Sully

by Captain Chesley B. Sullenberger, III

  The flight attendants headed back into the cabin. We pulled away from the gate with three fewer passengers than had arrived with us.

  The flight from Norfolk to West Palm was routine. We arrived just an hour and fifteen minutes late, and I stood outside the cockpit door as all the passengers deplaned.

  “Thank you for your patience this evening,” I said, nodding at them as they passed. They acknowledged my words with slight smiles or nods of their own. And all of us went to bed that night thinking of the family we had left behind in Norfolk.

  EARLY ONE Tuesday morning in September 2001, I was driving from my home in Danville to the airport in San Francisco. I had to catch a plane to Pittsburgh, where I was then based, to fly an MD-80 on to Charlotte. I was listening to the radio, an all-news station, and I heard that a plane had just crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York.

  How could someone be that off course? I thought. It must have been pretty foggy there. As I listened to the radio report, I was reminded of the infamous 1945 crash of a B-25 into the Empire State Building, when an Army Air Forces bomber pilot lost his way on a foggy Saturday morning, killing himself and thirteen others. I figured this World Trade Center crash must have been a similar accident.

  I parked my car in the airport lot, walked into the terminal, and that’s when I heard that another airplane had hit the South Tower and a third plane had hit the Pentagon.

  By 6:30 A.M. Pacific time, every airplane in the skies above the United States had been ordered to land, and the FAA had banned takeoffs of all civilian aircraft. It was clear I wouldn’t be getting to Pittsburgh that day to fly my scheduled flight. (My particular flight was one of some thirty-five thousand canceled that day nationwide.)

  I spent a little time in the US Airways operations office in San Francisco, and there were two crews there. Unlike me, they didn’t live in Northern California. They were stranded, and no one knew when planes might fly again. “You’d better get hotel rooms right now,” I suggested, “before they’re all gone.”

  I called pilot scheduling and told them that I couldn’t make it to Pittsburgh, obviously, and then I went home and watched CNN. As an American and as a pilot, I found the coverage very hard to take. It was so upsetting and disturbing that, at one point, I had to stop watching. I turned off the TV and went into the backyard to compose myself. It was a beautiful day in California, and it was remarkably quiet outdoors. Because all aircraft were grounded, you couldn’t hear any airplanes flying anywhere. My ears are always pretty attuned to the sounds of jets, and this saddened me.

  On Wednesday and most of Thursday, only the military was flying. I felt anxious about the terrorism and the national ground stop instituted by the FAA, and was eager to return to flying. Like so many pilots, I also felt a renewed sense of patriotism. I wanted to fly to prove our system could function, that we could take passengers safely to where they needed to go, and that the terrorists would not succeed.

  On Thursday night, I was able to get on a red-eye to Pittsburgh. On Friday morning, I was set to fly again.

  It was pretty chaotic in the crew room underneath the terminal at Pittsburgh International Airport. Not all crew members were able to make it in, and so a captain would say, “I have a first officer but need a flight attendant,” and a flight attendant would volunteer to take the trip with him.

  Eventually, I was assigned to fly from Pittsburgh to Indianapolis. Not many Americans were yet ready to return to the skies, so we took just seven people to Indianapolis and eight people back from there to Pittsburgh.

  There were so few of them, they barely outnumbered the crew. We put them all in first class. Some of the passengers said that they were nervous, and I tried to reassure them with small talk when they boarded.

  It was just three days after the attacks, and our planes were still vulnerable to terrorism. But I wanted passengers to know that even though the cockpit doors hadn’t yet been strengthened, there was a strengthened resolve among us in the cockpit, and the flight attendants in the cabin. The passengers had strengthened their resolve, too.

  “We’re determined not to let anything like this happen again,” I told a few passengers.

  The pilots murdered on September 11, 2001, were the very first victims. And so it was natural for pilots to discuss how we might have responded that day. The reality was that all our training until then had been aimed at preventing or managing a potential hijacking, not a kamikaze-style suicide mission.

  For airline employees, life is different now. The airline industry suffered a financial collapse after the attacks, and a great many people at the bottom of the seniority list were laid off. So many of them were good pilots, and they are missed.

  The attacks of September 11 don’t come into my head as often as they once did. That’s true for a lot of Americans. Time has passed. New tragedies have followed. I’ve piloted hundreds of flights since that day.

  But for someone who works for an airline, the reminders are still here, offering reasons for reflection. Sometimes I’ll be at Boston Logan International Airport, passing by the gates from which two of the flights departed on September 11—American Airlines Flight 11 from Gate 32 in Terminal B, and United Airlines Flight 175 from Gate 19 in Terminal C.

  There are American flags flying outside both of those gates as silent tributes. They are not part of any formal memorial. They were placed there by airport and airline employees. When I pass the flags, I am reminded of the sense of duty I felt on the day of the attacks—to get back in the air, to keep flying passengers to their destinations, to maintain our way of life.

  IN RECENT years, I’ll often come home from work weary. I’ve been gone for days. I may have traveled twelve thousand miles. I’ve endured all sorts of weather or traffic delays. I’m ready for bed. A lot of wives ask, “How was your day at the office?” Their husbands talk about big sales they’ve made or deals they’ve closed. I’ve also had my good days at the office.

  One evening I came home and Lorrie was standing in the kitchen. She asked how my day had gone. I began to tell her.

  I had piloted an Airbus A321 from Charlotte to San Francisco. It was one of those nights when there wasn’t much traffic. Air traffic controllers didn’t have to impose many constraints about altitude or speed. It was up to me how I wanted to travel the final 110 miles, and how I would get from thirty-eight thousand feet down to the runway in San Francisco.

  It was an incredibly clear and gorgeous night, the air was smooth, and I could see the airport from sixty miles out. I started my descent at just the right distance so that the engines would be near idle thrust almost all the way in, until just prior to landing. If I started down at the right place, I could avoid having to use the speed brakes, which cause a rumbling in the cabin when extended. To get it right, I’d need to perfectly manage the energy of the jet.

  “It was a smooth, continuous descent,” I told Lorrie, “one gentle, slowly curving arc, with a gradual deceleration of the airplane. The wheels touched the runway softly enough that the spoilers didn’t deploy immediately because they didn’t recognize that the wheels were on the ground.”

  Lorrie was touched by my enthusiasm. She noticed that I was telling the story with real emotion. “I’m glad,” she said.

  “And you know what?” I told her. “I’m guessing no one on the plane even noticed. Maybe some people sensed it was a smooth ride, but I’m sure they didn’t think much about it. I was doing it for myself.”

  Lorrie likes to say that I love “the art of the airplane.” She is right about that.

  The industry has changed, the job has changed, and I’ve changed, too. But I still remember the passion that I hoped one day to feel when I was five years old. And on this night, I felt it.

  9

  SHOWING UP FOR LIFE

  IN MARCH 1964, when I was thirteen years old, I saw a story on the evening news that I couldn’t get out of my head.

  My parents, my sister, and I were in our family roo
m, eating dinner on TV trays and watching our black-and-white Emerson TV, a bulky box encased in a blond wood cabinet. As usual, my parents turned the cream-colored plastic channel knob until they came to NBC’s Huntley-Brinkley Report. David Brinkley was based in Washington, D.C., and Chet Huntley was based in New York, where news had broken about a twenty-eight-year-old woman named Kitty Genovese.

  She lived in Queens, and had been stabbed to death outside her apartment. Her neighbors heard her screams as she was being attacked and sexually assaulted by a stranger. Allegedly, they did nothing to help her.

  According to the news report, thirty-eight people had heard her cries for help and didn’t call police because they didn’t want to get involved. Their inaction was later dubbed by sociologists as “the bystander effect.” People are less apt to help in an emergency when they assume or hope that other bystanders will step up and intervene.

  These initial news reports about the incident would eventually turn out to be an exaggeration. Some neighbors didn’t act because they thought they were witnessing a lovers’ quarrel. Others weren’t sure what they were hearing on a cold night with their windows closed. One person did end up calling the police.

  But back in 1964, all I knew was what I was hearing from The Huntley-Brinkley Report, and the news was very shocking to me, and to my family, too.

  I found myself thinking a lot about Kitty, and about her neighbors in New York. What transpired there felt utterly foreign to me. I couldn’t imagine this happening in North Texas. Where I lived, people felt a strong sense of community while also recognizing that they would often have to handle their problems and emergencies all on their own. This sense of both fellowship and self-reliance was necessary in a sparsely populated rural area.

  Whatever danger or challenge you faced, you couldn’t just dial 911. The nearest police or fire station was too far away. So, at least initially, you would have to deal with it yourself or quickly seek help from your closest neighbor, whose home might be a mile away. By necessity, we had to be self-sufficient. But we also knew that if we needed help, we could turn to our neighbors and they would do their best.

  It saddened me to think of these people in New York, in such close proximity to a woman being murdered, and choosing not to help. The police were just a few blocks and an easy phone call away. I couldn’t fathom the human values that would allow this to happen. I had never been to New York—in fact, I wouldn’t make my first visit there until I was thirty years old—and it was disturbing to me to hear that this could happen in a big city. I talked to my parents about how things seemed so different in New York compared with what we believed and how we lived in North Texas.

  I made a pledge to myself, right then at age thirteen, that if I was ever in a situation where someone such as Kitty Genovese needed my help, I would choose to act. I would do whatever I could. No one in danger would be abandoned. As they’d say in the Navy: “Not on my watch.”

  I NOW know, of course, that a great many New Yorkers have the same heartfelt urges to help others, and the same sense of empathy, as people anywhere else in the country. We all saw that on September 11, 2001. And I saw it again, firsthand, when Flight 1549 landed in the Hudson, and it felt as if the city rose up at every level to help our passengers and crew.

  But back when I was thirteen, and Kitty Genovese was in the news, I felt this real resolve. It wasn’t anything I put in writing. It was more of a commitment I made to myself, to live a certain way.

  I’d like to think I’ve done that.

  I’ve come to believe that every encounter with another person is an opportunity for good or for ill. And so I’ve tried to make my interactions with people as positive and respectful as I can. In little ways, I’ve tried to be helpful to others. And I’ve tried to instill in my daughters the notion that all of us have a duty to value life, because it is so fleeting and precious.

  Through the media, we all have heard about ordinary people who find themselves in extraordinary situations. They act courageously or responsibly, and their efforts are described as if they opted to act that way on the spur of the moment. We’ve all read the stories: the man who jumps onto a subway track to save a stranger, the firefighter who enters a burning building knowing the great risks, the teacher who dies protecting his students during a school shooting.

  I believe many people in those situations actually have made decisions years before. Somewhere along the line, they came to define the sort of person they wanted to be, and then they conducted their lives accordingly. They had told themselves they would not be passive observers. If called upon to respond in some courageous or selfless way, they would do so.

  Lorrie and I have done our share of very small things to help the greater good. A year ago, we were stopped at a red light in our hometown of Danville and we saw a female pedestrian in her late forties walking her small dog across the street. Lorrie saw the driver in front of us about to make a left turn. “He’s going to hit her!” Lorrie screamed. “He’s going to hit her!” And he did.

  It was unclear to us whether the driver of the car was not paying attention or if the sun was in his eyes—but the woman was knocked unconscious, and her dog ran loose. She was lying facedown in the street and I was one of the first people to get to her.

  I made sure someone called 911 and that someone checked that she had a pulse and was breathing and not bleeding, while I helped direct traffic around her before the police arrived. I was impressed with the other motorists. They recognized the gravity of the situation and were patient. No one was honking. No one tried to pull out and drive around the scene. It seemed as if everyone had the right attitude, the right values, and did the right thing. Someone got the woman’s dog. Another person found the woman’s cell phone and pulled up her daughter’s phone number from the phone’s contact list. The woman was taken away in an ambulance and survived.

  I was pleased to see the people of Danville respond so well, and I was glad to be involved.

  I’VE BEEN moved and impressed by my daughters’ eagerness to help others.

  Kate raised and trained two puppies for Guide Dogs for the Blind. The program sent us our first puppy, a yellow Labrador retriever named Misty, in November 2002. Kate immediately fell in love with the puppy. She worked day after day helping Misty understand verbal orders. To get a puppy to relieve herself on command, the trainer has to wait for her to go to the bathroom, and then say the command “Do your business!” The idea was that Misty would then associate the words with doing her business, and when serving a person with disabilities, would be able to “relieve on command.”

  Kate, then nine years old, took her responsibilities very seriously. One stormy day, I looked out the window and saw she was outside in the pouring rain, wearing her yellow slicker and galoshes, waiting for Misty to relieve herself so she could tell her, “Do your business!”

  I called Lorrie over to the window to watch. We were proud of Kate. She was so responsible. And she loved that dog so much.

  Once Misty was trained, we had to give her back to the organization so she could be placed in a home with a person who needed a guide dog. We knew that the good-bye would be very hard on Kate. “Recall Day” turned out to be Valentine’s Day 2004, when Misty was fifteen months old. Kate held herself together until it was time to leave Misty behind. Then she began bawling. For a while after that, she said she didn’t want to allow herself to fall in love with anything or anyone because it was going to be too hard when it was over. She said losing Misty was the first time she’d ever had her heart broken.

  Through it all, though, she saw the great value of the guide dogs program. “We’re helping people,” she’d say, “and giving them their freedom back. It feels good to be able to do that. Besides, it’s fun to have a puppy.”

  Kelly, meanwhile, is one of the most empathetic people I know. Starting in preschool, she always has been the kid who’d raise her hand and volunteer to be the teacher’s helper. She also embraced “Books for the Barrios,” the br
ainchild of the wife of a former naval officer and American Airlines pilot. The program has sent twelve million books to impoverished students overseas.

  In second grade, Kelly’s class took a field trip to the organization’s warehouse in Concord, California. They learned about all of the disadvantaged kids on the outlying islands in the Philippines. They were told that many of the children slept on dirt floors, and welcomed the cardboard boxes that Books for the Barrios were packed in. Families broke down the boxes and used the cardboard as mats to sleep on.

  Kelly was moved by what she heard on that field trip, and for her eighth birthday party, she decided on her own to ask her friends to bring books and gifts for children in the barrios. The children were instructed, when selecting gifts for Kelly, to pick presents that were appropriate for children in the Philippines. The party was held at the warehouse, and Kelly placed the wrapped gifts into shipping boxes. She and her friends then spent an hour helping pack donated books into boxes they decorated.

  Everyone’s reputation is made on a daily basis. There are little incremental things—worthwhile efforts, moments you were helpful to others—and after a lifetime, they can add up to something. You can feel as if you lived and it mattered.

  Until Flight 1549, I had assumed that I would always live a pretty anonymous life. I’d try to do my job to the best of my ability. Lorrie and I would try to raise the girls with the values we cherish. I’d make an effort to volunteer for worthy projects. Perhaps, I thought, at the end of my life, in aggregate, it would all add up to my being able to say I’d made a difference to others and to my community in some small way.

  Actually, I live in several communities. One is Danville, of course. But another is the community that keeps re-creating itself in the nation’s airports. It’s a community of familiar faces—airport workers, my colleagues at US Airways, the crews from other airlines—that also includes thousands of strangers who repopulate the terminals every day.