Highest Duty_ My Search for What Really Matters - Chesley B. Sullenberger [61]
The assistant chief pilot didn’t seem pleased that I was pushing back. But we let the matter be.
Six months later, on another Sunday, I found myself in the same situation. Empty seats. People in the boarding area eager to take them. The agents wanted us to close the cabin door, I insisted that we load the passengers, and our flight left the gate six minutes late.
The agents wrote me up again. And the assistant chief pilot called me again. He was in a pissier mood this time. “The chief pilot wants to give you two weeks off without pay,” he told me.
My union rep ended up talking to management and they never went through with their suspension threat. After all, I wasn’t alone. Many captains were having to fight this battle repeatedly. And then one day, a few months later, management came out with a new memo. It stated that passengers are not to be left behind if seats are available to them. I smiled when I read that.
All of us have little battles we can choose to take on or to skip. Some captains feel as I do about these sorts of things, and they fight. Others acquiesce and give up. None of us likes leaving passengers at the gate, but some have decided: “I can’t fight so many battles every day.”
I guess I haven’t had what I call “a sense of caring” beaten out of me yet. I empathized with those standby passengers. But as important, leaving them behind just would have felt wrong. And so I acted.
These are minor things, I know. But I feel better about myself when I make these kinds of efforts. And it’s nice to feel I’m doing a little good in the process.
I’VE READ a great deal as I’ve commuted from San Francisco to my base in Charlotte. The trip across the country seems to go faster when I’m engrossed in a book. My tastes haven’t changed much since I was a boy: I continue to be drawn to history.
I have read a few terrific books about the nation’s Medal of Honor recipients. Each of their stories is inspiring. But I remain particularly haunted by the story of twenty-three-year-old Henry Erwin, a U.S. Army Air Forces radio operator from Alabama whose heroism during World War II was astounding. On April 12, 1945, Staff Sergeant Erwin was on a B-29 mission to attack a gasoline plant in Koriyama, Japan. One of his tasks was to help the bombers see their aim points by dropping a phosphorus flare through a tube in the floor of the B-29. The device exploded in the tube, and the phosphorus was ignited, blinding Erwin and engulfing him in flames. Smoke filled the airplane. Erwin knew the flare would soon burn through the floor, igniting the bombs in the bomb bay below, destroying the B-29 and probably killing the crew.
Though Erwin was in excruciating pain, he crawled along the floor, found the burning flare, and held it against his chest with his bare hands. He brought it up to the cockpit, screamed to the copilot to open his window, and heaved it out, saving the other eleven men on board.
Erwin was expected to die within days from his injuries, and the decision was made by General Curtis LeMay to award him the Medal of Honor before he succumbed. The problem was, there was no Medal of Honor to be found in the Western Pacific. The closest one was hours away in a glass display case in Honolulu. And so an airman was dispatched in the middle of the night to go pick it up. When he couldn’t find the key to open the display case, he broke the glass. He collected the medal, and put it on a plane bound for Guam, where it was pinned on the still-alive-and-conscious Staff Sergeant Erwin, wrapped head to toe in bandages.
Erwin surprised everyone, living through forty-three operations. He remained hospitalized until 1947,