Highest Duty

by Chesley B. Sullenberger

  In the wake of the flight, we’ve sat down together as a family to read through some of the stacks of mail we’ve received from around the world. It helped us process the event together, to see how other people connected with it emotionally. It reminded us to cherish the bonds between us, because nothing is ever for sure. I think the girls have a better understanding of this now.

  As teenagers, Kate and Kelly are far less apt to snuggle with Lorrie and me than they once were. We miss that. Sometimes, when they’re not feeling well, it becomes OK to snuggle again. And in the wake of Flight 1549, we hug a bit more. I’m more apt to kiss the girls before I leave town, even if it is early in the morning and they’re in bed, sleeping.

  A FEW weeks after Flight 1549, Lorrie wrote a letter of thanks to all the friends and strangers who had gotten in touch with her to express their concern. “It is still hard for me to sort out all my emotions,” she wrote. “The events of January 15 have been like an onion, multilayered, and peeling back the layers has taken time and will take more time to come. For me, there was the accident itself, the huge media interest, and then the mail.

  “It’s interesting how our brains protect us from trauma, because after Sully told me the news, I didn’t feel panicked. I just felt this weird, out-of-body feeling that it was not real. I was going through the motions but I could not believe that the images I was seeing on TV were of my husband’s plane.

  “I know intellectually and believe with all my heart that commercial aviation is the safest form of travel, so I have never been afraid of Sully’s career. How incredible were the odds that my husband was involved in an airline accident? Impossible, and yet not.”

  Flight 1549 has had an impact on our marriage. The resulting emotions for both of us have been overwhelming and sometimes confusing, and we haven’t been able to sufficiently be there for each other at every step.

  One morning, five months after the incident, Lorrie said to me, “I’ve wanted to cry all morning.” And so she went by herself to our favorite hill in the neighborhood—the “anything is possible” hill. She stood on top, took a moment that was all her own, and cried. Why was she crying?

  “The accident, the aftermath, it’s still unbelievable to me,” she told me. “I feel like I haven’t been able to fully process it all.”

  It isn’t just that Flight 1549 jolted her into the realization that she could lose me. “I’ve always known I could lose you,” she says. “Like all of us, you’re at the mercy of those driving next to you on the highway, or the food you’re eating in a restaurant, or a disease we don’t yet know about. So it’s not that I feel like you’re cheating death every time you fly.”

  Instead, Lorrie just feels as if the incident in the Hudson, and the continuing aftermath, has scrambled her brain. It affected the dynamics in our family.

  For our entire marriage, Lorrie spent long stretches as a single parent. I’d be off on trips, and she’d be dealing with everything in the household. It seemed like things always decided to break when I was gone—the car, the washing machine, the oven. Once, I was on a flight doing preparations before pushing back from the gate, and my cell phone rang. It was Lorrie in a panic. Water was pouring down the side window of our house. At first she thought it was a bad storm, but then she realized that the seal on our pool pump had broken, and water was gushing into the air like an open fire hydrant.

  “Oh my God!” Lorrie said. “The pool is broken! A quarter of the water that was in it has drained out already, and hundreds of gallons are raining down on our window!”

  “I’m about to push back,” I said to her, which meant I was required to turn off my cell phone. “Turn off the filter pump and call the pool guy. I have to go. I’m sorry.” And then I shut off my cell phone, taxied toward the runway, and left her on her own to stop the rain.

  No woman dealing with an emergency like that wants her husband hanging up on her. Again and again, my flying career came at a cost.

  I’ve been even busier and more out-of-pocket since Flight 1549. I’ve been asked to make appearances, give testimony, answer requests from the media, and travel as a public face of the piloting profession. For the first seven months after the Hudson incident, I wasn’t even flying planes for US Airways. Still, some weeks, I’d be gone from home more than I used to be when I was in the cockpit.

  “You won’t get a do-over with the girls,” Lorrie has been telling me. “If you wait until the next year or the year after that to live your family life, you’ll miss too much. The time you’ve lost is gone forever.”

  I know this, and I’ve tried to make adjustments in my life.

  A stressful incident such as Flight 1549 either pulls a couple closer together or leaves them further apart. Lorrie and I have seen both extremes. At first, we clung to each other like ports in a storm. There was an onslaught of attention, and we were hanging on to each other for dear life.

  Now Lorrie sometimes gets frustrated with me when I’m “Sully, the public figure.” Almost everywhere I go, people recognize me and want to interact, get an autograph, or reflect on something from their own lives. I’m cordial and gracious to everyone, and genuinely interested in their stories. Sometimes, when I get home, I can be frazzled and used up and short-tempered. I can be impatient with the girls.

  “You have your priorities wrong, Sully,” Lorrie has told me firmly. “As nice as you are to strangers, that’s the same nice you need to be to me and the girls.”

  She is completely right about that, and I’m lucky to have a spouse who loves me enough to tell it to me straight.

  AT ABOUT eight o’clock one morning, a few months after Flight 1549, Lorrie and I were in our garage, looking out into the street. Kate had just pulled out of the driveway, headed for school. It was a bright, beautiful morning, but inside the garage, we were standing in shadow. Lorrie and I were holding hands and watching her pull away.

  Kate began her three-point turn to pull out of our court, and she stopped for a moment to shift from reverse into drive. As she turned her head, her ponytail was swaying, and she looked so grown up. She looked almost like a woman in her twenties. It was startling to us.

  In that instant, I felt a cascade of images coming into my head, images of her growing up and becoming the strong, confident young lady she now is. It was almost as if she were driving away that morning on her way to her own adult life. Standing there, I remembered when we took her to her first day of preschool at St. Timothy’s Episcopal Church in Danville, and how a lot of the other kids were clinging and crying, and Kate just took off, happily independent. She said good-bye and never looked back.

  In that moment, I also thought about an essay Kelly wrote in third grade. In the spring of 2002, US Airways had parked its MD-80 fleet and was retraining pilots on the Airbus. Until I got the Airbus training, I wasn’t flying, and I was able to remain home for a few months, very present in the kids’ lives. Kelly’s essay assignment, in the fall of 2002, was to write about the happiest time of her life. “The happiest time of my life,” she wrote, “was the time when Daddy was home.” Reading that was one of those bittersweet moments that filled and broke my heart at the same time.

  Now here we are, with the girls pulling out of our driveway all on their own. I’ve blinked and everything has changed: My parents are long gone, the things I missed with my kids can’t be reclaimed, and my life is different now. Lorrie is right. I need to remember every day how precious our time with the girls really is.

  By landing safely, Flight 1549 returned passengers and crew to the loving embrace of their families. We’ve all been given second chances. We’ve been given new reminders that we are loved, and new opportunities to show affection to those we care about. There were 155 people on that plane who got to go home. I must never lose sight of the fact that I was one of them.

  19. THE QUESTION

  ONE DAY IN early May, almost four months after Flight 1549 landed in the Hudson, three large cardboard boxes arrived at my front door in Danville. Inside, wel
l preserved and neatly packaged, were the things I had left behind in the cockpit of the plane. Everything was there except that eight-dollar tuna sandwich I had bought and never eaten before takeoff.

  I was somewhat solemn going through my belongings. I knew that after most airline accidents, such boxes are sent to relatives of victims who’ve died. Or else, when a plane crashes, fire destroys most everything, or the victims’ belongings have been shattered into pieces so small that there is almost nothing to be returned. Maybe relatives will get back someone’s wedding ring. Usually loved ones get little or nothing.

  In the case of Flight 1549, all of us who were “survivors” got boxes addressed directly to us. We were able to sign the FedEx slips ourselves. Some of what was returned to us was destroyed and unusable. But a lot of things were in good condition and could be folded back into our lives. Passengers got back their favorite jeans, their coats, their car keys, their purses. I pictured these passengers, all over the country, opening their boxes and flashing back to January 15, 2009. We could focus on waterlogged items that were ruined, or we could go through our personal effects feeling grateful.

  The plane had sunk into the Hudson after we all evacuated, and a company from El Segundo, California, Douglass Personal Effects Administrators, was charged with taking what was fished out of the water and trying to reclaim what they could. I was impressed by the job they undertook in order to reunite us with our belongings. They went through every suitcase in the cargo hold and every item in the overhead compartments.

  It was amazing and impressive that so many things submerged in dirty, icy water could be brought back to life. The company used sheets of fabric softener to separate all of the clothing and other items. The smell of dryer sheets was overpowering when we opened our boxes.

  My roll-aboard bag was in one of the boxes, its contents dried, inventoried, and wrapped up in tissue paper. My iPod, laptop, and alarm clock were trashed. But my phone charger and iPod charger still worked. So did my data cable for transferring photos from my phone to my computer. My mini Maglite also worked fine. My running shoes looked as good as new. The shoes I was wearing on the flight came home with me in January but were totally waterlogged and beaten up. I really hoped they could be saved, because they were what we call “airport-friendly shoes,” with no metal; I didn’t have to take them off to go through security checkpoints. I took those shoes to my favorite local shoe repairman at a shopping center in Danville, and he did a wonderful job fixing and cleaning them up. I wear them still.

  On January 15, I was traveling with four library books, including a copy of Just Culture, a book about safety issues. I later called my local library to apologize for leaving the books on the plane, and they agreed not to charge me for replacing them.

  Anyway, I was glad to find all four of the library books in one of the boxes of my belongings. The reclamation company had tried using a drying process to make the books usable again but weren’t completely successful. The pages are readable but too wrinkled to be checked out again by library patrons. I returned them anyway. The library has found a place for them to be displayed.

  Since Flight 1549 came at the end of a four-day trip, I had mostly dirty laundry in my roll-aboard bag. All of my clothing came back in good condition, ready to wear, and with that strong fabric-softener smell.

  I was also glad to get back my Jeppesen airway manual, which contains the charts for all of the airports we serve. Still taped neatly inside the manual, weathered but readable, was the fortune from a fortune cookie that I’d gotten at a Chinese restaurant in San Mateo, California, sometime in the late 1980s.

  The fortune read: “A delay is better than a disaster.”

  I thought that was good advice at the time and so I’d kept it in the manual ever since.

  That fortune reminded me of an unexpected question Kate asked me when she was nine years old. I was driving her to school, and out of the blue, she asked me: “Daddy, what does integrity mean?”

  After thinking about it for a little bit, I came up with what, in retrospect, was a pretty good answer. I said, “Integrity means doing the right thing even when it’s not convenient.”

  Integrity is the core of my profession. An airline pilot has to do the right thing every time, even if that means delaying or canceling a flight to address a maintenance or other issue, even if it means inconveniencing 183 people who want to get home, including the pilot. By delaying a flight, I am ensuring that they will get home.

  I am trained to be intolerant of anything less than the highest standards of my profession. I believe air travel is as safe as it is because tens of thousands of my fellow airline and aviation workers feel a shared sense of duty to make safety a reality every day. I call it a daily devotion to duty. It’s serving a cause greater than ourselves.

  And so I think often of that fortune, which sat for a good while in the cockpit of a water-filled Airbus A320, tilted sideways in the Hudson: “A delay is better than a disaster.”

  It’s nice to have that fortune back. It will definitely accompany me on future flights.

  A FEW days after receiving my belongings, I flew to Washington, D.C., where I met Jeff Skiles at the headquarters of the National Transportation Safety Board. We had been invited to listen to the cockpit voice recorder (CVR), and to offer our thoughts and memories.

  Previously, the only tape available had been from the FAA, and that contained the radio communications between us and Air Traffic Control. This NTSB visit would be our first opportunity to listen to the audio from the cockpit voice recorder. We’d hear exactly what we had said to each other in the cockpit during the flight. For four months until this May meeting, both of us had been relying on our memories of what we had said. Now, finally, we would know for sure.

  There were six of us in the room: Jeff Skiles, Jeff Diercksmeier, a U.S. Airline Pilots Association accident investigation committee member, three NTSB officials (two investigators and a specialist from the agency’s recordings section), and me. The investigators were happy to have Jeff and me there with them. After many airline accidents, when the recordings are reviewed, the flight crews are not on hand. Often, the pilots whose voices are on the recordings are dead, and so they can’t explain what they were thinking, why they made the decisions they did, or exactly what a particular word was.

  Listening to the tape was an intense experience for us. It brought us back together into the cockpit, as if we were reliving the incident in real time.

  We were in a small office with fluorescent lights, and we sat in chairs at a table, wearing headsets. Jeff and I didn’t look at each other much. For the most part, we were in our own heads, often with our eyes closed, trying to capture all the sounds and noises in the cockpit.

  The recording began while Flight 1549 was about to push back from the gate and continued until we first touched the Hudson. There were things I said on the tape that I didn’t recall saying. Just thirty-three seconds before the bird strike, I said to Jeff, “And what a view of the Hudson today!” He took a look and agreed: “Yeah!”

  The bird strikes were completely audible on the tape. There were the sounds of thumps and then unnatural noises as the birds went through the engines. You could hear the damage being inflicted on the engines, and how they protested with sickening sounds that an engine should never make. We clearly heard the wooooooh of engines spooling down and rolling back, followed by the sounds of vibrations as the engines tore themselves apart. Listening to the tape, I was reminded of how we felt in that moment. It was as if the bottom were falling out of our world. Even in the safety of that office at the NTSB, it was disturbing for us to hear again the rundown of the engines, and to know we had been in the cockpit of that aircraft when that was occurring.

  The biggest surprise for me, listening to the tape, was how fast everything happened. The entire flight was five minutes and eight seconds long. The first minute and forty seconds were uneventful. Then, from the moment I said, “Birds!” until we approached the water and
I said, “We’re gonna brace!” just three minutes and twenty-eight seconds had passed. That’s less time than it takes me to brush my teeth and shave.

  The whole incident took a bit longer in my memory. Yes, I knew and felt all along that things happened fast. But in my recollections, it was as if I had a little more time to think, to decide, to act—even if it was abbreviated.

  Listening to the tape, however, I realized that everything really happened in 208 extraordinarily time-compressed seconds. Frankly, it was beyond belief. Beyond extreme. It was overwhelming. It took me right back to the moment. I didn’t tear up, but I know there were muscle changes in my face as I listened. It was surprising and emotional for Jeff, too.

  Somehow, time must have slowed down in my head that day. It’s not as if everything was in slow motion. It’s just that, in my memory, it didn’t feel as incredibly fast as the tape made obvious that it was.

  There are different microphones in the cockpit, which can pick up voices, noises, warning chimes, and radio transmissions, including those from other planes. The NTSB was able to play back whatever was picked up by each microphone, one at a time, so we could isolate certain sounds and hear things that were at first masked by louder sounds. The investigators asked us to explain sounds or snippets of conversation that weren’t clear on the tape.

  I was very happy with how Jeff and I sounded on the tape, and how we handled ourselves individually and as a team. We did not sound confused and overwhelmed. We sounded busy. I’ve read many transcripts of accidents over the last thirty years, and this one sounded really good in terms of our competence.

  Jeff and I had met just three days before we flew Flight 1549. Yet during this dire emergency—with no time to verbalize every action and discuss our situation—we communicated extraordinarily well. Thanks to our training, and our immediate observations in the moment of crisis, each of us understood the situation, knew what needed to be done, and had already begun doing our parts in an urgent yet cooperative fashion.