Highest Duty_ My Search for What Really Matters - Chesley B. Sullenberger [9]
As I sat in my middle seat on the way to Charlotte, I found myself reading and taking notes for my consulting business. I don’t recall trading too many words with the passengers on either side of me.
When I’m a passenger in the back of a plane, though I’m reading or trying to nap or worrying about the shuttered Jiffy Lube, I still have a general awareness of how the flight is going and what the pilots are doing. I can feel the movements of the airplane. Most of my fellow passengers are engaged with their own books or are tapping away on their laptops, and they don’t realize subtle things. But even when I’m not trying, I can tell when the plane is climbing or descending, or when the pilots are changing the flap setting or the engine thrust. For pilots, that general awareness comes with the territory.
The flight I was on had left San Francisco at 7:30 A.M. Pacific time, and arrived in Charlotte at 3:15 P.M. Eastern time. I got something to eat at the airport in Charlotte and then made my way to the gate for my first piloted flight of the four-day trip. I’d be going right back to San Francisco, flying an Airbus A321, carrying about 180 passengers.
Once I got to the gate, I smiled at some of the passengers and greeted the three flight attendants—Sheila Dail, Donna Dent, and Doreen Welsh. I had flown with Sheila and Donna before. I’m guessing I had shared trips with Doreen, too, some years ago, when we were both based in Pittsburgh. Because US Airways hasn’t hired new flight attendants in years, all our crews are veterans. Doreen, now fifty-eight, joined the company in 1970 when it was Allegheny Airlines. That’s thirty-eight years of experience. Both Sheila, fifty-seven, and Donna, fifty-one, have more than twenty-six years with the airline.
At the gate, I also shook hands with Jeff Skiles, the first officer who’d be flying with me. He and I had never met before, so we introduced ourselves. Along with Sheila, Donna, and Doreen, we’d be a team for the next four days.
Despite all my years as a pilot, it’s common for me to have a first officer or flight attendants I’ve never met. Even after some serious downsizing, US Airways still has about 5,000 pilots and 6,600 flight attendants. It’s impossible to know them all.
It is standard at our airline for a crew to have a brief meeting together at the start of a trip. It’s vital to make individuals feel like a team quickly so that they can work almost as well together on the first flight as they naturally would after having flown several flights together. So before the passengers boarded we stood—Jeff, Sheila, Donna, Doreen, and I—in the aisle of the empty first-class cabin for a couple minutes, and I said a few words.
As the captain, it’s up to me to set the tone. I want to be approachable. I asked the flight attendants to be my eyes and ears during the days ahead, to tell me about anything important that I couldn’t observe from the cockpit. I asked them to let me know what they needed to do their jobs—catering, cleaning, whatever—and told them I’d try to help. I wanted them to know I was looking out for them. “I can’t get you your retirement plans back, but I can do a few things that will make your quality of life better. One of them is, when we arrive at our destination on the last flight of a day, I’ll call the hotel and make sure that they’ve sent the van so we’re not waiting for twenty minutes.”
Jeff, forty-nine years old, was very friendly from the moment we said hello, and in the days to follow I’d learn more about him. Like me, he had earned his private pilot license at sixteen. But he came from an aviation family; both his parents were also pilots. He had worked for US Airways for twenty-three years, with twenty thousand flight hours, and had risen to be a captain. But due to cutbacks in flights and planes, and the effect on the pilots’ seniority list, he was now flying as a first officer.