Highest Duty_ My Search for What Really Matters - Chesley B. Sullenberger [72]
Seattle is a gorgeous city to fly into. When I was a pilot at PSA, I would sometimes fly up to Seattle from Los Angeles, and I knew by memory the volcanoes in the Cascade Range heading north—Mount McLoughlin, Mount Bachelor, the Three Sisters, Mount Washington, Mount Jefferson, Mount Hood, Mount Adams, Mount Rainier. Each mountain would loom into view, one after the other.
I’ve flown over a lot of places in America—Montana, Idaho, the Dakotas—where you travel great distances without much evidence of human habitation. It’s a lonely kind of beauty, but it can tug at you. I also like flying on the East Coast, where the population density is striking. There’s a constant stream of lights between Washington, D.C., and Boston. From the air, it has almost become one continuous megalopolis.
Flying down to Ft. Lauderdale, I like passing over Cape Canaveral and seeing its three-mile-long runway. What a thrill it would be to land the shuttle there. Florida trips also have reminded me of how easily nature can tear apart hundreds of miles of human development. For years after a spate of hurricanes in 2004 and 2005, thousands of homes in South Florida had blue tarps covering their roofs. It was sobering to fly above that checkerboard carpet of blue squares, to see the destructive powers of wind and rain.
In the early 1990s, when I was lower on the seniority list, I had to pilot a lot of red-eye flights. On so many of those red-eyes, I got to see the northern lights again and again. Especially in the wintertime, there were nights when for the whole trip, west to east, the lights would fill the entire northern horizon. To me, these lights—formed by charged particles colliding in the earth’s magnetosphere—looked like curtains billowing gently in the wind, with their folds swaying in and out. Sometimes, the lights were a deep magenta or cherry red. Other times, as the lights were cycling, they were lime green. Rather than looking like a curtain, these green lights sometimes looked like an old TV with the vertical hold not adjusted properly and the lines on the TV rolling from bottom to top. I felt privileged to be in a place, night after night, where I could see such scenes.
A few years ago, my schedule included regular trips to Bermuda, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, and Antigua, which were a lot more fun than landing in Charlotte for the 141st time. I loved approaching the islands during daylight. We’d come in over shallow turquoise water, with the white, sandy beaches and lush green mountains ahead of us.
I USED to fly from Albany, New York, to LaGuardia, and we’d pass over West Point, a trip that would often jog memories for me. One winter, when I was a cadet at the Air Force Academy, I was sent to West Point for a week as part of an exchange program. On that visit, everything there felt gray to me: the stone walls of the old buildings, the winter sky, the cadets’ uniforms. I ate in the cavernous cadet dining hall, where I was told that General Douglas MacArthur made his last visit to West Point. He had come back to his beloved alma mater in 1962 to give his famous “Duty, Honor, Country” speech. Flying over West Point on winter days decades later, I’d find myself thinking about that speech and wondering what the current cadets were doing at that particular moment.
My schedule takes me into and out of LaGuardia about fifteen times a year, and in my career, I’ve flown there hundreds of times. So I know the general landscape and landmarks of the area very well.
In the New York corridor, when the weather is good, controllers often tell us to fly toward a specific landmark on the ground. This use of “reporting points”—especially important when pilots are flying visually in addition to using instruments—is less common in some other areas of the country, where the landmarks aren’t as large or well-known.
“Direct to the statue. Follow