Highest Duty by Chesley B. Sullenberger Read Free Book Online Page A

They didn’t have all the data that now aids us in our decisions. They didn’t have the benefit of all the additional decades of trial and error in aircraft design. They acted with the mental and physical tool kits available to them.
    Perhaps the most famous water landing prior to Flight 1549 happened on October 15, 1956. It was Pan American Airways Flight 943, bound from Honolulu to San Francisco with twenty-five passengers. There were also forty-four cases of live canaries in the cargo hold.
    In the middle of the Pacific, in the middle of the night, theBoeing 377 Stratocruiser lost two engines, and its remaining two engines were under strain, consuming large amounts of fuel.
    Captain Richard Ogg, forty-two years old, knew he was too far into the trip to turn back to Hawaii. San Francisco was too far ahead. And so he opted for a water landing. He circled for several hours, burning off fuel and waiting for daylight, above a U.S. Coast Guard cutter that was in position to rescue passengers and crew.
    Just before 8 A.M. , the captain attempted his landing. The tail snapped off and the nose was shattered on impact, but all the passengers and crew were rescued. Captain Ogg went through the plane twice, making sure he didn’t leave anyone behind. The plane took twenty-one minutes to sink below the surface of the Pacific.
    The circumstances of Flight 943 were different from my experience on Flight 1549, mostly because Captain Ogg had hours to work on his plan and Jeff and I didn’t even have minutes. Also, he was landing on the open ocean, not on a river. But I had long admired Captain Ogg’s ability to safely land on water. I knew that not all pilots could have successfully equaled his effort.
    After Flight 1549 hit the news, the San Francisco Chronicle contacted Captain Ogg’s widow, Peggy, to ask her about the similarities between my landing in the Hudson and her husband’s 1956 ditching in the Pacific. She spoke of her husband’s sense of duty. He had told reporters at the time: “We had a certain job to do. We had to do it right or else.”
    When Captain Ogg was on his deathbed in 1991, his wife was sitting with him and noticed a faraway look on his face. She askedhim what he was thinking about. He told her: “I was thinking of those poor canaries that drowned in the hold when I had to ditch the plane.”
     
    T HE FIRST major airline accident I ever investigated personally was PSA Flight 1771, which crashed into hilly ranchland near Cayucos, California, on December 7, 1989. It was traveling from Los Angeles to San Francisco.
    The specifics of the crash were haunting and disturbing. A former USAir ticket agent named David Burke, thirty-five years old, had been caught on a security videotape allegedly stealing sixty-nine dollars in in-flight cocktail receipts. He was fired, and tried unsuccessfully to get his job back. He then decided to buy a ticket on Flight 1771 because his supervisor was a passenger on it.
    In that era before the September 11 attacks, those with airport IDs didn’t necessarily have to go through security. So Burke was able to board the plane carrying a .44 Magnum revolver. Sometime after boarding, he wrote a note on an airsickness bag to his supervisor: “Hi Ray: I think it’s sort of ironical that we ended up like this. I asked for some leniency for my family. Remember? Well, I got none and you’ll get none.”
    The plane was at twenty-two thousand feet when the cockpit voice recorder picked up the sound of what appeared to be shots being fired in the cabin. Then a flight attendant was heard entering the cockpit. “We have a problem,” she said. The captain answered: “What kind of problem?” Burke was then heard saying: “I’m the problem!”
    The sounds of a struggle and gunshots followed. Investigators believed Burke shot the captain and first officer, and then himself, after which the plane went into a nosedive, probably because a pilot’s body was slumped against the controls. The