Highest Duty (13 page)

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.

I
N 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 room, 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 brainchild 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.

An airport is not always an easy place to connect meaningfully with other people. We’re all coming and going, trying to get somewhere else and then home. But there are little ways to show humanity, and I’ve admired those who find ways to do so.

A
PILOT’S
job, first and foremost, is to fly the airplane safely, delivering passengers from Point A to Point B. We have checklists outlining a host of other tasks, too. But there are many things that are not in our job description, things that are the responsibility of gate agents, baggage handlers, skycaps, caterers, cleaners.

Most of these people do their jobs well, but an airport and an airline are not perfect systems. That can be frustrating for travelers and for those of us in the industry. If I can help things along, I try to do so.

There was one time when we had flown from Philadelphia to Hartford, Connecticut, landing at 10:30
P.M.
A young couple in their thirties with a toddler waited and waited on the jetway for their stroller, but it never showed up. I wanted to help them. My attitude with passengers in these situations is this: I’ve gotten you this far. I’m not going to leave you hanging now.

I went down the stairs and out to the ramp and talked to the baggage handlers. Then I came back and told the couple that the stroller was either lost or left in Philly. “Come with me,” I told them.

I walked the couple to baggage claim and showed them where to file a claim. It was late. The lights in the terminal were being shut off. If I didn’t get them to the right place, they’d be stuck in the airport with everything closed, including the baggage office.

A flight attendant saw me helping them and commented that not every pilot or flight attendant would bother to help. It was an awfully simple thing I had done. I barely had to walk out of my way, since I was headed to a hotel van right outside of baggage claim.

And yet, I understood completely what this flight attendant meant.

A lot of people in the airline industry, and especially at my airline, US Airways, feel beaten down by circumstance. We’ve been hit by an economic tsunami. Some people feel their companies have held a gun to their heads, demanding concessions. We’ve been through pay cuts, givebacks, downsizing, layoffs. We’re the working wounded.

People get tired of constantly fighting the same battles over and over again every day. The gate agent hasn’t pulled the jetway up to the plane in time. The skycap is supposed to bring the wheelchair and hasn’t. (I’ve helped more than a few older people into wheelchairs and pushed them into the terminal myself.) The caterer hasn’t brought all the first-class meals. Catering companies always seem to be the lowest bidders with the highest employee turnover. At the end of a long day, you and your crew will get off the plane and make your way out of the terminal, but the hotel van isn’t there when it’s supposed to be.

All of this stuff beats you down. You get tired of constantly trying to correct what you corrected yesterday.

Many pilots and other airline workers feel that if they keep picking up all the slack, those who run the companies we work for will never staff the airlines properly, or do the training necessary, or hire the contractor who will be most responsible about bringing wheelchairs. And my colleagues are right about that. In the cultures of some companies, management depends heavily on the innate goodness and professionalism of its employees to constantly compensate for systemic deficiencies, chronic understaffing, and substandard subcontractors.

At all airlines, there are many employees, including in management, who care deeply and try to make things better. But at some point, it can feel like a fine line between letting passengers fend for themselves and enabling the airline’s inadequacies. And so it becomes a decision whether to do the simple, easy act of walking a young couple and their toddler to baggage claim.