Highest Duty_ My Search for What Really Matters - Chesley B. Sullenberger [55]
IN RECENT years, I’ll often come home from work weary. I’ve been gone for days. I may have traveled twelve thousand miles. I’ve endured all sorts of weather or traffic delays. I’m ready for bed. A lot of wives ask, “How was your day at the office?” Their husbands talk about big sales they’ve made or deals they’ve closed. I’ve also had my good days at the office.
One evening I came home and Lorrie was standing in the kitchen. She asked how my day had gone. I began to tell her.
I had piloted an Airbus A321 from Charlotte to San Francisco. It was one of those nights when there wasn’t much traffic. Air traffic controllers didn’t have to impose many constraints about altitude or speed. It was up to me how I wanted to travel the final 110 miles, and how I would get from thirty-eight thousand feet down to the runway in San Francisco.
It was an incredibly clear and gorgeous night, the air was smooth, and I could see the airport from sixty miles out. I started my descent at just the right distance so that the engines would be near idle thrust almost all the way in, until just prior to landing. If I started down at the right place, I could avoid having to use the speed brakes, which cause a rumbling in the cabin when extended. To get it right, I’d need to perfectly manage the energy of the jet.
“It was a smooth, continuous descent,” I told Lorrie, “one gentle, slowly curving arc, with a gradual deceleration of the airplane. The wheels touched the runway softly enough that the spoilers didn’t deploy immediately because they didn’t recognize that the wheels were on the ground.”
Lorrie was touched by my enthusiasm. She noticed that I was telling the story with real emotion. “I’m glad,” she said.
“And you know what?” I told her. “I’m guessing no one on the plane even noticed. Maybe some people sensed it was a smooth ride, but I’m sure they didn’t think much about it. I was doing it for myself.”
Lorrie likes to say that I love “the art of the airplane.” She is right about that.
The industry has changed, the job has changed, and I’ve changed, too. But I still remember the passion that I hoped one day to feel when I was five years old. And on this night, I felt it.
9
SHOWING UP FOR LIFE
IN MARCH 1964, when I was thirteen years old, I saw a story on the evening news that I couldn’t get out of my head.
My parents, my sister, and I were in our family room, eating dinner on TV trays and watching our black-and-white Emerson TV, a bulky box encased in a blond wood cabinet. As usual, my parents turned the cream-colored plastic channel knob until they came to NBC’s Huntley-Brinkley Report. David Brinkley was based in Washington, D.C., and Chet Huntley was based in New York, where news had broken about a twenty-eight-year-old woman named Kitty Genovese.
She lived in Queens, and had been stabbed to death outside her apartment. Her neighbors heard her screams as she was being attacked and sexually assaulted by a stranger. Allegedly, they did nothing to help her.
According to the news report, thirty-eight people had heard her cries for help and didn’t call police because they didn’t want to get involved. Their inaction was later dubbed by sociologists as “the bystander effect.” People are less apt to help in an emergency when they assume or hope that other bystanders will step up and intervene.
These initial news reports about the incident would eventually turn out to be an exaggeration. Some neighbors didn’t act because they thought they were witnessing a lovers’ quarrel. Others weren’t sure what they were hearing on a cold night with their windows closed. One person did end up calling the police.
But back in 1964, all I knew was what I was hearing from The Huntley-Brinkley Report, and the news was very