Highest Duty_ My Search for What Really Matters - Chesley B. Sullenberger [46]
Aldo flew his jet very close to mine. He and his WSO inspected the exterior of my aircraft, looking for any obvious damage, fluid leaks, or other anomalies. “You look OK,” Aldo said as he chased me in his F-4.
I contacted Las Vegas Approach Control and advised the civilian controller of my emergency status and of my need to return for landing at Nellis. The controller put certain constraints on how I might return, and how long I could take to line up. He wanted a tighter turn to my final approach.
“Unable,” I told him. That’s the standard response when a pilot can’t do what a controller is asking him.
I told him I needed a five-mile final approach to make sure I could be stabilized for landing. I was glad I had insisted on that, because as I was descending, a gust of wind caused a wing to dip. Aldo and his backseater assumed I was losing control of the F-4. They expected to see Loren and me flying like cannonballs out of our plane in our ejection seats. But I moved the control stick full right, and was able to raise the left wing that had dipped. For the moment, we held on.
After that gust of wind, I was intensely focused on keeping the wings exactly level, and on carefully maintaining both our vertical and horizontal path to the runway. I tried to get exactly in line with the runway’s centerline.
Aldo followed me down, ready to let me know the instant I deviated from the proper path or entered an attitude from which I couldn’t recover. I felt like I was still in control, but I was wary, prepared for the possibility that my aircraft might betray me and I’d have to abandon it.
We made it over the safety area leading up to the runway threshold, and within a few seconds, we were on the runway itself, our drag chute deployed.
We had made it safely to the ground.
I braked to a stop, then slowly taxied back to where the other fighters were parked. Loren and I stepped off the ladder, and stood there for a moment. We were both holding our helmets and oxygen masks in our left hands, but our right hands were free. Loren reached out to shake my hand, and said, from his heart but with a big grin, “I thank you, my mother thanks you, my brother thanks you, my sister thanks you…”
Loren and I had worked together as a team, with help from Aldo and his WSO. We had maintained control of the aircraft and solved each problem so we could land safely.
Had I died that day, other pilots would have grieved for me. Fellow pilots would have been assigned the duty of investigating the accident. They would have learned the cause of my crash. I’m glad I saved them from having to look at a photograph of my scalp.
EACH MAN we lost had his own regrettable story, and so many of the particular details remain with me.
At Nellis, there was Brad Logan, my “wingman” (which meant he flew the aircraft beside me, following my lead). There would be four planes in formation, and Brad was in the number two plane. We flew together more than forty times. He was a very good pilot.
I was a captain, and he was a first lieutenant, a few years younger than I was. He was an unpretentious, unassuming, jovial guy who was always smiling. Big, solid, and friendly, he looked like Dan Blocker, the actor who played Hoss Cartwright on Bonanza. Naturally, Brad’s tactical call sign was “Hoss.”
After Nellis, he was flying out of an air base in Spain. One day, on a training mission, his plane was in formation descending through the clouds. I heard there was a miscalculation or miscommunication between air traffic control and the leader of his flight. Maintaining his assigned position in the formation, through no fault of his own, Brad’s plane crashed into the side of a mountain obscured by clouds. The other planes in the formation were high enough to fly over the mountain, but Brad and his backseater were killed.
He had a wife and a young child, and as I recall, they received just $10,000 or $20,000 from his government life insurance policy. That