Highest Duty

by Chesley B. Sullenberger

  For years now, Lorrie has included me as a character in her repertoire of inspirational stories. I’m not sure I want to know everything discussed high in those mountains about our private lives. But I’m happy with Lorrie’s basic message: “Hiking,” she says, “has reinvigorated my marriage.”

  IT WAS Lorrie’s idea. She wanted us to hike together to the top of California’s Mount Whitney, which is in the Sierra Nevada range, southeast of where we are in Northern California. At 14,505 feet, it’s the highest peak in the contiguous United States.

  This was fairly early in Lorrie’s discovery of hiking, and she arranged for eight couples to go together. She got the necessary U.S. Forest Service hiking permit, but one by one, for scheduling reasons or because they hadn’t trained well enough, each of the other couples dropped out. The sixteen-person hike became a two-person hike—me and Lorrie—but we decided, what the heck, we’d still do it.

  We trained for the adventure faithfully. Whenever I was home from a trip, we’d put on our running shoes and run over to a shopping center a mile from our house, where there is a series of stairs leading up a hill to a parking lot. We’d run up and down the stairs fifteen or twenty times, and then we’d jog home.

  We kept going to the gym to lift weights, and we went on practice hikes locally, carrying weights in our backpacks. We also did a lot of biking up Mount Diablo, just northeast of Danville.

  Lorrie believes that to meet your goals in life, it’s important to write them down. But that’s not enough. You also need to take what she and others call “authentic action” every day to achieve them. That means you have to knock on a door, or make a phone call, or do something concrete to get you closer to your goal. When training to hike the tallest mountain in the continental United States, you have to get out every day and prepare. She made sure we did that. In the middle of our training, I hit a patch of gravel while riding a mountain bike on Mount Diablo, breaking my pelvis. I was out of work for six weeks, and it made getting back to preparations for Mount Whitney that much more challenging.

  Lorrie felt that, not unlike our adoption journey, training for the hike would be good for us as a couple. We needed each other for emotional support. When one of us was tired, the other would offer encouragement. And these moments of rallying for each other would be good practice for the support we’d have to give each other on the actual hike.

  Our ascent of Mount Whitney was set for September 2, 1999. We got a babysitter for the girls, and rather than driving the seven hours southeast from our house to the mountain, we decided to rent a Cessna Turbo 182RG (a four-seat, single-engine plane) and fly there. It was pretty romantic, just the two of us, heading off to test ourselves in the wilderness.

  We planned to complete the hike in one day, but that meant we’d have to start very early. We stayed in a motel near the mountain, woke up at 3 A.M., and were on the trail at four-fifteen, wearing our headlamps and backpacks, ready to go. The trailhead starts at 8,300 feet, and if we could make it to the top and back, it would be twenty-one miles round-trip.

  In our backpacks we had rain gear, hats, gloves, spare batteries, matches, power bars, water, peanut-butter sandwiches, and other essentials. I also had brought along a gallon-size plastic bag with my mother’s ashes. She had died the January before, and I thought the mountain might be an appropriate place to spread her ashes.

  My dad had passed away four years earlier, and after living a pretty traditional life with him, my mom had really come into her own in her final years. My father had been more of a homebody, and my mom had loyally stayed on the home front with him. But once he was gone, she did a great deal of traveling with friends. It was as if she was making up for lost time. She embraced every part of living she could, and it was wonderful to see that. Lorrie and I thought it would be fitting to bring her ashes to this tallest peak so we could set her free in the wind, to continue her travels.

  We started our hike well before sunrise, but the moon was half full, and straight up in the sky. There was so much light from the moon that our bobbing headlamps were almost unnecessary.

  The predawn darkness was magnificent. Astronomers would say “the seeing was good.” The air was stable, and so the stars were bright and clear, without much twinkling. It was almost as if we could reach out and touch them.

  At first, we were walking in the shadows of tall trees, wearing just light jackets. Once the sun started rising and warmed the mountain, we were able to put the jackets into our backpacks.

  The sunrise was spectacular. We were hiking on the eastern side of the mountain, facing west, and one peak behind us was perfectly aligned with the sun, forming a triangularly shaped shadow on the expanse of Whitney ahead of us. As the sun got higher, the black triangle moved down the face of the mountain. It was an amazing sight.

  We were also fascinated by how the mountain changed as we climbed. With each change in elevation, we traversed different zones with varying terrain and plants. We encountered marshy areas and some lakes and streams, but as we got higher, the vegetation became more sparse. Portions of the trail were rugged and rocky, and at one point we had to scramble over large boulders. Then the altitude began taking its toll on us. We knew this would happen—we had read the books—but that made it only a little easier to handle. Lorrie had a raging headache, and both of us got sluggish and very tired.

  We kept reassuring each other with an old line that marathon runners use: “It’s not twenty-six miles. It’s one mile, twenty-six times.”

  We had another mantra: “Anyone can hike Mount Whitney. You just point your feet in an uphill direction, and put one foot in front of the other.” We kept repeating that.

  We lost our appetite, which is also common. We knew we had to force ourselves to eat, because we’d need our energy. The guidebooks had told us to bring our favorite foods, even junk food, because we’d be more apt to eat something we liked. It was remarkable to see what happened every time we pulled something to eat from our backpacks. Blue jays would try to land on our shoulders or backpacks to take the food away. Large ground squirrels called marmots would come out of the rocks, almost out of nowhere, and would also try to grab their share. They were all obviously very used to humans and knew that where there were people, there was food.

  At thirteen thousand feet, the narrow trail crossed over the top of the mountain and there was a sheer drop-off. We were well above the tree line at this point, and it looked as barren as the surface of the moon. Lorrie got teary, in part from exhaustion and also, she admitted, out of fear. It was pretty intimidating looking down. She wondered if we really needed to reach the exact summit to release my mother’s ashes.

  “Why don’t we just let your mother out here?” she asked. “Your mom would understand. I know she would.”

  I wanted to keep going. “We can do it,” I told her. She smiled weakly at me, and we pressed on.

  By one-fifteen, we were within sight of the summit—maybe an hour from reaching it. But hours earlier, when we began the hike, we had established a turnaround time of one P.M. We knew we needed enough energy and daylight to make our descent, and we didn’t want to take any risks that would hamper our ability to return safely. Part of us wanted to continue on. But we deferred to good judgment. We resisted temptation and made a smart decision: We had come far enough.

  I was understandably emotional as I reached into my backpack and took out my mom’s ashes. I opened the bag, and it was a powerful moment when I let go of her ashes, and watched them take off so easily into the wind. It was a clear blue day, not a cloud in the sky, and the ashes fluttered into the breeze and just kept going.

  “I hope she enjoys her travels,” Lorrie said, and I wasn’t able to say much in response. I just watched.

  Once that simple ceremony was over, Lorrie and I allowed ourselves to appreciate the majesty of the view. “Our worries seem pretty small in comparison to all of this, don’t they?” Lorrie said to me. “It puts life in perspective.”

  We rested for a
bit, taking it all in. But we couldn’t stay there too long. Our hike was only half over at that point.

  Descending the mountain was almost harder than the hike up, because we were so drained emotionally and physically. By the end of a hike like this, every part of your body that could possibly chafe against another part of your body has done so.

  When we reached the bottom of the trail at 8:15 P.M., again in darkness, we felt absolutely exhilarated despite our exhaustion. We were immensely proud of ourselves. Lorrie, who had spent years believing her body had let her down, recognized that in so many ways, her body had come through for her.

  Flying home the next day in the rented plane, I circled over the mountain a few times, and we looked down at it with awe. We both joked that it was a good thing we hadn’t flown over it on the way there, because from the air it looked too formidable and steep.

  “Wow,” Lorrie said to me. “Can you believe we did it?”

  On the plane, as we headed over the mountain and then northwestward toward home, Lorrie, inspired, took out a pen and wrote a “gratitude letter.”

  She wrote of how the mountain helped bring clarity to her life: “I realized how small our daily ‘stuff’ is. The mountain was here long before we were, and will be here long after we are gone. The fabric on my family room chairs really seemed insignificant by comparison. But what seemed supremely important during the hike was the giggling and laughter of Katie and Kelly, even when we want it quiet, and the love of our family—those living and those who have left us.”

  Lorrie is well on her way to having led “a well-lived life.” She makes her way with passion and purpose, and by doing so reminds others of what is possible. I’m grateful to have shared the trail for so much of it.

  LORRIE IS always on the lookout for inspiration, and a couple of years ago, she heard Maria Shriver speak at her annual California Governor and First Lady’s Conference on Women. At one point, Maria recited a Hopi Indian poem that had touched Lorrie deeply. It reads, in part:

  There is a river flowing now very fast,

  It is so great and swift that there are those who will be afraid,

  They will try to hold onto the shore.

  They will feel they are torn apart and will suffer greatly.

  Know the river has its destination.

  The elders say we must let go of the shore, push off into the middle of the river,

  Keep our eyes open, and our heads above water.

  Lorrie said this poem moved her to tears. She recognizes that all of us have to find the courage to leave the shore. That means leaving the crutch of our lifelong complaints and resentments, or our unhappiness over our upbringing or our bodies or whatever. It means no longer focusing negative energy on things beyond our control. It means looking beyond the safety of the familiar.

  Lorrie loves the image of letting go of the shore, finding the middle of the river, and letting the river take us. It’s a reminder that our lives are a combination of what we can control, what we can’t, and the results of the choices we make.

  The river analogy works in our marriage and it helps us cope with matters such as our financial difficulties. “As long as we can keep our heads above the water,” Lorrie says, “we can make it.” It’s a beautiful way of looking at life.

  Lorrie and I don’t always succeed in staying optimistic, but we have tried our best to live our lives in the middle of the river. Or else we’re on our favorite hilltop, looking at the world below, reminding ourselves that anything is possible.

  11. MANAGING THE SITUATION

  AL HAYNES.

  Pilots mention his name with reverence.

  On July 19, 1989, he was the captain of United Airlines Flight 232, a DC-10 traveling from Denver to Chicago. There were 296 passengers and crew on board.

  When I was a facilitator of the crew resource management course (CRM), the story of that flight served as one of our most useful teaching tools. And personally, Flight 232 has taught me a great deal about flying—and about life.

  After taking off from Denver, Flight 232 flew uneventfully for about eighty-five minutes. Then, soon after crossing into the airspace above Iowa, with the plane at thirty-seven thousand feet and the first officer, William Records, at the controls, an explosion was heard coming from the rear of the plane. The cause was soon apparent: The center engine had failed. Captain Haynes, who was approaching thirty thousand hours of flying experience, asked Dudley Dvorak, the second officer (flight engineer), to go through the engine failure checklist. As this was under way, the cockpit crew realized that all three hydraulic systems were losing pressure. Hydraulics are necessary to control this type of airplane. The first officer was having trouble controlling the aircraft.

  Captain Haynes took the controls and saw he could turn the plane to the right but not the left. After the flight engineer announced to the passengers that an engine had failed, an off-duty United check pilot named Dennis Fitch, seated in the main cabin, came up front and offered to help. Captain Haynes welcomed him into the cockpit.

  This type of emergency was so rare that there was no training for it, no checklist. It would later be determined that the odds of a simultaneous failure of three hydraulic systems approached a billion to one. But Captain Haynes played the hand he was dealt, and relied on his decades of experience to improvise and to lead. He and the others realized that the only way to control the airplane was to manipulate the throttles. The four men in the cockpit flew like that for more than forty minutes, trying to brainstorm ways they might get the damaged airplane to the ground in one piece. In essence, they had forty minutes to learn a new way of flying an airplane.

  Traditionally in the airline industry, there had been a steep hierarchy in cockpits, and first and second officers had been reluctant to offer many suggestions to a captain. The fact that Captain Haynes solicited and welcomed input that day helped the crew find ways to solve this unanticipated problem, and have a better chance of making it to a runway.

  At first, air traffic controllers were going to send the crippled aircraft to Des Moines International Airport. But the plane was turning on its own, to the west, and so a decision was made to send it to Sioux City Gateway Airport. “I’m not going to kid you,” Captain Haynes told the passengers. “It’s going to be a very hard landing.”

  The cockpit voice recorder captured both the collaborative professionalism and the poignant camaraderie that eased their tension.

  At one point, Dennis Fitch said, “I’ll tell you what, we’ll have a beer when this is all done.”

  Captain Haynes replied: “Well, I don’t drink, but I’ll sure as hell have one.”

  They approached the airport at a speed of 215 knots, descending at 1,600 feet per minute, as they tried to slow down by raising the nose. The pilots did a remarkable job of touching down near the beginning of the runway. It looked like they might make it.

  Then the right wing struck the runway. Witnesses said the aircraft cartwheeled as it broke apart and into flames. There were 111 fatalities—some on impact, others from smoke inhalation—but 185 people survived that day because of the masterful work of Captain Haynes and his crew. (Though there were serious injuries, everyone in the cockpit lived.) An investigation later determined that a fatigue crack caused a fracture of the fan disk in the center engine.

  In CRM training, Flight 232 is considered one of the best examples of a captain leading a team effort while being ultimately responsible for the decisions and the outcome. Captain Haynes turned to all the resources at his disposal on a plane in great jeopardy. Given what his crew was up against, this could well have been a crash with no survivors. Their work in the cockpit will be studied for generations.

  I was honored to be contacted by Captain Haynes after my experience on Flight 1549. He has spent much of his life since the Sioux City accident speaking about it around the world. He has made more than 1,500 speeches, donating his fees or speaking pro bono. He talks about what the rest of us might learn from his experiences that da
y, focusing on the importance of communication, preparation, execution, cooperation, and the word he uses, “luck.” He also talks about the sadness that he’ll never shake regarding those on the plane who didn’t make it.

  He told me these speeches, which he dedicates to those who died on his flight, have been therapeutic for him. Speaking about safety issues has helped him cope with survivor’s guilt. “My job was to get people from Point A to Point B safely,” he said. “For a while afterward, I felt I didn’t do my job.”

  Captain Haynes, now seventy-seven, was my age, fifty-eight, on the day of the Sioux City accident. He told me that beyond what his crew did, there were other favorable factors that saved lives: It was a clear day without much wind. The Iowa Air National Guard happened to be on duty there and rushed to help. Rescue crews had recently received training for handling the crash of a large jet. And just when his plane hit, both hospitals in town were in the middle of a shift change, meaning twice the medical personnel were available to treat the many injured survivors, including Captain Haynes. He was brought to the hospital with a head injury that required ninety-two stitches. He had a concussion and his left ear was almost cut off.

  So many people involved that day stepped up aggressively to do what needed to be done. I always keep in mind a remark made by the fire chief at the Sioux City airport: “Either you manage the situation, or the situation will manage you.”

  In the years after the accident, Captain Haynes lost his oldest son in a motorcycle crash. His wife died of a rare infection. Then his daughter needed a bone marrow transplant. But, through all of this, he was buoyed to learn that his efforts on Flight 232 were not forgotten. When insurance wouldn’t fully cover his daughter’s procedure, hundreds of people, including survivors of the Sioux City crash, donated more than $500,000. His daughter even received donations from families who lost loved ones on Flight 232.