Highest Duty_ My Search for What Really Matters - Chesley B. Sullenberger [53]
The passengers had been understanding and cooperative, and had experienced this incident in full view. I felt they deserved to know the truth. And so I got on the public address system.
“The woman who was ill on our flight was under the care of paramedics out on the jetway,” I said, “but attempts to revive her were not successful.”
There was quiet in the cabin. It was a pretty sobering moment for all of us. Some of the other passengers had watched the woman come onto the plane just like everyone else, put her belongings in the overhead, and settle into her seat. Now, just over an hour after leaving Philadelphia, she was dead.
Because Linda had used emergency medical equipment to help the woman while in flight, we had to wait forty-five minutes for the maintenance staff in Norfolk to replace our medical kit. We also needed to refuel the jet and get a new flight plan. The passengers sat quietly in their seats while we did that.
The woman’s family removed their belongings from the plane—they’d be staying with her body in Norfolk—but their checked baggage, and the woman’s bags, would have to continue on to Florida with us. There was no time to find their specific bags and remove them from the cargo hold. They’d have to be retagged in Florida and sent back to the family.
About five minutes before we were set to take off again, I called the four flight attendants into the cockpit to join me and Rick, the first officer. As the captain, I was the person ultimately responsible for the decisions made that night. I knew it had been stressful for all of us. I wasn’t sure whether the flight attendants felt they could have done more to try to save the woman’s life.
First, I thanked them for their efforts. “You did your best. But as tragic as this outcome was, it would be even more tragic if a stressful situation allowed us to be distracted from our duties going forward.”
The flight attendants looked a bit ashen and weary. “Rick and I here in the cockpit, we’re going to do what we were trained to do,” I said. “We’ll do our checklist. We’ll get the plane into the air. We’ll make it safely down to West Palm. I know you have all of your procedures to do, and I know you’ll do them as you always have. We’ll all need to just fall back on our procedures, and get back into the routine, safe operation that we work so hard to maintain.”
The flight attendants headed back into the cabin. We pulled away from the gate with three fewer passengers than had arrived with us.
The flight from Norfolk to West Palm was routine. We arrived just an hour and fifteen minutes late, and I stood outside the cockpit door as all the passengers deplaned.
“Thank you for your patience this evening,” I said, nodding at them as they passed. They acknowledged my words with slight smiles or nods of their own. And all of us went to bed that night thinking of the family we had left behind in Norfolk.
EARLY ONE Tuesday morning in September 2001, I was driving from my home in Danville to the airport in San Francisco. I had to catch a plane to Pittsburgh, where I was then based, to fly an MD-80 on to Charlotte. I was listening to the radio, an all-news station, and I heard that a plane had just crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York.
How could someone be that off course? I thought. It must have been pretty foggy there. As I listened to the radio report, I was reminded of the infamous 1945 crash of a B-25 into the Empire State Building, when an Army Air Forces bomber pilot lost his way on a foggy Saturday morning, killing himself and thirteen others. I figured this World Trade Center crash must have been a similar accident.
I parked my car in the airport lot, walked into the terminal, and that’s when I heard that another airplane had hit the South Tower and a third plane had