Highest Duty: My Search for What Really Matters

9. SHOWING UP FOR LIFE

IN MARCH 1964, when I was thirteen years old, I saw a story on the evening news that I couldn’t get out of my head.

My parents, my sister, and I were in our family room, eating dinner on TV trays and watching our black-and-white Emerson TV, a bulky box encased in a blond wood cabinet. As usual, my parents turned the cream-colored plastic channel knob until they came to NBC’s Huntley-Brinkley Report. David Brinkley was based in Washington, D.C., and Chet Huntley was based in New York, where news had broken about a twenty-eight-year-old woman named Kitty Genovese.

She lived in Queens, and had been stabbed to death outside her apartment. Her neighbors heard her screams as she was being attacked and sexually assaulted by a stranger. Allegedly, they did nothing to help her.

According to the news report, thirty-eight people had heard her cries for help and didn’t call police because they didn’t want to get involved. Their inaction was later dubbed by sociologists as “the bystander effect.” People are less apt to help in an emergency when they assume or hope that other bystanders will step up and intervene.

These initial news reports about the incident would eventually turn out to be an exaggeration. Some neighbors didn’t act because they thought they were witnessing a lovers’ quarrel. Others weren’t sure what they were hearing on a cold night with their windows closed. One person did end up calling the police.

But back in 1964, all I knew was what I was hearing from The Huntley-Brinkley Report, and the news was very shocking to me, and to my family, too.

I found myself thinking a lot about Kitty, and about her neighbors in New York. What transpired there felt utterly foreign to me. I couldn’t imagine this happening in North Texas. Where I lived, people felt a strong sense of community while also recognizing that they would often have to handle their problems and emergencies all on their own. This sense of both fellowship and self-reliance was necessary in a sparsely populated rural area.

Whatever danger or challenge you faced, you couldn’t just dial 911. The nearest police or fire station was too far away. So, at least initially, you would have to deal with it yourself or quickly seek help from your closest neighbor, whose home might be a mile away. By necessity, we had to be self-sufficient. But we also knew that if we needed help, we could turn to our neighbors and they would do their best.

It saddened me to think of these people in New York, in such close proximity to a woman being murdered, and choosing not to help. The police were just a few blocks and an easy phone call away. I couldn’t fathom the human values that would allow this to happen. I had never been to New York—in fact, I wouldn’t make my first visit there until I was thirty years old—and it was disturbing to me to hear that this could happen in a big city. I talked to my parents about how things seemed so different in New York compared with what we believed and how we lived in North Texas.

I made a pledge to myself, right then at age thirteen, that if I was ever in a situation where someone such as Kitty Genovese needed my help, I would choose to act. I would do whatever I could. No one in danger would be abandoned. As they’d say in the Navy: “Not on my watch.”

I NOW know, of course, that a great many New Yorkers have the same heartfelt urges to help others, and the same sense of empathy, as people anywhere else in the country. We all saw that on September 11, 2001. And I saw it again, firsthand, when Flight 1549 landed in the Hudson, and it felt as if the city rose up at every level to help our passengers and crew.

But back when I was thirteen, and Kitty Genovese was in the news, I felt this real resolve. It wasn’t anything I put in writing. It was more of a commitment I made to myself, to live a certain way.

I’d like to think I’ve done that.

I’ve come to believe that every encounter with another person is an opportunity for good or for ill. And so I’ve tried to make my interactions with people as positive and respectful as I can. In little ways, I’ve tried to be helpful to others. And I’ve tried to instill in my daughters the notion that all of us have a duty to value life, because it is so fleeting and precious.

Through the media, we all have heard about ordinary people who find themselves in extraordinary situations. They act courageously or responsibly, and their efforts are described as if they opted to act that way on the spur of the moment. We’ve all read the stories: the man who jumps onto a subway track to save a stranger, the firefighter who enters a burning building knowing the great risks, the teacher who dies protecting his students during a school shooting.

I believe many people in those situations actually have made decisions years before. Somewhere along the line, they came to define the sort of person they wanted to be, and then they conducted their lives accordingly. They had told themselves they would not be passive observers. If called upon to respond in some courageous or selfless way, they would do so.

Lorrie and I have done our share of very small things to help the greater good. A year ago, we were stopped at a red light in our hometown of Danville and we saw a female pedestrian in her late forties walking her small dog across the street. Lorrie saw the driver in front of us about to make a left turn. “He’s going to hit her!” Lorrie screamed. “He’s going to hit her!” And he did.

It was unclear to us whether the driver of the car was not paying attention or if the sun was in his eyes—but the woman was knocked unconscious, and her dog ran loose. She was lying facedown in the street and I was one of the first people to get to her.

I made sure someone called 911 and that someone checked that she had a pulse and was breathing and not bleeding, while I helped direct traffic around her before the police arrived. I was impressed with the other motorists. They recognized the gravity of the situation and were patient. No one was honking. No one tried to pull out and drive around the scene. It seemed as if everyone had the right attitude, the right values, and did the right thing. Someone got the woman’s dog. Another person found the woman’s cell phone and pulled up her daughter’s phone number from the phone’s contact list. The woman was taken away in an ambulance and survived.

I was pleased to see the people of Danville respond so well, and I was glad to be involved.

I’VE BEEN moved and impressed by my daughters’ eagerness to help others.

Kate raised and trained two puppies for Guide Dogs for the Blind. The program sent us our first puppy, a yellow Labrador retriever named Misty, in November 2002. Kate immediately fell in love with the puppy. She worked day after day helping Misty understand verbal orders. To get a puppy to relieve herself on command, the trainer has to wait for her to go to the bathroom, and then say the command “Do your business!” The idea was that Misty would then associate the words with doing her business, and when serving a person with disabilities, would be able to “relieve on command.”

Kate, then nine years old, took her responsibilities very seriously. One stormy day, I looked out the window and saw she was outside in the pouring rain, wearing her yellow slicker and galoshes, waiting for Misty to relieve herself so she could tell her, “Do your business!”

I called Lorrie over to the window to watch. We were proud of Kate. She was so responsible. And she loved that dog so much.

Once Misty was trained, we had to give her back to the organization so she could be placed in a home with a person who needed a guide dog. We knew that the good-bye would be very hard on Kate. “Recall Day” turned out to be Valentine’s Day 2004, when Misty was fifteen months old. Kate held herself together until it was time to leave Misty behind. Then she began bawling. For a while after that, she said she didn’t want to allow herself to fall in love with anything or anyone because it was going to be too hard when it was over. She said losing Misty was the first time she’d ever had her heart broken.

Through it all, though, she saw the great value of the guide dogs program. “We’re helping people,” she’d say, “and giving them their freedom back. It feels good to be able to do that. Besides, it’s fun to have a puppy.”

Kelly, meanwhile, is one of the most empathetic people I know. Starting in preschool, she always has been the kid who’d raise her hand and volunteer to be the teacher’s helper. She also embraced “Books for the Barrios,” the brainchild of the wife of a former naval officer and American Airlines pilot. The program has sent twelve million books to impoverished students overseas.

In second grade, Kelly’s class took a field trip to the organization’s warehouse in Concord, California. They learned about all of the disadvantaged kids on the outlying islands in the Philippines. They were told that many of the children slept on dirt floors, and welcomed the cardboard boxes that Books for the Barrios were packed in. Families broke down the boxes and used the cardboard as mats to sleep on.

Kelly was moved by what she heard on that field trip, and for her eighth birthday party, she decided on her own to ask her friends to bring books and gifts for children in the barrios. The children were instructed, when selecting gifts for Kelly, to pick presents that were appropriate for children in the Philippines. The party was held at the warehouse, and Kelly placed the wrapped gifts into shipping boxes. She and her friends then spent an hour helping pack donated books into boxes they decorated.

Everyone’s reputation is made on a daily basis. There are little incremental things—worthwhile efforts, moments you were helpful to others—and after a lifetime, they can add up to something. You can feel as if you lived and it mattered.

Until Flight 1549, I had assumed that I would always live a pretty anonymous life. I’d try to do my job to the best of my ability. Lorrie and I would try to raise the girls with the values we cherish. I’d make an effort to volunteer for worthy projects. Perhaps, I thought, at the end of my life, in aggregate, it would all add up to my being able to say I’d made a difference to others and to my community in some small way.

Actually, I live in several communities. One is Danville, of course. But another is the community that keeps re-creating itself in the nation’s airports. It’s a community of familiar faces—airport workers, my colleagues at US Airways, the crews from other airlines—that also includes thousands of strangers who repopulate the terminals every day.

An airport is not always an easy place to connect meaningfully with other people. We’re all coming and going, trying to get somewhere else and then home. But there are little ways to show humanity, and I’ve admired those who find ways to do so.

A PILOT’S job, first and foremost, is to fly the airplane safely, delivering passengers from Point A to Point B. We have checklists outlining a host of other tasks, too. But there are many things that are not in our job description, things that are the responsibility of gate agents, baggage handlers, skycaps, caterers, cleaners.

Most of these people do their jobs well, but an airport and an airline are not perfect systems. That can be frustrating for travelers and for those of us in the industry. If I can help things along, I try to do so.

There was one time when we had flown from Philadelphia to Hartford, Connecticut, landing at 10:30 P.M. A young couple in their thirties with a toddler waited and waited on the jetway for their stroller, but it never showed up. I wanted to help them. My attitude with passengers in these situations is this: I’ve gotten you this far. I’m not going to leave you hanging now.

I went down the stairs and out to the ramp and talked to the baggage handlers. Then I came back and told the couple that the stroller was either lost or left in Philly. “Come with me,” I told them.

I walked the couple to baggage claim and showed them where to file a claim. It was late. The lights in the terminal were being shut off. If I didn’t get them to the right place, they’d be stuck in the airport with everything closed, including the baggage office.

A flight attendant saw me helping them and commented that not every pilot or flight attendant would bother to help. It was an awfully simple thing I had done. I barely had to walk out of my way, since I was headed to a hotel van right outside of baggage claim.

And yet, I understood completely what this flight attendant meant.

A lot of people in the airline industry, and especially at my airline, US Airways, feel beaten down by circumstance. We’ve been hit by an economic tsunami. Some people feel their companies have held a gun to their heads, demanding concessions. We’ve been through pay cuts, givebacks, downsizing, layoffs. We’re the working wounded.

People get tired of constantly fighting the same battles over and over again every day. The gate agent hasn’t pulled the jetway up to the plane in time. The skycap is supposed to bring the wheelchair and hasn’t. (I’ve helped more than a few older people into wheelchairs and pushed them into the terminal myself.) The caterer hasn’t brought all the first-class meals. Catering companies always seem to be the lowest bidders with the highest employee turnover. At the end of a long day, you and your crew will get off the plane and make your way out of the terminal, but the hotel van isn’t there when it’s supposed to be.

All of this stuff beats you down. You get tired of constantly trying to correct what you corrected yesterday.

Many pilots and other airline workers feel that if they keep picking up all the slack, those who run the companies we work for will never staff the airlines properly, or do the training necessary, or hire the contractor who will be most responsible about bringing wheelchairs. And my colleagues are right about that. In the cultures of some companies, management depends heavily on the innate goodness and professionalism of its employees to constantly compensate for systemic deficiencies, chronic understaffing, and substandard subcontractors.

At all airlines, there are many employees, including in management, who care deeply and try to make things better. But at some point, it can feel like a fine line between letting passengers fend for themselves and enabling the airline’s inadequacies. And so it becomes a decision whether to do the simple, easy act of walking a young couple and their toddler to baggage claim.

My way of handling these issues is to fight to improve the system but still help those I can.

There was another incident late one night at the airport in Charlotte. We were delayed because of weather and air traffic issues, and as my crew stood on the curb waiting for the hotel van, a woman saw me in my pilot’s uniform and approached me. She was around fifty years old with short brown hair. She had no purse, no luggage, only a cigarette in her hands.

She said she and her family had flown in on US Airways, and she was changing planes in Charlotte, on her way to another city. Her family was back at the gate, where their plane was delayed because of the weather.

“I asked an airport employee where I could smoke a cigarette, and he sent me out here to the curb,” she told me. But without thinking, she had left her purse and boarding pass with her family at the gate, on the other side of security. And worse, a few minutes earlier, at 10:30 P.M., the security checkpoints had closed. The Transportation Security Administration is a bureaucracy. When it closes, it closes. At 10:30 P.M., you can go through. At 10:31 P.M., you can’t. So she was stuck.

I could have told her that I was unable to help her, then gotten into the hotel van and driven off. But that wouldn’t feel right. I took out my cell phone and called a couple of people in operations. I gave them her name, her cell-phone number, and tried to see if they could somehow help her get back to the gate—or at least get her a voucher for a hotel room.

I don’t know what became of that woman that night. But I felt I had to try to help her. As a human being, I couldn’t just go to the hotel and leave her behind.

Again, it hardly took any effort on my part. Besides, I don’t want to go through life as a bystander.

WHEN THERE are maintenance issues or other delays, I believe in telling passengers exactly what is going on. Sometimes a plane has to be taken out of service after passengers are already loaded and ready to go. I don’t like to leave it to flight attendants to give the bad news. I get on the public address system, and offer up the details. I have stood in the front of the cabin, where the passengers can all see me, and I’ve said: “Ladies and gentlemen, this is the captain. This airplane has to be taken out of service, so we’re going to have to change airplanes. We’ll need to get off this plane and the gate agent will send you to the new gate. I appreciate your patience, and I apologize for the inconvenience.”

When I do this I also want to protect the flight attendants from any kind of whining or abuse as people deal with the delay. “I’m the one responsible for this change,” I’ll say. I’ll stand at the door as each passenger deplanes, looking them all in the eye and nodding. I want them to know that if they have an issue, they should talk to me, not take it out on the crew.

I’ve learned that word choice is so important. When there’s a delay, I like to address passengers by saying: “I promise to tell you everything I know as soon as I know it.” I’ve found such language makes a world of difference. It’s inclusive. It tells passengers our intention is to give them the whole truth, and it lets them know we trust and respect them enough to share this truth. Not being honest up front might avoid hard questions early on, but then there can be consequences for the flight attendants later, when they have to deal with passengers who feel they were lied to. It also hurts the reputation of the airline.

If passengers decide they haven’t been dealt with honestly, they get on their connecting flight feeling angry. Then a vicious cycle sets in. Passengers have already formed a negative impression of the airline, and through the filter of that negativity, they start finding things that support their preconceived notions. They discount things that are positive as being due to chance, and they view negative things as supporting their belief that “this is a lousy airline.”

I can avoid all that just by being straightforward with passengers from the cockpit.

For the most part, I find passengers to be considerate and understanding. Flying is not the genteel activity it once was, but given that passengers are all cooped up in a relatively small space, and that can be aggravating and uncomfortable, they tend to rise to most occasions.

A lot of times I feel for passengers, and for the situations they find themselves in given all the issues that define air travel today: enhanced security checks, more-crowded cabins, long flights without food service. I’ll try to do what I can.

Passengers often don’t know when efforts are made on their behalf by the crews on airplanes. Sometimes, we’re pulling for them—quietly or under the radar.

For instance, the airlines want flights taking off on time. It makes your airline look better when your on-time rate is higher than other airlines’. Gate agents are judged on their ability to deliver on-time departures. This can make for tension among airline employees, and it’s certainly not always best for passengers.

And so sometimes, I’ve felt obliged to stand my ground.

There was one Sunday afternoon when I was flying from West Palm Beach to Pittsburgh. There was a fairly substantial standby list of people hoping to get on the plane. Everyone with an assigned seat was loaded on, and then the gate agent came on the plane to say that he would close the door. He wanted us pushing back on time. I told him there were still two empty seats.

“Whoever is next on the standby list, why don’t you send them down?” I said.

The agent was having none of it. He wanted us closing the door and pushing back. He knew that his station manager’s job-performance evaluation is based partially on statistics for on-time departures. He didn’t want to get any grief from his superior, and so he didn’t want to take a few more minutes to get two more passengers on the plane.

I understand the ramifications for everyone in the airline system. The station managers dump on the agents. The agents push the crews to load faster. The statistics-driven system is not forgiving if, say, six people in wheelchairs have to be loaded, and that slows down boarding.

Anyway, this gate agent and I were at odds over these two empty seats that I wanted to fill. I had to speak up.

“Let’s remember why we’re here,” I told him. “We’re here to get paying customers to their destinations. You have two paying customers out there who want to be on this plane, and there are seats available for them. So I say, let’s quickly get them on board.”

I prevailed. After all, the policy manual says the captain is in charge. And so the two passengers at the top of the standby list were invited onto the plane, and we ended up pushing back two minutes late. We may have been a minute or two late to Pittsburgh.

The following Tuesday was my day off, and my phone rang at home. It was the assistant chief pilot. He told me that he had a letter from a passenger service supervisor in West Palm.

“They say you interfered with the boarding process, delaying the flight,” he told me. And then he started reading me the riot act. He talked to me like a disciplinarian, as if I were some renegade cowboy in the cockpit, keeping the gate agents from doing their jobs.

I was a bit peeved by this phone call.

“I care deeply about doing a good job,” I told him, “and I think there are two possibilities regarding this incident. The first possibility is that the agents were following company procedures, and the company procedures are flawed. The second possibility is they weren’t following procedures, in which case they should. We had one hundred and fifty seats, two of which were empty. I wanted to see them filled. I think that’s good for the company and good for the passengers.”

The assistant chief pilot didn’t seem pleased that I was pushing back. But we let the matter be.

Six months later, on another Sunday, I found myself in the same situation. Empty seats. People in the boarding area eager to take them. The agents wanted us to close the cabin door, I insisted that we load the passengers, and our flight left the gate six minutes late.

The agents wrote me up again. And the assistant chief pilot called me again. He was in a pissier mood this time. “The chief pilot wants to give you two weeks off without pay,” he told me.

My union rep ended up talking to management and they never went through with their suspension threat. After all, I wasn’t alone. Many captains were having to fight this battle repeatedly. And then one day, a few months later, management came out with a new memo. It stated that passengers are not to be left behind if seats are available to them. I smiled when I read that.

All of us have little battles we can choose to take on or to skip. Some captains feel as I do about these sorts of things, and they fight. Others acquiesce and give up. None of us likes leaving passengers at the gate, but some have decided: “I can’t fight so many battles every day.”

I guess I haven’t had what I call “a sense of caring” beaten out of me yet. I empathized with those standby passengers. But as important, leaving them behind just would have felt wrong. And so I acted.

These are minor things, I know. But I feel better about myself when I make these kinds of efforts. And it’s nice to feel I’m doing a little good in the process.

I’VE READ a great deal as I’ve commuted from San Francisco to my base in Charlotte. The trip across the country seems to go faster when I’m engrossed in a book. My tastes haven’t changed much since I was a boy: I continue to be drawn to history.

I have read a few terrific books about the nation’s Medal of Honor recipients. Each of their stories is inspiring. But I remain particularly haunted by the story of twenty-three-year-old Henry Erwin, a U.S. Army Air Forces radio operator from Alabama whose heroism during World War II was astounding. On April 12, 1945, Staff Sergeant Erwin was on a B-29 mission to attack a gasoline plant in Koriyama, Japan. One of his tasks was to help the bombers see their aim points by dropping a phosphorus flare through a tube in the floor of the B-29. The device exploded in the tube, and the phosphorus was ignited, blinding Erwin and engulfing him in flames. Smoke filled the airplane. Erwin knew the flare would soon burn through the floor, igniting the bombs in the bomb bay below, destroying the B-29 and probably killing the crew.

Though Erwin was in excruciating pain, he crawled along the floor, found the burning flare, and held it against his chest with his bare hands. He brought it up to the cockpit, screamed to the copilot to open his window, and heaved it out, saving the other eleven men on board.

Erwin was expected to die within days from his injuries, and the decision was made by General Curtis LeMay to award him the Medal of Honor before he succumbed. The problem was, there was no Medal of Honor to be found in the Western Pacific. The closest one was hours away in a glass display case in Honolulu. And so an airman was dispatched in the middle of the night to go pick it up. When he couldn’t find the key to open the display case, he broke the glass. He collected the medal, and put it on a plane bound for Guam, where it was pinned on the still-alive-and-conscious Staff Sergeant Erwin, wrapped head to toe in bandages.

Erwin surprised everyone, living through forty-three operations. He remained hospitalized until 1947, and after he was released, his burns left him scarred and disfigured for life. Yet he continued to serve his country as a counselor at a Veterans Hospital in Alabama. He died in 2002.

Who among us could have brought ourselves to lift that white-hot flare to our chest with our bare hands? Presented with that situation, I assume I would have let it burn through the floor of the B-29.

Knowing that there have been people like Erwin, capable of doing such extraordinary things—acts that are truly beyond comprehension—I feel that the least I can do is be of service in whatever very small ways are available to me.

Sometimes that means recalling how I felt as a thirteen-year-old, when I first heard the story of Kitty Genovese, and made a vow about the kind of person I hoped to be. And sometimes it means attempting the smallest of acts—helping a couple find a lost stroller, or enabling a standby passenger to get the last seat on a departing plane.