Highest Duty_ My Search for What Really Matters - Chesley B. Sullenberger [99]
In her letter to me, Theresa wrote that she cried watching news reports of Flight 1549. She was reminded of how much she had wished that her father’s flight could have had the same positive outcome—a safe water landing. She wished that he and the 109 others on his DC-9–32 could have made their way onto the plane’s wings, or into slide rafts in the water of the Everglades.
“I had wondered for many years what my dad’s final minutes were like,” Theresa wrote. “I had assumed he was full of fear, and regret that he would never see his family again. The thought of him dying in a moment of panic and sadness was overwhelming for me.”
Greg Feith, the lead investigator with the National Transportation Safety Board, had told her that her dad’s focus would have been on landing the plane. The investigator’s words had been somewhat reassuring to her. But in the thirteen years since, she was unable to fully embrace them, because the investigator had never been in a cockpit of a plane in great distress. How could he know what a pilot was truly thinking in such a horrible moment?
That’s why my appearance on 60 Minutes was so meaningful to Theresa. She heard me explain that I had no extraneous thoughts once we lost those engines over New York. My mind never wandered. I was thinking only of how Jeff and I could get Flight 1549 to safety. My comments provided her with an epiphany of sorts.
“To hear you say how focused you were, and that you had a job to do…it gives me peace of mind, because you were someone who lived through it,” she wrote. “I now know that Greg was right. My dad didn’t leave this world in a moment of deep sadness. He was only trying to do his job. I can’t thank you enough, Captain Sullenberger. It has been a real blessing to hear your story.”
Lorrie was moved to tears by Theresa’s letter. She couldn’t get it out of her head, and so she decided to call her. They spoke for an hour—a pilot’s wife and a pilot’s daughter, sharing memories. “It was cathartic for both of us,” Lorrie later told me.
Theresa talked of the inappropriate things well-meaning people have said to her. “People tell me that my father died doing what he loved,” she told Lorrie. “Hearing that hasn’t been helpful to me. If he died in his garden of a heart attack, that would be different. That would have been dying doing something he loved. But he died in a three-thousand-degree fire. That wasn’t what he loved.”
The search for the remains of Flight 592 victims took two months, and Theresa told Lorrie how traumatic that was for surviving families. The plane had disintegrated into the smallest pieces, which had to be pulled from the muck far into the Everglades. While workers pushed through every sawgrass blade, snipers stood by to shoot alligators before they approached.
Half of those who died on the flight were never identified. Theresa recalled talking to a woman who was given her son’s ankle. They were able to identify it because of a tattoo.
Theresa’s father was identified only by a finger, which was delivered to the family in a small box. Because he was in the Air Force, there were records of his fingerprints. “The coroner asked what we wanted to do with it,” Theresa said. “We told him, ‘We want it back in the Everglades with the rest of him.’”
A mental health counselor and a wildlife and fisheries agent went with the family to the crash site during a memorial service, dropping First Officer Hazen’s remains from a small envelope back into the water. It was a surreal and tough moment for the family, and yet it offered a small bit of comfort.
There have been all sorts of airline incidents since the ValuJet crash in 1996, but Theresa said Flight 1549 struck her in ways that none of the others had. Flight 1549 and Flight 592 were similar, she said. Both encountered