I told him I needed a five-mile final approach to make sure I could be stabilized for landing. I was glad I had insisted on that, because as I was descending, a gust of wind caused a wing to dip. Aldo and his backseater assumed I was losing control of the F-4. They expected to see Loren and me flying like cannonballs out of our plane in our ejection seats. But I moved the control stick full right, and was able to raise the left wing that had dipped. For the moment, we held on.

  After that gust of wind, I was intensely focused on keeping the wings exactly level, and on carefully maintaining both our vertical and horizontal path to the runway. I tried to get exactly in line with the runway’s centerline.

  Aldo followed me down, ready to let me know the instant I deviated from the proper path or entered an attitude from which I couldn’t recover. I felt like I was still in control, but I was wary, prepared for the possibility that my aircraft might betray me and I’d have to abandon it.

  We made it over the safety area leading up to the runway threshold, and within a few seconds, we were on the runway itself, our drag chute deployed.

  We had made it safely to the ground.

  I braked to a stop, then slowly taxied back to where the other fighters were parked. Loren and I stepped off the ladder, and stood there for a moment. We were both holding our helmets and oxygen masks in our left hands, but our right hands were free. Loren reached out to shake my hand, and said, from his heart but with a big grin, “I thank you, my mother thanks you, my brother thanks you, my sister thanks you…”

  Loren and I had worked together as a team, with help from Aldo and his WSO. We had maintained control of the aircraft and solved each problem so we could land safely.

  Had I died that day, other pilots would have grieved for me. Fellow pilots would have been assigned the duty of investigating the accident. They would have learned the cause of my crash. I’m glad I saved them from having to look at a photograph of my scalp.

  EACH MAN we lost had his own regrettable story, and so many of the particular details remain with me.

  At Nellis, there was Brad Logan, my “wingman” (which meant he flew the aircraft beside me, following my lead). There would be four planes in formation, and Brad was in the number two plane. We flew together more than forty times. He was a very good pilot.

  I was a captain, and he was a first lieutenant, a few years younger than I was. He was an unpretentious, unassuming, jovial guy who was always smiling. Big, solid, and friendly, he looked like Dan Blocker, the actor who played Hoss Cartwright on Bonanza. Naturally, Brad’s tactical call sign was “Hoss.”

  After Nellis, he was flying out of an air base in Spain. One day, on a training mission, his plane was in formation descending through the clouds. I heard there was a miscalculation or miscommunication between air traffic control and the leader of his flight. Maintaining his assigned position in the formation, through no fault of his own, Brad’s plane crashed into the side of a mountain obscured by clouds. The other planes in the formation were high enough to fly over the mountain, but Brad and his backseater were killed.

  He had a wife and a young child, and as I recall, they received just $10,000 or $20,000 from his government life insurance policy. That’s how it was for pilots’ families after their accidental deaths; the support they received was very modest. But we signed up knowing this. We were aware that some of us wouldn’t make it because not all training exercises could go flawlessly. There was always the chance that surprises such as low clouds and an unexpected mountain could be our undoing.

  Those who survived accidents often found ways to acknowledge to the rest of us that they had cheated an unkind fate. They had a bit of an aura about them.

  There was a terrific pilot named Mark Postai who was stationed with me in England in 1976. He was a very smart, skinny guy in his mid-twenties, with dark hair and an olive complexion. He had majored in aeronautical engineering at the University of Kansas.

  On August 14, 1976, Mark took off from runway 6 at RAF Lakenheath, heading to the northeast, and there was a thick forest off the end of the runway. He had a flight control malfunction that made the airplane unflyable, but he and his backseater were able to eject successfully before the plane crashed into the forest and exploded in a fireball. They survived, uninjured.

  When Mark made it back to the base, someone told him: “You know that forest belongs to the Queen of England.”

  He replied, with a smile, “Please tell the Queen I’m sorry I burned down half of her forest.”

  Mark lived in the officers’ quarters assigned to bachelors, and a week or so after the accident, he invited us into his room for a party. “I want you guys to see something,” he told us.

  Air Force personnel had searched the woods and found the ejection seat that had saved his life. In appreciation, Mark had put it on display in the corner of the room. “Go ahead, sit in it,” he said. We all had drinks in our hands—there was a nurse from the base in the room with us also, I recall—and it just seemed like a very appropriate thing to do, to plant ourselves in that seat and feel the magic. Maybe it offered us reassurance that an ejection seat might save our lives someday also.

  Mark told us how it felt to eject, how his heart was pounding. We all knew the science behind ejection seats, of course. A sequence of events must happen to get you out of the jet. Once you pull the ejection handle, the canopy flies off. Then there’s a ballistic charge, which is similar to a cannon shell that catapults you out of the airplane. And once you get a certain distance from the aircraft, a rocket motor sustains you and keeps you moving with a slightly more gentle acceleration. After the rocket finishes firing, the parachute deploys itself. The seat falls away, and you parachute down to the ground.

  That’s if all goes well, as it did for Mark.

  The night of his party, he proudly showed us the letter he had received from Martin-Baker Aircraft Company Ltd., which billed itself as “a producer of ejection and crashworthy seats.” Evidently, they sent one of these letters to every pilot who had used one of their seats and lived. In the letter, they told Mark: “You were the 4,132nd person to be saved by a Martin-Baker ejector seat.” (The British say “ejector” instead of “ejection.”)

  Like me, Mark’s next assignment back in the States was at Nellis, flying the F-4. Because of his skill as a pilot, and his engineering training, he was
asked to be in a special “test and evaluation” squadron. The group operated in great secrecy. I figured he was flying stealth fighters.

  Mark ended up marrying a young and very attractive woman named Linda. His life was coming together. And then one day, we got word that he had died in an accident. None of us knew what kind of plane he had been flying, but we were told that his death resulted from, of all things, an attempted ejection that had failed.

  Only recently, more than two decades later, did I learn through the aviation magazine Air & Space what had happened to Mark. The article offered a look at how the United States worked to get inside knowledge about enemy planes during the cold war, especially Soviet MiGs. The story briefly touched on an American pilot who died ejecting from a MiG-23 in 1982. It was Mark. Turned out, the plane had come into American hands somehow. Mark’s job was to train U.S. fighter pilots to be able to fight effectively against Soviet aircraft.

  The article mentioned a book, Red Eagles: America’s Secret MiGs, which I tracked down. The book explained that the single engine in the MiG that Mark was flying caught on fire. He began an attempt at an engine-out landing at his desert base but had to eject. The Soviet fighters had ejection seats with notoriously bad reputations. I assume Mark knew this when he pulled the ejection handle and hoped for the best.

  Very few pilots ever have to eject once in their lives. My long-ago friend Mark ejected twice. The second time, of course, there was no congratulatory letter waiting for him from the company that made the ejection seat.

  A couple of years after Mark died, I found myself at a social event where Linda, his young widow, happened to be. I told her that I thought her husband was a terrific guy and a gifted pilot, and that I had always enjoyed his company. I told her how sorry I was. And then I was quiet. There wasn’t much more I could say.

  I guess I felt like something of a survivor by 1980, as my Air Force career was ending. No, I had never been in combat. But unsettling things happened just often enough to get my attention. I knew what was at stake.

  There were a dozen different ways on a dozen different days that I could have died during my military years. I survived in part because I was a diligent pilot with good judgment, but also because circumstances were with me. I made it to the other side with a great respect for the sacrifices of those who didn’t. In my mind, I can see them—young, eager faces that are with me still.

  8. THIS IS THE CAPTAIN SPEAKING

  MILITARY UNITS FROM all over the world came to Nellis to use the endless miles of open Nevada desert to practice maneuvers. I flew against not just the Marines and the Navy but also the Royal Air Force from Great Britain, and units from as close as Canada and as far away as Singapore.

  Nellis is famous as the home of “Red Flag,” which meant that three or four times a year, we’d engage in weeks-long war games and exercises. We’d be split up into “good guys” and “bad guys” and then we’d take to the skies, devising tactics to fool our adversaries and avoid getting shot down.

  Red Flag began in 1975 as a response to deficiencies in the performance of pilots new to combat during the Vietnam War. An analysis by the Air Force, dubbed “Project Red Baron II,” found that pilots who had completed at least ten combat missions were far more likely to survive future missions. By the time they had ten missions under their belts, they had gotten over the initial shock and awe of battle. They had enough experience to process what was going on around them without being too fearful. They had enough skill and confidence to survive.

  Red Flag gave each of us “realistically simulated” air-to-air combat missions, while allowing us to analyze the results. The idea was this: Give a pilot his ten missions, and all the accompanying challenges, without killing him.

  We were able to have dogfights over thousands of square miles of empty desert. We could drop bombs and go supersonic without bothering anyone. We had mock targets—old, abandoned tanks and trucks—out there. Sometimes we’d drop dummy bombs and sometimes we’d use live ordnance, and we’d have to make sure everyone in formation was far enough away so shrapnel from the bomb explosion wouldn’t hit anyone’s plane.

  Each jet had a special instrument pod that electronically recorded what was going on. There was radar coverage in the desert to monitor attacks, and whether the shots taken were valid. We’d have mass briefings before the exercises and mass debriefings afterward.

  On one mission, I was given the opportunity to be the Blue Force mission commander, responsible for planning and leading a mission involving about fifty aircraft. It was a complicated task, planning high-speed, low-level attacks using different kinds of airplanes. We had to figure out when to attempt midair refuelings, how to avoid threats, and how best to use all the available resources to achieve the best outcome. It took leadership and coordination skills, getting everyone on the same page.

  Exercises such as Red Flag were thrilling, but other aspects of military life were less appealing to me.

  As I approached the end of my service commitment in the late 1970s, I got the sense that the best part of my military career was already behind me. I’d served six years and I just loved flying fighters. But I had learned that if I wanted to have a successful, rising career as an Air Force officer, I’d have to do a lot more than climb into a cockpit and fly. To keep getting promoted, I’d have to choose a career path that took me further away from flying. I’d have to spend much of my time giving briefings or sitting at a desk, signing off on paperwork.

  In the peacetime Air Force, appearances mattered. Not just haircuts and shoeshines, but also how you appeared to those above you in the hierarchy. To get promoted, you had to be a good politician. You needed to develop alliances and find a well-connected mentor.

  Yes, certain people respected my flying abilities, but I was never particularly good at networking. I didn’t put the effort into it. I felt I could get by on my own merits as an aviator.

  There were other things that also factored into my decision to leave the Air Force. By the late 1970s, with the Vietnam War over, there was a big drawdown in the military budget. The cuts were exacerbated by rising fuel costs, which meant that to save money, we weren’t being permitted to fly as much. It takes years to get good at using a jet fighter as a weapon, so it was crucial to get pilots into the air as often as possible. The budget issues would leave me grounded more than I would have liked.

  My career decisions at that time in my life had a lot to do with the simple question: How much will I get to fly?

  The idea of applying to be an astronaut certainly had great appeal to me, but by the late 1970s, when I might have tried to qualify, manned missions weren’t in the forefront of NASA’s plans. The Apollo program, which had sent twelve men to the moon between 1969 and 1972, had been canceled. The space shuttle wasn’t yet in operation. Two of my academy classmates would end up flying the space shuttle in the early 1990s, and in many ways I envied them. But I knew I’d have to spend years and years of my life preparing to fly just once or twice in space. That’s if I could even have made the cut. I didn’t have an engineering degree, and had never been a test pilot as my two classmates had been.

  My last day of military service was set for February 13, 1980, three weeks after my twenty-ninth birthday. President Reagan had just taken office and the hostages had been released in Iran. It looked like the nation was headed into more peaceful times, and it felt like the right time for me to return to civilian life.

  My final flight was an air-to-air combat training mission, and as you can imagine, it was bittersweet. I flew against our squadron commander, Lieutenant Colonel Ben Nelson, and we both knew the emotions I was feeling at the controls. After the flight, I climbed out of the jet, shook hands with Lieutenant Colonel Nelson and some other well-wishers on the ramp, and then I gave a final salute. It was a simple good-bye.

  “Good luck, Sully,” Lieutenant Colonel Nelson said.

  It was official. I would never again fly a fighter. That’s not to say I wasn’t a fighter pilot,
though. Just as there’s no such thing as an ex-Marine, I would always be a fighter pilot.

  I SENT an application to almost every airline, but it was not an easy time to get a job as a commercial pilot. The airlines were losing money and starting to feel the effects of federal deregulation fifteen months earlier. There were growing issues between management and labor. In the decade to follow, more than a hundred airlines would go out of business, including nine major carriers.

  All of the airlines combined hired just over a thousand pilots in 1980, and I was grateful to be one of them. I came cheap, too. When I started at Pacific Southwest Airlines, as a second officer/ flight engineer on the Boeing 727, I was earning less than $200 a week. That was my gross, not my take-home pay.

  There were eight of us in my PSA class of new hires, and I rented a room in San Diego with a former Navy pilot named Steve Melton. Steve and I went to class all day, training to be flight engineers. We later had simulator training, after which we would return home and turn our closet into our own little makeshift cockpit. On the inside of the closet door, we taped posters with mock-ups of a flight engineer’s panels. We quizzed each other on every light, dial, switch, and gauge, and all the procedures we had to know. We had a lot to learn, and little time to do it.

  All eight of us in my class of new hires were so broke that on a lot of afternoons, we’d go to an aviation-themed restaurant-bar close to the airport. The place served one-dollar beers during happy hour, and appetizers were free. That would be our dinner several nights a week.

  I entered the airline industry at the tail end of what’s been called the Golden Age of Aviation. Before deregulation, flying was relatively more expensive, and for a lot of people, it felt like a special occasion when they went to the airport to fly somewhere. When I arrived in 1980, everything had gotten a little more casual, but you still saw a lot more men and women in dress clothes than you see today. These days, a growing percentage of travelers look like they’re on their way back from the gym or the beach or just working in the yard.