Highest Duty_ My Search for What Really Matters - Chesley B. Sullenberger [18]
In the wake of Flight 1771, some groups of airline workers were subjected to security requirements similar to those set for passengers, better methods of employment verification were instituted, and federal law required employees to turn in their IDs after being terminated from airline jobs. But larger problems with security would still need to be addressed. Standing on that hillside in California, I couldn’t have imagined the way cockpits would be breached on September 11, 2001.
In my role helping with accident investigations, I also was called upon to talk to passengers who survived crashes.
On February 1, 1991, there was a runway collision at Los Angeles International Airport between USAir Flight 1493 and SkyWest Airlines Flight 5569. It happened in part because the local air traffic controller cleared the USAir jet, a 737–3B7, to land while the SkyWest commuter plane, a Fairchild Metro III, was holding in position to take off on the same runway. All ten people on the SkyWest plane died, and twenty-two passengers were killed on the 737. I was given the task of interviewing some of the sixty-seven survivors from the 737.
The NTSB gave us a long questionnaire, with questions such as: What announcements do you recall hearing? Did the emergency exit lights come on? Which exit did you use to escape? Did you help anyone else get out? Did anyone help you get out?
All of these questions were designed to help the airline industry learn from these events and improve the next outcome.
It was not especially pleasant work investigating accidents, but I was grateful for the opportunities to do so. When I talked to survivors, I listened carefully, trying to understand, and I filed away the details, in case I’d ever need to draw on them.
4
“MEASURE TWICE, CUT ONCE”
I GREW UP in a home where each of us had our own hammer.
When I think about the work ethic and the values that carried me through life, and through seven million miles as a pilot, I think at times about the hammer my dad gave me as a boy.
He had married my mom in 1948, bought a piece of farmland from her parents, and borrowed $3,000 to build a house on it. It was a very small ranch house, just one bedroom. But over the years that followed, my dad devoted himself to enlarging the homestead again and again. He built a series of additions with the help of three not-always-willing assistants: my mother, my sister, and me.
My parents were born in Denison, Texas, and my mom only lived in two homes her entire life, and they were within one mile of each other. The first was her childhood home, built around 1918 by my grandfather, Russell Hanna, who used materials he found right there on the property. He cleared the land of a great number of large stones, cut them with the help of a hired hand, and used them to build the house and other farm structures. From that home, my mom at age twenty-one moved just down the road to the little place she built with my dad. She’d live there, on Hanna Drive, for the rest of her life.
Certainly, my maternal grandfather could have named that gravel road First Avenue or Main Street or whatever. But the road led to his property, and so it bore his name. That’s where I grew up, 11100 Hanna Drive, an ever-expanding house next to Lake Texoma, eleven miles outside of Denison.
My dad’s father, who died before I was born, owned a planing mill—a final processing plant for lumber—and my paternal grandmother continued to be involved in the office operations after he was gone. It was right there in Denison, and when I was a young boy, I’d visit and play happily in the huge mounds of sawdust. The place was thick with the sounds of giant woodworking machinery and the wonderful smell of lumber. There was also a cool device on my grandmother’s desk, a coil-springed gadget shaped like a human hand and made of stamped-out sheet metal. My grandmother stored envelopes and paperwork between the hand’s fingers. Having grown up in that mill, my dad had a love and knowledge of woodworking, and of making things with his hands. By adulthood, he