Highest Duty_ My Search for What Really Matters - Chesley B. Sullenberger [49]
Exercises such as Red Flag were thrilling, but other aspects of military life were less appealing to me.
As I approached the end of my service commitment in the late 1970s, I got the sense that the best part of my military career was already behind me. I’d served six years and I just loved flying fighters. But I had learned that if I wanted to have a successful, rising career as an Air Force officer, I’d have to do a lot more than climb into a cockpit and fly. To keep getting promoted, I’d have to choose a career path that took me further away from flying. I’d have to spend much of my time giving briefings or sitting at a desk, signing off on paperwork.
In the peacetime Air Force, appearances mattered. Not just haircuts and shoeshines, but also how you appeared to those above you in the hierarchy. To get promoted, you had to be a good politician. You needed to develop alliances and find a well-connected mentor.
Yes, certain people respected my flying abilities, but I was never particularly good at networking. I didn’t put the effort into it. I felt I could get by on my own merits as an aviator.
There were other things that also factored into my decision to leave the Air Force. By the late 1970s, with the Vietnam War over, there was a big drawdown in the military budget. The cuts were exacerbated by rising fuel costs, which meant that to save money, we weren’t being permitted to fly as much. It takes years to get good at using a jet fighter as a weapon, so it was crucial to get pilots into the air as often as possible. The budget issues would leave me grounded more than I would have liked.
My career decisions at that time in my life had a lot to do with the simple question: How much will I get to fly?
The idea of applying to be an astronaut certainly had great appeal to me, but by the late 1970s, when I might have tried to qualify, manned missions weren’t in the forefront of NASA’s plans. The Apollo program, which had sent twelve men to the moon between 1969 and 1972, had been canceled. The space shuttle wasn’t yet in operation. Two of my academy classmates would end up flying the space shuttle in the early 1990s, and in many ways I envied them. But I knew I’d have to spend years and years of my life preparing to fly just once or twice in space. That’s if I could even have made the cut. I didn’t have an engineering degree, and had never been a test pilot as my two classmates had been.
My last day of military service was set for February 13, 1980, three weeks after my twenty-ninth birthday. President Reagan had just taken office and the hostages had been released in Iran. It looked like the nation was headed into more peaceful times, and it felt like the right time for me to return to civilian life.
My final flight was an air-to-air combat training mission, and as you can imagine, it was bittersweet. I flew against our squadron commander, Lieutenant Colonel Ben Nelson, and we both knew the emotions I was feeling at the controls. After the flight, I climbed out of the jet, shook hands with Lieutenant Colonel Nelson and some other well-wishers on the ramp, and then I gave a final salute. It was a simple good-bye.
“Good luck, Sully,” Lieutenant Colonel Nelson said.
It was official. I would never again fly a fighter. That’s not to say I wasn’t a fighter pilot, though. Just as there’s no such thing as an ex-Marine, I would always be a fighter pilot.
I SENT an application to almost every airline, but it was not an easy time to get a job as a commercial pilot. The airlines were losing money and starting to feel the effects of federal deregulation fifteen months earlier. There were growing issues between management and labor. In the decade to follow, more than a hundred airlines would go out of business, including nine major carriers.
All of the airlines combined hired just over a thousand pilots in 1980,