Highest Duty_ My Search for What Really Matters - Chesley B. Sullenberger [14]
At 3:25:44, from the controller to me and Jeff: “Cactus fifteen forty-nine, contact New York departure, good day.” We were being told that future communications for our flight were being handed off to the controller at New York Terminal Radar Approach Control, located on Long Island.
At 3:25:48, from me to the LaGuardia controller: “Good day.” To that point, my four-day trip had been completely unremarkable, and as with almost every other takeoff and landing I’d experienced in forty-two years as a pilot, I expected this flight to remain unremarkable.
We’d even made up a little time caused by the delays earlier in the day. So I was in a good mood. The Charlotte-San Francisco flight was still showing on time, and a middle seat was available. It looked like I’d make it home while Lorrie and the girls were still awake.
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THOSE WHO CAME BEFORE ME
AS HUMAN ENDEAVORS go, aviation is a very recent one. The Wright brothers first flew in 1903. That’s just 106 years ago. I’m fifty-eight years old, and I’ve been flying for forty-two of those years. Aviation is so young that I’ve been involved in it for almost half of its history.
Through the efforts of many people in the past 106 years—their hard work, their practice, their engineering breakthroughs—aviation has quickly gone from its dangerous infancy to being so commonplace that there is little tolerance for any risk at all. We may have made it look too easy. People have forgotten what’s at stake.
I’m not saying passengers shouldn’t feel comfortable flying. It’s just that it’s easy to become complacent when our nation can sometimes go a year or two between major airline accidents involving fatalities. When things are going well, success can hide inefficiencies and deficiencies. And so it takes constant vigilance.
Long before I found myself in the cockpit of Flight 1549, I had closely studied other airline accidents. There is much to be learned from the experiences of pilots who were involved in the seminal accidents of recent decades. I have soberly paged through transcripts from cockpit voice recorders, with the last exchanges of pilots who didn’t survive.
I studied these accidents partly because, in the early 1990s, I had joined a couple dozen other US Airways pilots to help develop an air-safety course looking at CRM—crew resource management. Before Flight 1549, my proudest professional contribution was my work in CRM. My fellow facilitators and I helped change the culture of our airline’s pilot group by improving cockpit communication, leadership, and decision making. As First Officer Jeff Diercksmeier, my friend on the CRM team, said, “It was a time when a few people who really believed in what they were doing made a difference.”
My interest in air safety goes back to my first flights as a teenager. I’ve always wanted to know how some pilots handled challenging situations and made the best decisions. These were men and women worth emulating.
And so I tried to understand, intimately, the full stories behind each of these pilot’s actions. I’d ask myself: If I had been there, would I have been as successful?
A few years ago, I was invited to speak at an international conference in France focused on safety issues in a variety of industries. Given the comparatively ultrasafe record of commercial aviation, I was asked to appear on two panels to discuss how airline safety efforts might be transferable elsewhere. I talked about how other industries are recognizing that they can benefit by adopting some of our approaches.
This degree of safety requires tremendous commitment at every level of an organization and a constant diligence and vigilance to make it a reality.
Those of us who are pilots worry about the financial issues now weighing down airlines. Most passengers today select carriers based on price. If one airline’s fare is five dollars less than a competitor