Highest Duty_ My Search for What Really Matters - Chesley B. Sullenberger [38]
In the summer before sophomore year, we all endured survival training. We were each sent into the woods for four days without food and water. This was called SERE training, which stood for “survival, evasion, resistance, and escape.” It was designed to teach us survival skills, how to avoid being taken as prisoners of war, and how to behave if captured.
The upperclassmen dressed up like communist soldiers and came looking for us. The drama was a bit over-the-top, but it all felt like serious business. I struggled during those days, overwhelmed at times by lack of sleep and food. I was luckier than some of my classmates, because I managed to sneak into the upperclassmen’s encampment unnoticed and grab a loaf of bread and some jelly. Others went all those days without eating.
By sophomore year, I realized how much all of these experiences had helped me mature. I had been very homesick in my first six months at the academy. But when I returned home for visits, my homesickness ended. Here I was, not yet out of my teens, but I had met people from all over the world. I had done hard things I didn’t know I could do. It was as if I had become a man, and my hometown seemed so much smaller to me than I had remembered.
We hadn’t been allowed to fly an aircraft at the academy until the end of our doolie year, so when I got back to Mr. Cook’s grass strip on breaks, I was pretty rusty. I didn’t have enough flying time to really have the total mind-muscle connection that one has riding a bike. I had to get my bearings again.
Starting in my sophomore year at the academy, I got an amazing amount of flying instruction and experience. I’d get a ride down to the airfield every chance I could.
I also signed up to learn how to fly gliders. I loved flying the gliders because gliding is the purest form of flight. It’s almost birdlike. There’s no engine, it’s much quieter, and you’re operating at a slower speed, maybe sixty miles an hour. You feel every gust of wind, and so you’re aware of how light your airplane is, and how you are at the mercy of the elements.
Gliding in Colorado, I learned that the way to stay aloft longer is to carefully use the environment to your advantage. The sun heats the surface of the earth unevenly, especially in summer, and so some parts become warmer than others. The air above the warmer parts is heated and becomes less dense, so you have rising air over these areas of the earth. When you fly through a column of rising air, you can feel it lifting the airplane. If you enter a very tight turn to remain in that air, it’s like riding an elevator as long and as high as it will take you. It’s called “thermal lift,” and going from one thermal to another, you can end up soaring for hours.
In the wintertime, you have “mountain wave lift.” The winds in the air are stronger in winter, and if the wind is crossing a mountain or ridgeline, it’s like water flowing over a rock. If you stay in the rising air downwind of the mountain, you can remain aloft for long periods.
While I was at the academy, in addition to all the hours spent in gliders, I got my flight instructor certificate. I began to teach other cadets, including a dozen friends, how to fly both airplanes and gliders.
Because I had so much experience, when I graduated from the academy in 1973, I was named “Outstanding Cadet in Airmanship.” It was an honor that came because I’d been tenacious in honing my skills through all those hours in the skies.
THE AIR Force Academy gave me an education on many fronts—about human nature, about what it means to be a well-rounded person, and about working harder than I’d thought possible. On campus, the education we received was called “The Whole Man Concept,” because our superiors weren’t just teaching us about the military. They wanted us to have great strength of character, to be informed about all sorts of matters we might easily dismiss, and to find ways to make vital contributions to the world beyond the academy. We cadets often dismissed it as “The Manhole Concept,” but in our