Highest Duty: My Search for What Really Matters

19. THE QUESTION

ONE DAY IN early May, almost four months after Flight 1549 landed in the Hudson, three large cardboard boxes arrived at my front door in Danville. Inside, well preserved and neatly packaged, were the things I had left behind in the cockpit of the plane. Everything was there except that eight-dollar tuna sandwich I had bought and never eaten before takeoff.

I was somewhat solemn going through my belongings. I knew that after most airline accidents, such boxes are sent to relatives of victims who’ve died. Or else, when a plane crashes, fire destroys most everything, or the victims’ belongings have been shattered into pieces so small that there is almost nothing to be returned. Maybe relatives will get back someone’s wedding ring. Usually loved ones get little or nothing.

In the case of Flight 1549, all of us who were “survivors” got boxes addressed directly to us. We were able to sign the FedEx slips ourselves. Some of what was returned to us was destroyed and unusable. But a lot of things were in good condition and could be folded back into our lives. Passengers got back their favorite jeans, their coats, their car keys, their purses. I pictured these passengers, all over the country, opening their boxes and flashing back to January 15, 2009. We could focus on waterlogged items that were ruined, or we could go through our personal effects feeling grateful.

The plane had sunk into the Hudson after we all evacuated, and a company from El Segundo, California, Douglass Personal Effects Administrators, was charged with taking what was fished out of the water and trying to reclaim what they could. I was impressed by the job they undertook in order to reunite us with our belongings. They went through every suitcase in the cargo hold and every item in the overhead compartments.

It was amazing and impressive that so many things submerged in dirty, icy water could be brought back to life. The company used sheets of fabric softener to separate all of the clothing and other items. The smell of dryer sheets was overpowering when we opened our boxes.

My roll-aboard bag was in one of the boxes, its contents dried, inventoried, and wrapped up in tissue paper. My iPod, laptop, and alarm clock were trashed. But my phone charger and iPod charger still worked. So did my data cable for transferring photos from my phone to my computer. My mini Maglite also worked fine. My running shoes looked as good as new. The shoes I was wearing on the flight came home with me in January but were totally waterlogged and beaten up. I really hoped they could be saved, because they were what we call “airport-friendly shoes,” with no metal; I didn’t have to take them off to go through security checkpoints. I took those shoes to my favorite local shoe repairman at a shopping center in Danville, and he did a wonderful job fixing and cleaning them up. I wear them still.

On January 15, I was traveling with four library books, including a copy of Just Culture, a book about safety issues. I later called my local library to apologize for leaving the books on the plane, and they agreed not to charge me for replacing them.

Anyway, I was glad to find all four of the library books in one of the boxes of my belongings. The reclamation company had tried using a drying process to make the books usable again but weren’t completely successful. The pages are readable but too wrinkled to be checked out again by library patrons. I returned them anyway. The library has found a place for them to be displayed.

Since Flight 1549 came at the end of a four-day trip, I had mostly dirty laundry in my roll-aboard bag. All of my clothing came back in good condition, ready to wear, and with that strong fabric-softener smell.

I was also glad to get back my Jeppesen airway manual, which contains the charts for all of the airports we serve. Still taped neatly inside the manual, weathered but readable, was the fortune from a fortune cookie that I’d gotten at a Chinese restaurant in San Mateo, California, sometime in the late 1980s.

The fortune read: “A delay is better than a disaster.”

I thought that was good advice at the time and so I’d kept it in the manual ever since.

That fortune reminded me of an unexpected question Kate asked me when she was nine years old. I was driving her to school, and out of the blue, she asked me: “Daddy, what does integrity mean?”

After thinking about it for a little bit, I came up with what, in retrospect, was a pretty good answer. I said, “Integrity means doing the right thing even when it’s not convenient.”

Integrity is the core of my profession. An airline pilot has to do the right thing every time, even if that means delaying or canceling a flight to address a maintenance or other issue, even if it means inconveniencing 183 people who want to get home, including the pilot. By delaying a flight, I am ensuring that they will get home.

I am trained to be intolerant of anything less than the highest standards of my profession. I believe air travel is as safe as it is because tens of thousands of my fellow airline and aviation workers feel a shared sense of duty to make safety a reality every day. I call it a daily devotion to duty. It’s serving a cause greater than ourselves.

And so I think often of that fortune, which sat for a good while in the cockpit of a water-filled Airbus A320, tilted sideways in the Hudson: “A delay is better than a disaster.”

It’s nice to have that fortune back. It will definitely accompany me on future flights.

A FEW days after receiving my belongings, I flew to Washington, D.C., where I met Jeff Skiles at the headquarters of the National Transportation Safety Board. We had been invited to listen to the cockpit voice recorder (CVR), and to offer our thoughts and memories.

Previously, the only tape available had been from the FAA, and that contained the radio communications between us and Air Traffic Control. This NTSB visit would be our first opportunity to listen to the audio from the cockpit voice recorder. We’d hear exactly what we had said to each other in the cockpit during the flight. For four months until this May meeting, both of us had been relying on our memories of what we had said. Now, finally, we would know for sure.

There were six of us in the room: Jeff Skiles, Jeff Diercksmeier, a U.S. Airline Pilots Association accident investigation committee member, three NTSB officials (two investigators and a specialist from the agency’s recordings section), and me. The investigators were happy to have Jeff and me there with them. After many airline accidents, when the recordings are reviewed, the flight crews are not on hand. Often, the pilots whose voices are on the recordings are dead, and so they can’t explain what they were thinking, why they made the decisions they did, or exactly what a particular word was.

Listening to the tape was an intense experience for us. It brought us back together into the cockpit, as if we were reliving the incident in real time.

We were in a small office with fluorescent lights, and we sat in chairs at a table, wearing headsets. Jeff and I didn’t look at each other much. For the most part, we were in our own heads, often with our eyes closed, trying to capture all the sounds and noises in the cockpit.

The recording began while Flight 1549 was about to push back from the gate and continued until we first touched the Hudson. There were things I said on the tape that I didn’t recall saying. Just thirty-three seconds before the bird strike, I said to Jeff, “And what a view of the Hudson today!” He took a look and agreed: “Yeah!”

The bird strikes were completely audible on the tape. There were the sounds of thumps and then unnatural noises as the birds went through the engines. You could hear the damage being inflicted on the engines, and how they protested with sickening sounds that an engine should never make. We clearly heard the wooooooh of engines spooling down and rolling back, followed by the sounds of vibrations as the engines tore themselves apart. Listening to the tape, I was reminded of how we felt in that moment. It was as if the bottom were falling out of our world. Even in the safety of that office at the NTSB, it was disturbing for us to hear again the rundown of the engines, and to know we had been in the cockpit of that aircraft when that was occurring.

The biggest surprise for me, listening to the tape, was how fast everything happened. The entire flight was five minutes and eight seconds long. The first minute and forty seconds were uneventful. Then, from the moment I said, “Birds!” until we approached the water and I said, “We’re gonna brace!” just three minutes and twenty-eight seconds had passed. That’s less time than it takes me to brush my teeth and shave.

The whole incident took a bit longer in my memory. Yes, I knew and felt all along that things happened fast. But in my recollections, it was as if I had a little more time to think, to decide, to act—even if it was abbreviated.

Listening to the tape, however, I realized that everything really happened in 208 extraordinarily time-compressed seconds. Frankly, it was beyond belief. Beyond extreme. It was overwhelming. It took me right back to the moment. I didn’t tear up, but I know there were muscle changes in my face as I listened. It was surprising and emotional for Jeff, too.

Somehow, time must have slowed down in my head that day. It’s not as if everything was in slow motion. It’s just that, in my memory, it didn’t feel as incredibly fast as the tape made obvious that it was.

There are different microphones in the cockpit, which can pick up voices, noises, warning chimes, and radio transmissions, including those from other planes. The NTSB was able to play back whatever was picked up by each microphone, one at a time, so we could isolate certain sounds and hear things that were at first masked by louder sounds. The investigators asked us to explain sounds or snippets of conversation that weren’t clear on the tape.

I was very happy with how Jeff and I sounded on the tape, and how we handled ourselves individually and as a team. We did not sound confused and overwhelmed. We sounded busy. I’ve read many transcripts of accidents over the last thirty years, and this one sounded really good in terms of our competence.

Jeff and I had met just three days before we flew Flight 1549. Yet during this dire emergency—with no time to verbalize every action and discuss our situation—we communicated extraordinarily well. Thanks to our training, and our immediate observations in the moment of crisis, each of us understood the situation, knew what needed to be done, and had already begun doing our parts in an urgent yet cooperative fashion.

Forty-four more seconds passed, with Jeff and me engaged in challenge-and-response as we went through the checklist while listening to both Patrick the controller and the repetitive chimes of the flight warning computer.

As I listened to the recording, I saw clearly that Jeff was doing exactly the right things at exactly the right moments. He knew intuitively that because of our short time remaining before landing and our proximity to the surface, he needed to shift his priorities. Without me asking, he began to call out to me the altitude above the surface and the airspeed.

It was awful and beautiful at the same time.

Jeff and I had found ourselves in a crucible, a cacophony of automated warnings, synthetic voices, repetitive chimes, radio calls, traffic alerts, and ground proximity warnings. Through it all, we had to maintain control of the airplane, analyze the situation, take step-by-step action, and make critical decisions without being distracted or panicking. It sounded as if our world was ending, and yet our crew coordination was beautiful. I was very proud of what we were able to accomplish.

After Jeff and I heard the recording for the first time with the NTSB investigators, we excused ourselves to go to the men’s room. We would have to listen to the tape several more times on this day, but I think we both wanted a break before we did that.

As we walked down the hallway of this old government office building, I turned to Jeff and asked, “What did you think?”

Before he could answer, I felt a need to say something. “I’ll tell you what I think,” I told him. “I’m so proud of you. Within seconds of me calling for the checklist, you had it out, you found the right page, you had begun reading it. And you were right there with me, step-by-step, challenge-and-response, through all of those distractions. We did this together.”

In the media, I’d gotten most of the credit for Flight 1549. “I don’t care what anybody says,” I told Jeff. “We were a team.”

He looked at me, and I saw tears in his eyes. “Thank you,” he said. I was a bit choked up myself. We hugged, then stood together for a moment in that hallway, not saying anything. We were two men who’d been through something extraordinary together and couldn’t find the words to fully capture it.

Eventually, we made our way back to the CVR lab, where we joined the investigators and listened to the cockpit recording again and again.

WHEN KELLY was very young, she once asked me, “What’s the best job in the world?”

My answer to her was this: “It’s the job you would do even if you didn’t have to.” It’s so important for people to find jobs suited to their strengths and their passions. People who love their jobs work more diligently at them. They become more adept at the intricacies of their duties. They serve the world well.

On January 14, 2009, my life had been a series of thoughtful opportunities to be the best pilot, leader, and teammate I could be. I was an anonymous, regular guy—a husband, a father, a US Airways pilot. On January 15, circumstances changed everything, a reminder that none of us ever knows what tomorrow will bring.

I flew thousands of flights in the last forty-two years, but my entire career is now being judged by how I performed on one of them. This has been a reminder to me: We need to try to do the right thing every time, to perform at our best, because we never know which moment in our lives we’ll be judged on.

I’ve told Kate and Kelly that each of us has the responsibility to prepare ourselves well. I want them to invest in themselves, to never stop learning, either professionally or personally. At the end of their lives, like all of us, I expect they might ask themselves a simple question: Did I make a difference? My wish for them is that the answer to that question will be yes.

As for myself, I look back at everything and continue to feel lucky. I found my passion very early. At five years old, I knew I would spend my life flying. At sixteen, I was already in the sky alone, practicing and practicing, circling happily above Mr. Cook’s grass strip.

In the years that followed, my romance with flying helped sustain me. At twenty-four, I was a fighter pilot, learning that I had to pay the closest attention to everything, because life and death could be separated by seconds and by feet. By fifty-seven, I was a gray-haired man with my hands on the controls of an Airbus A320 over Manhattan, using a lifetime of knowledge to find a way to safety.

Through it all, my love of flying has never wavered. I’m still that eleven-year-old boy with his face pressed against the window of the Convair 440, ready to take my first ride out of Dallas on an airplane. I’m still that earnest teen who flew low over our house on Hanna Drive, waving to my mom and sister on the ground. I’m still the serious young Air Force cadet, in awe of all the fighter pilots who came before me and showed me the way.

Just as I completely love Lorrie, Kate, and Kelly, I will never shake my love of flying. Never.

At the moment, I’m not sure exactly what my next steps in life might be. Where will flying take me next? What tests are ahead? What opportunities? I do know that I will continue to be an airline pilot. It’s part of what gives me purpose. It’s a big part of who I am.

I’m sure there will be passengers on future US Airways flights who will look toward the closed cockpit doors and wonder: Who is flying this plane today? Most likely, the captain will be one of my colleagues, an aviator who is well disciplined and well trained, with the highest sense of duty and a great love of flight.

Then again, the guy behind that door may be me. Once we’re in the air, I’ll say a few words about the cruising altitude, the flying time, and the weather. I’ll remind passengers to keep their seat belts fastened, because turbulence often comes unexpectedly. And then I’ll switch off the public address system, and I’ll do my job.