Highest Duty_ My Search for What Really Matters - Chesley B. Sullenberger [44]
I had to take statements from the other guys in his squadron. I had to sort through photos of the accident, shots of the shattered plane on the desert floor. The carnage was chronicled in exact detail, including photos of identifiable sections of the pilot’s scalp.
As in every Air Force accident, investigators had to turn all the specific circumstances inside out to learn exactly what transpired. It was as if the pilot who died still had a responsibility to help ensure the safety of the rest of us, his fellow aviators.
Pilots are taught that it is vital to always have “situational awareness,” or “SA.” That means you are able to create and maintain a very accurate real-time mental model of your reality. Investigating this pilot’s apparent inaccurate SA reminded me of what was at stake for fighter pilots. It took an absolute commitment to excellence because we were required to do incredible things close to the ground and fast, often changing directions quickly, while always making sure that the way we were pointed was safe to go.
In so many areas of life, you need to be a long-term optimist but a short-term realist. That’s especially true given the inherent dangers in military aviation. You can’t be a wishful thinker. You have to know what you know and what you don’t know, what you can do and what you can’t do. You have to know what your airplane can and can’t do in every possible situation. You need to know your turn radius at every airspeed. You need to know how much fuel it takes to get back, and what altitude would be necessary if an emergency required you to glide back to the runway.
You also need to understand how judgment can be affected by circumstances. There was an aircrew ejection study conducted years ago which tried to determine why pilots would wait too long before ejecting from planes that were about to crash. These pilots waited extra seconds, and when they finally pulled the handle to eject, it was too late. They either ejected at too low an altitude and hit the ground before their parachutes could open, or they went down with their planes.
What made these men wait? The data indicated that if the plane was in distress because of a pilot’s error in judgment, he often put off the decision to eject. He’d spend more precious time trying to fix an unfixable problem or salvage an unsalvageable situation, because he feared retribution if he lost a multimillion-dollar jet. If the problem was a more clear-cut mechanical issue beyond the pilot’s control, he was more likely to abandon his aircraft and survive by ejecting at a higher, safer altitude.
My friend Jim Leslie was on a training mission in an F-4 in 1984, dogfighting with other airplanes. His plane ended up in a spin due to a mechanical malfunction, and there was no way to get it to fly again. “Pilots are only human,” he later told me. “In stressful situations, your brain tells you what you want to hear and see, which is: ‘This ain’t happening to me!’ And so you mentally deny that your plane is going down. You think you have time to fix the problem or to escape, when really, you have no time. And so you eject too late.”
Jim pulled his ejection handle, which first sent his WSO out of the F-4, then sent him a split second later. “I thought I had ejected us in plenty of time,” he said, “but I later learned that I did it just three seconds before the plane hit the ground.” Had he waited even one second longer, he wouldn’t have made it safely out of the aircraft.
“Nobody wants to crash,” Jim said. “It’s not a good mark on your flight record. The loss of that F-4 cost the Air Force four million dollars that day. But