Highest Duty (16 page)

O
NE THING
that has always helped make the airline industry strong and safe is the concept that pilots call “captain’s authority.” What that means is we have a measure of autonomy—the ability to make an independent, professional judgment within the framework of professional standards.

The problem today is that pilots are viewed differently. Over the years, we’ve lost a good deal of respect from our management, our fellow employees, the general public. The whole concept of being a pilot has been diminished, and I worry that safety can be compromised as a result. People used to say that airline pilots were one step below astronauts. Now the joke is: We’re one step above bus drivers, but bus drivers have better pensions.

Airline managers seem to second-guess us more often now.
There are more challenges. Thirty years ago, it would be unheard of for a mechanic or ramp worker to vociferously disagree with a captain. Now it happens.

I know that some captains don’t represent the best of us. There may be circumstances and times when it is appropriate to challenge a captain. But sometimes we are questioned because others in the airline system want the operation to go more smoothly or be more timely or less costly.

There was a scene in the 2002 movie
Catch Me If You Can
that made me think. Set in the 1960s, and based on a true story, the film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as a con man who at one point impersonates a Pan Am pilot. In this particular scene, DiCaprio’s character is watching a handsome captain in full uniform walking into a hotel accompanied by several beautiful young Pan Am stewardesses. The front desk manager comes out from behind the counter to greet them, welcoming the captain and his crew back to the hotel. It’s just a passing moment in the movie, but it perfectly encapsulates the high level of respect given to airline crews then. I almost had tears in my eyes watching that reminder of what the Golden Age of Aviation was like—and how much flight crews have lost since then.

A few years ago, in
Flying
magazine, I read a column written by an airline captain who was nearing retirement. He was remembering his earliest days as a pilot, and comparing those days with today, when all airline employees, including pilots, are judged on their ability to follow rules. “We were hired for our judgment,” he wrote. “Now we are being evaluated on our compliance.”

In many ways, it’s good that all airlines are more standardized today. There are appropriate procedures and we are bound to follow them. These days there are virtually no cowboys in the skies, ignoring items on their checklists. At the same time, however, I am concerned that compliance alone is not sufficient. Judgment—like Al Slader’s decision—is paramount.

The way the best pilots see it: A captain’s highest duty and obligation is always to safety. As we say it: “We have the power of the parking brake.” The plane will not move until we feel we can operate the aircraft safely.

With authority comes great responsibility. A captain needs leadership skills to take the individuals on his crew and make them feel and perform like a team. It’s a heavy professional burden on the captain to know he may be called upon to tap into the depths of his experience, the breadth of his knowledge, and his ability to think quickly, weighing everything he knows while accounting for what he cannot know.

I long have had great respect for pilots such as Al Haynes, Al Slader, and many others. And I believe that my knowledge and understanding of their actions was of great help to me on Flight 1549 as I made decisions in those tense moments over New York City.

N
O TWO AIRPORTS
are exactly alike. They’re almost like fingerprints in that way. Each one has a different geometry, runway layout, and arrangement of taxiways and terminal buildings. Each one differs in its direction and distance from the city center, and proximity to other landmarks.

I’ve never counted how many different runways I’ve landed on. I couldn’t tell you the exact number of cities I’ve seen from the air. But I try to pay attention to the specific details of a place, and to hold on to a mental picture of the view. It could be helpful the next time I return, even if it’s years later.

When pilots fly regular routes to a certain city, we become very familiar with what the area’s landmarks look like from the air. From as high as twenty-five or thirty thousand feet, we can identify the tallest buildings, the local stadiums, the nearest large bodies of water, the major highways. We know the configurations
of the runways, the seasonal weather conditions, and, once on the ground, the best place to get a reasonably healthy lunch in the terminal.

Given the US Airways hub system, I’ve done a lot of flying into Charlotte, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia, so takeoffs and landings in those cities are a pilot’s equivalent of driving your car out of your driveway and through your neighborhood.

On so many flights, I find myself thinking the same thoughts: about how beautiful Earth is—both the natural and the manmade beauty—and how lucky we are to call it our home.

There are many parts of the country I enjoy flying over or into. Approaching St. Louis on a clear day, you can see the 630-foot-tall Gateway Arch from ten miles away and 30,000 feet up. If the sun is at the right angle, you’ll find sunlight glistening off the edge of the arch.

Flying into Las Vegas, in the clear desert air, you can see the Strip from a good distance even in the daytime. At night, it’s a line of some of the brightest lights on the continent, beckoning from eighty miles away.

Seattle is a gorgeous city to fly into. When I was a pilot at PSA, I would sometimes fly up to Seattle from Los Angeles, and I knew by memory the volcanoes in the Cascade Range heading north—Mount McLoughlin, Mount Bachelor, the Three Sisters, Mount Washington, Mount Jefferson, Mount Hood, Mount Adams, Mount Rainier. Each mountain would loom into view, one after the other.

I’ve flown over a lot of places in America—Montana, Idaho, the Dakotas—where you travel great distances without much
evidence of human habitation. It’s a lonely kind of beauty, but it can tug at you. I also like flying on the East Coast, where the population density is striking. There’s a constant stream of lights between Washington, D.C., and Boston. From the air, it has almost become one continuous megalopolis.

Flying down to Ft. Lauderdale, I like passing over Cape Canaveral and seeing its three-mile-long runway. What a thrill it would be to land the shuttle there. Florida trips also have reminded me of how easily nature can tear apart hundreds of miles of human development. For years after a spate of hurricanes in 2004 and 2005, thousands of homes in South Florida had blue tarps covering their roofs. It was sobering to fly above that checkerboard carpet of blue squares, to see the destructive powers of wind and rain.

In the early 1990s, when I was lower on the seniority list, I had to pilot a lot of red-eye flights. On so many of those red-eyes, I got to see the northern lights again and again. Especially in the wintertime, there were nights when for the whole trip, west to east, the lights would fill the entire northern horizon. To me, these lights—formed by charged particles colliding in the earth’s magnetosphere—looked like curtains billowing gently in the wind, with their folds swaying in and out. Sometimes, the lights were a deep magenta or cherry red. Other times, as the lights were cycling, they were lime green. Rather than looking like a curtain, these green lights sometimes looked like an old TV with the vertical hold not adjusted properly and the lines on the TV rolling from bottom to top. I felt privileged to be in a place, night after night, where I could see such scenes.

A few years ago, my schedule included regular trips to Bermuda, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, and Antigua, which were a lot more fun than landing in Charlotte for the 141st time. I loved approaching the islands during daylight. We’d come in over shallow turquoise water, with the white, sandy beaches and lush green mountains ahead of us.

I
USED
to fly from Albany, New York, to LaGuardia, and we’d pass over West Point, a trip that would often jog memories for me. One winter, when I was a cadet at the Air Force Academy, I was sent to West Point for a week as part of an exchange program. On that visit, everything there felt gray to me: the stone walls of the old buildings, the winter sky, the cadets’ uniforms. I ate in the cavernous cadet dining hall, where I was told that General Douglas MacArthur made his last visit to West Point. He had come back to his beloved alma mater in 1962 to give his famous “Duty, Honor, Country” speech. Flying over West Point on winter days decades later, I’d find myself thinking about that speech and wondering what the current cadets were doing at that particular moment.

My schedule takes me into and out of LaGuardia about fifteen times a year, and in my career, I’ve flown there hundreds of times. So I know the general landscape and landmarks of the area very well.

In the New York corridor, when the weather is good, controllers often tell us to fly toward a specific landmark on the ground. This use of “reporting points”—especially important when pilots
are flying visually in addition to using instruments—is less common in some other areas of the country, where the landmarks aren’t as large or well-known.

“Direct to the statue. Follow the river,” controllers will tell us, which means fly toward the Statue of Liberty and then follow the Hudson. Or they’ll point us to the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, at the mouth of upper New York Bay. “Direct to the Narrows.”

If time permits, I’ll allow myself to take a moment to appreciate the physical beauty of the New York landscape. Below me are millions of people in hundreds of thousands of structures. It’s pretty dramatic.

On a cloudless day with good visibility, when I can clearly see “The Lady”—pilots’ shorthand for the Statue of Liberty—I can often make out the flash of flame in her torch. Passing over the statue, I’m reminded of how I used to love reading an illustrated children’s book to Kate and Kelly when they were young. The book was about the building of the statue, how the French people gave it to the United States as a gift, and about “The New Colossus,” the Emma Lazarus poem engraved on a bronze plaque at the base. I enjoyed that children’s book even more than the girls did, partly because I’ve always found that poem by Emma Lazarus to be so moving and evocative. I can recite much of it from memory: “…and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand glows world-wide welcome; Her mild eyes command the air-bridged harbor…I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

When the girls were little and I was on a trip, I’d mail them postcards so they could get a sense of where I was. Sometimes, I’d also send postcards to their teachers to share with the class. I’d
offer a few lines with my own observations about, say, the Liberty Bell in Philly or the famous statues of ducklings in Boston Public Garden. When I sent the girls postcards of the Statue of Liberty, I described the thrill I felt flying over it, and how I had thought of them and our shared bedtime book.

I
WISH
I could bring Lorrie and the girls with me to see the country more often. One of the perks of working in the airline industry always has been our ability to have our families fly free or at a reduced fare. We can fly in coach without charge on US Airways if seats are available. On other airlines, we pay a percentage of the fare, usually between a quarter and half of the regular price.

In past eras, pilots easily took their spouses and kids on vacations and impulsive sightseeing jaunts. These days, however, with low fares ensuring that airplanes are almost always full, it’s much harder to get seats. It’s yet another result of airline deregulation. Our employee travel benefits are now of limited usefulness.

In 2001, for instance, I was able to get four seats on a flight to Orlando, so Lorrie and I were able to take the girls to Disney World. But then we had trouble getting seats on a flight home to San Francisco. We kept running back and forth to different terminals, schlepping all our luggage, trying to find a flight on any available airline.

Kate, then eight years old, eventually had enough. “Why don’t we buy tickets like everyone else?” she asked. In her eyes, I wasn’t
a big-shot pilot impressing her with my perks. I was a cheap, harried father making her pull her suitcase all over the airport.

Mostly, we buy regular tickets for flights now, because the hassles and uncertainties of trying to use my employee travel benefits just aren’t worth it.

I’d say our most memorable free trip as a family was to New York in December 2002, when the girls were nine and seven.

I had a four-day trip scheduled, and each night had a layover in Manhattan. Impulsively, I called Lorrie from Pittsburgh.

“Let’s take the girls out of school,” I told her. “I can get the three of you on the next red-eye to Pittsburgh, and from there we’re going to take a little surprise vacation.” It was an echo of the good old days, when my father would decide to pull my sister and me out of school for a trip to Dallas.

Lorrie and the girls agreed to come. They arrived early in the morning in Pittsburgh, and I was waiting for them at their gate. I piloted the next US Airways flight to LaGuardia, and I was able to get them seats on my plane.

I just loved having them on board. I did my usual welcome announcement, but with a twist. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is Captain Sullenberger, and Katie and Kelly, this is Dad. We are bound for New York’s LaGuardia Airport…”

Lorrie later told me the girls giggled when I said that. They felt like everyone was smiling at them. It was a nice moment.

We got to New York and it was bitterly cold, but we had a terrific time. We took a ferry by the Statue of Liberty. It was just fifteen months after the attacks of September 11, and Liberty
Island itself was still off-limits. That night we went to see
42nd Street
on Broadway.

The next day I piloted a flight from LaGuardia to New Orleans and back, and Lorrie and the girls stayed in New York. They went to Macy’s and visited Santa Claus. They took a sightseeing bus tour of the city. They went to Ground Zero.

I made it back by nightfall, and we saw the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center, and went ice-skating. Then we got tickets for the Rockettes’ Christmas show at Radio City Music Hall. Kate and Kelly were wide-eyed at the splendor of the theater, and having taken dance lessons themselves, they loved how the dancers were arranged perfectly by height, and how they performed together as a chorus line with such precision.

The next day I had to pilot a flight from New York to Nassau. As I was leaving LaGuardia, a major snowstorm began. I got the plane deiced and flew down to the Bahamas, where it was eighty degrees. As usual, I was only able to step out into the sunshine briefly, when I walked down the stairs to the tarmac. After a quick turnaround, we flew back to New York that afternoon.

All the way back from Nassau, I checked the hourly weather reports for LaGuardia, and saw it was snowing in New York and visibility was down to a quarter of a mile. The forecast was that conditions would improve at our arrival time. But as we got closer, it looked like we might have to divert to Pittsburgh, our alternate airport.

When we arrived in the New York area, the visibility improved slightly, allowing us to land on a plowed but still-snow-covered runway.

As I was walking through the terminal, I stopped to look at the TV monitors showing the scheduled arrivals. In column after column, every flight from every city, A to Z, had the same notation: “canceled,” “canceled,” “canceled…” But when I got to the
Ns
, there was one flight, from Nassau, showing an on-time arrival. My flight.

Turned out, I was in the right place at the right time, and was able to arrive just as the weather improved. I got to the hotel when Lorrie and the kids were just about to go to dinner. I was struck by the sight of Kate and Kelly, standing in the lobby wearing beautiful wool winter overcoats with velvety collars. Kelly’s was red. Katie’s was green. They looked like pretty little dolls, dressed up for a walk in snowy Manhattan. I was grateful to have made it back to the city to see that vision of them, walking through the lobby and then into the night.

For the rest of our stay, Lorrie and I dragged the girls around—onto subways, into cabs. Everywhere we went, Kate and Kelly were two short suburban girls, lost in a sea of taller, city-savvy adults. By the end of the trip, Kate told us, “This has been a lot of fun, but I’m tired of all the hustle and bustle.”

We were able to get four seats on a flight back to San Francisco, and this time, I sat back in coach with them, and we all looked out the window together, watching the continent go by.

F
OR A
pilot, LaGuardia is a more challenging environment than the average airport. The volume of traffic in the New York area makes it a complicated airspace, with so many planes vying for
slots to take off or land. There are three major airports in close proximity—JFK, Newark, and LaGuardia—plus smaller facilities such as Westchester County Airport in White Plains and Teterboro in New Jersey. The radio frequencies are busier than those in many other places in the country. A great many voices are in your ears, and there’s a lot going on around you that you need to be aware of.

Another issue is that at LaGuardia, the runways are short and surrounded by water. So you pretty much have to nail your landings, since there’s not a lot of extra room if you don’t. When landing, you want to put the airplane on the runway in the right place, because you’ll need to have enough room to stop. You aim for the “touchdown zone,” which begins a thousand feet beyond the start of the runway.