Highest Duty_ My Search for What Really Matters - Chesley B. Sullenberger [96]
But now I am recognized everywhere, and I have people coming up to me with tears in their eyes. They’re not sure why they’re crying. Their feelings about what the flight represents, and then the surprise of meeting me, just cause a swell of emotions. When people seem so grateful to me, my foremost feeling is that I don’t deserve this attention or their effusive thanks. I feel like a bit of an impostor. And yet, I also feel I have an obligation not to disappoint them. I don’t want to dismiss their gratitude or suggest that they shouldn’t feel the way they do.
Of course, I’m still not comfortable with the “hero” mantle. As Lorrie likes to say, a hero is someone who risks his life running into a burning building. Flight 1549 was different, because it was thrust upon me and my crew. We did our best, we turned to our training, we made good decisions, we didn’t give up, we valued every life on that plane—and we had a good outcome. I don’t know that “heroic” describes that. It’s more that we had a philosophy of life, and we applied it to the things we did that day, and the things we did on a lot of days leading up to it.
As I see it, rather than an act of heroism, that philosophy is what people are responding to.
They also embraced news of Flight 1549 because it came at a moment when a lot of people were feeling pretty low.
On January 15, 2009, the day of our flight, the world was in transition. The presidency of the United States was about to change hands, which had some people feeling hopeful and others feeling nervous about the road ahead. It was a time of great uncertainty, with two wars and the world economy falling apart. On a lot of fronts, people felt confused and fearful. They wondered if we as a society had lost our way or gotten off track. Some people had been questioning even our basic competence.
They heard about Flight 1549 and it was unlike most stories they learn of through the media, in that the news continued to be good. The plane had landed safely. Passengers and rescuers had reached out and helped one another. Everyone on the plane had lived. It was all positive news (unless of course you owned or insured that Airbus A320—then the news wasn’t as completely upbeat).
For people watching reports of Flight 1549 on their televisions, this felt remarkable. It enabled them to reassure themselves that all the ideals that we believe in are true, even if they’re not always evident. They decided that the American character still exists, that what we think our country stands for is still there.
I’ve come to have a greater appreciation of life—and of America, too—through my interactions with so many people since the event. They say they were touched by my story, but so very often I am even more touched by theirs.
WHEN FLIGHT 1549 landed in the Hudson, eighty-four-year-old Herman Bomze watched the rescue from his thirtieth-floor Manhattan apartment overlooking the river.
Mr. Bomze, a retired marine and civil engineer, found himself feeling very moved as passengers scurried into their rafts and onto the wings. He was concerned that all the passengers hadn’t made it out of the plane. He worried the ferries wouldn’t get to everyone in time. He called his daughter, Bracha Nechama, and left her a voice mail to tell her how it affected him. She in turn sent a letter telling me his story.
In 1939, when Herman was fifteen years old, he, his sister, and his parents were living in Vienna and trying desperately to get out of Austria. Because they were Jewish, their apartment had been ransacked by Nazis. They knew of the mass deportations of Jews and had heard the rumors of mass murder.
Herman’s family hoped to come to the United States, where relatives lived and were willing to sign paperwork vouching for them. In those days, the United States had strict quotas on how many European refugees could be admitted.