Highest Duty (21 page)

I felt the most intense feeling of relief I’d ever felt in my life. I felt like the weight of the universe had been lifted off of my heart. I probably let out a long breath. I’m not sure I smiled. I was too spent to celebrate.

It had been the most harrowing day of my life, but I was incredibly grateful for this ending. We hadn’t saved the Airbus 320. That was ruined. But the people on the plane, they would be returning to their families. All of them.

I
AM USED
to it now.

I open a letter and five one-dollar bills fall out. “Mr. Sullenberger, Great job! I’d like to buy you a beer, albeit a cheap domestic one.”

A fax arrives: “In this crazy world, it’s good to know that chance still favors the prepared mind. Good job, Captain!”

A letter comes with an illustration of Snoopy in an exhilarated dance pose. The caption: “Oh Happy Day!” The letter writer is a woman from New Jersey. “We on the East Coast are still scarred by 9/11. It seemed all in the tristate area lost a family member, a friend, a neighbor, a coworker. Your splash in the river made us feel elated, serene, and happy!”

I have gotten thousands of messages such as these since Flight 1549. I have received ten thousand e-mails from people who tracked down my safety consulting business online. Another five
thousand e-mails arrived at my personal e-mail address. I don’t know much about Facebook, but my kids tell me I have more than 635,000 fans there.

I’ve heard from people on every continent except Antarctica. And almost every time I’m at the mall or in a restaurant, strangers come up to say they don’t mean to bother me, but they just want to say thank you.

While a few of these correspondents had loved ones or friends on Flight 1549, the vast majority did not. What happened on that airplane touched them deeply enough that they felt compelled to reach out to me and my family. Some tell me that after hearing about our flight, they found themselves reflecting on a seminal moment in their own lives or thinking about a person who inspired them. Others ended up reviewing the dreams they had for their children or feeling renewed grief about losses they’re still trying to understand.

I have become a recipient of people’s reflections because I am now the public face of an unexpectedly uplifting moment that continues to resonate. Hearing from so many people, paying attention to their stories—that’s part of my new job.

I’ve come to see their thankfulness as a generous gift, and I don’t want to diminish their kind words by denying them. Though it made me uncomfortable at first, I’ve made a decision to graciously accept people’s thanks. At the same time I don’t strive to take it as my own. I recognize that I have been given a role to play, and maybe some good can happen as a result.

It’s not a role that I had ever experienced before. I spent a lifetime being anonymous. I was proud of my wife, proud of my
kids, but I lived a quiet home life. My work life was also mostly hidden, conducted on the other side of a locked cockpit door.

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 un
certainty, 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.

W
HEN 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 every
one 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. At the U.S. embassy in Vienna, the family was told that only three visas were available—for Herman, his mother, and his sister. Because Herman’s father had a Polish passport, and there were different quotas for Poles, there would be no visa for him.

“Please,” Herman’s mother pleaded. “Let our family stay together.”

“You can stay together if you’d like,” the embassy clerk told them. “If you want to stay here in Austria, you can be together. If the three of you want to go, you can go. It’s your choice.”

The family made a decision. Herman’s father would stay behind. Herman, his sister, and his mother would escape to the United States, where life would be safer for them. The three of them arrived here in August 1939, and not long after that, Herman’s father was transported to Buchenwald concentration camp. He was murdered there in February 1940.

Almost seventy years later, Herman watched the rescue of
Flight 1549 unfold, and it was, in part, these difficult memories that compelled him to call his daughter, Bracha. Afterward, Bracha continued to think about the connections between me and her father, and she reached out to me with her letter.

She wrote of Herman’s great reverence for life, forged through the Holocaust. She also wrote that her father was lucky that our flight found safety in the river, as opposed to crashing into buildings in Manhattan.

“Had you not been so skilled and such a lover of life,” she wrote, “my father or others like him, in their sky-high buildings, could have perished along with your passengers. As a Holocaust survivor, my father taught me that to save a life is to save the world.”

She explained to me the Jewish view that if you save one person, you never know what he or she might go on to accomplish, or how his or her progeny might contribute to peace and healing in the world. “May you know the joy of having saved generations of people,” Bracha wrote, “allowing them the possibility of humanitarianism such as yours. Bless you, Captain Sullenberger.”

Her letter continues to move and inspire me. I feel honored that she viewed the landing of the plane in the Hudson as “a powerful commitment to life.” She’s right: I don’t know the good things still to be accomplished by the 154 people on my flight. I can’t fathom what contributions might be made to the world by their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren yet to be born.

T
HERE WERE
those who wrote to say they agreed with me: I am not a hero. I appreciated the ways they spoke to me. They
wrote to say that preparation and diligence are not the same as heroism.

“In your interviews, you seemed uncomfortable being called a hero,” wrote Paul Kellen of Medford, Massachusetts. “I also found the title inappropriate. I see a hero as electing to enter a dangerous situation for a higher purpose, and you were not given a choice. That is not to say you are not a man of virtue, but I see your virtue arising from your choices at other times. It is clear you take your professional responsibilities seriously. It is clear that many of the choices in your life prepared you for that moment when your engines failed.

“There are people among us who are ethical, responsible, and diligent. I think there are many of them. You might have toiled in obscurity were it not for an ill-timed meeting with a flock of birds.

“I hope your story encourages those many others who toil in obscurity to know that their reward is simple—they will be ready if the test comes. I do not mean to diminish your achievement. I just want to point out that when the challenge sounded, you had thoroughly prepared yourself. I hope your story encourages others to imitation.”

I heard from more than a few people who lost loved ones in accidents, or who survived accidents themselves. Some of these tragedies involved airplanes.

People wrote of how they had found the courage to return to flying, mostly because they had resolved to trust the professionals in the cockpit.

Karen Kaiser Clark of St. Paul, Minnesota, wrote to me about
Delta Air Lines Flight 191, which crashed in Dallas on August 2, 1985, “taking the lives of 139 people, each with a family, a circle of friends, and a place in the world no one could replace. It was wind shear, and my mom, Kate, was among the last seven identified. Her fifteen friends were also killed. Just five months prior, we had taken our father off life support. This was her first venture as a widow.”

In the wake of the tragedy, Karen said, she was able to find a path to acceptance and a new appreciation for life. “Following Mom’s funeral in Florida,” she wrote, “we flew with her ashes and Dad’s to inter them in Toledo, Ohio. However, our flight was caught in horrible turbulence. We were all terrified, but in those moments I vowed that if we were able to land, I would find a way to (1) grow through these terrible times and not become bitter, and (2) continue to fly, as I lecture internationally.”

Bart Simon, who owns a hair-products company in Cleveland, told me he was on USAir Flight 405 when it attempted takeoff from LaGuardia on the night of March 22, 1992, and crashed in Flushing Bay. “I was one of the lucky ones who walked away with just a small cut on my head,” Bart wrote. Twenty-seven people died, and nine of the twenty-three other survivors had serious injuries. The National Transportation Safety Board later said the probable causes were ice on the wings, failures of the FAA and the airline industry to have appropriate procedures regarding icing and delays, and the flight crew’s decision to take off without knowing for sure that the wings were free of ice.

“I had been successful in putting that evening out of my mind
and getting on with my life,” Bart told me, “but the pictures of your landing last month and the similarity of the circumstances—US Airways, LaGuardia, the water—brought the memories rushing back.” He wrote that when he watched our crew on TV, it seemed as if we epitomized what passengers hope to find when they board flights: professionals who are “cool, calm, and most of all, in command, no matter how dire the circumstances.” He said he was writing to say thanks “on behalf of the millions of us who entrust our lives to you and your fellow pilots every year.”

He had boarded a plane out of LaGuardia bound for Cleveland the very morning after that 1992 crash. “The charred remains of Flight 405 were clearly visible in Flushing Bay as my plane taxied by, but I left that morning calm in the knowledge that a skilled professional was at the controls, and that in a short time I would be back home.”

As pilots, we sometimes sense that passengers have no awareness of us. It’s as if they’re just pushing their way past the cockpit, looking for space in the overhead compartments. But in the wake of Flight 1549, I’ve been able to hear from people such as Karen Kaiser Clark and Bart Simon, and it is humbling to contemplate the faith and trust that they and others like them have placed in us.

T
HERESA
H
UNSICKER
, who runs a day-care center in Louisiana, learned about Flight 1549 while watching Fox News. A forty-three-year-old mother of a nine-year-old girl, she saw me on
60 Minutes
and felt compelled to write about how my interview had affected her.

“My name is Theresa Hunsicker,” her letter began, “and I am the daughter of Richard Hazen, who was the copilot of ValuJet 592. It went down in the Florida Everglades on May 11, 1996, with 110 people on board.”

Flight 592 had taken off from Miami International Airport, headed for Atlanta, with Captain Candalyn Kubeck at the controls. About six minutes into the flight, she and First Officer Hazen reported fire in the plane’s interior and smoke in the cockpit. On the cockpit recording, a female voice is heard shouting from the cabin: “Fire, fire, fire, fire!”

First Officer Hazen radioed to the controller, asking to return to the airport. A few minutes later, traveling at five hundred miles per hour, it crashed in the Everglades. The plane was destroyed on impact.