Highest Duty_ My Search for What Really Matters - Chesley B. Sullenberger [0]
My Search for What Really Matters
Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger
with Jeffrey Zaslow
Highest Duty is dedicated to
my wife, Lorrie, and my daughters, Kate and Kelly.
You are the three most important people in my life,
and I love you more than I can express in words.
This book is also dedicated to
the passengers and crew of Flight 1549
and to their families.
We will be joined forever
because of the events of January 15, 2009,
in our hearts and in our minds.
Contents
1 A Flight You’d Never Forget
2 A Pilot’s Life
3 Those Who Came Before Me
4 “Measure Twice, Cut Once”
5 The Gift of Girls
6 Fast, Neat, Average
7 Long-term Optimist, Short-term Realist
8 This Is the Captain Speaking
9 Showing Up for Life
10 Anything Is Possible
11 Managing the Situation
12 The View from Above
13 Sudden, Complete, Symmetrical
14 Gravity
15 One Hundred Fifty-five
16 Stories Heard, Lives Touched
17 A Wild Ride
18 Home
19 The Question
Acknowledgments
Appendix A: Flight Path of Flight 1549, January 15, 2009
Appendix B: National Transportation Safety Board Cockpit Voice Recorder Transcript Excerpt
About the Authors
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
1
A FLIGHT YOU’D NEVER FORGET
THE FLIGHT LASTED just a few minutes, but so many of the details are rich and vivid to me.
The wind was coming from the north not the south, which was unusual for that time of year. And my wheels made a distinct rumbling sound as they rolled across the rural Texas airstrip. I remember the smell of the warm engine oil, and how it drifted into the cockpit as I prepared to take off. There was also the smell of freshly cut grass in the air.
I have a clear recollection of how my body felt—this heightened sense of alertness—as I taxied to the end of the runway, went through my checklist, and got ready to go. And I recall the moment the plane lifted into the air and, just three minutes later, how I would need to return to the runway, intensely focused on the tasks at hand.
All these memories are with me still.
A pilot can take off and land thousands of times in his life, and so much of it feels like a speeding blur. But almost always, there is a particular flight that challenges a pilot or teaches or changes him, and every sensory moment of that experience remains in his head forever.
I have had a few unforgettable flights in my life, and they continue to live in my mind, conjuring up a host of emotions and reasons for reflection. One took me to New York’s Hudson River on a cold January day in 2009. But before that, perhaps the most vivid was the one I’ve just described: my first solo flight, late on a Saturday afternoon at a grass airstrip in Sherman, Texas. It was June 3, 1967, and I was sixteen years old.
I hold on to this one, and a handful of others, as I look back on all the forces that molded me as a boy, as a man, and as a pilot. Both in the air and on the ground, I was shaped by many powerful lessons and experiences—and many people. I am grateful for all of them. It’s as if these moments from my life were deposited in a bank until I needed them. As I worked to safely land Flight 1549 in the Hudson, almost subconsciously, I drew on those experiences.
FOR A few months when I was four years old, I wanted to be a policeman and then a fireman. By the time I was five, however, I knew exactly what I wanted to do with my life—and that was to fly.
I never wavered once this possibility came into my head. Or more precisely, came over my head, in the form of jet fighters that crisscrossed the sky above my childhood home outside Denison, Texas.
We lived by a lake on a sparse stretch of land nine miles north of Perrin Air Force Base. Because it was such a rural area, the jets flew pretty low, at about three thousand feet, and you could always hear them coming. My dad would give me his binoculars, and I loved looking into the distance, to the horizon, wondering what was out there. It fed my wanderlust. And in the case of the jets, what was out there was even more exciting because