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

plane hit the ground at about seven hundred miles an hour and much of it disintegrated on impact. None of the forty-three people on board survived.
    As an Air Line Pilots Association safety committee volunteer, I served as an investigator at the crash site as part of the “survival factors” working group, charged with trying to determine what the crew could have done to make that flight survivable. Of course, given the circumstances, there was almost nothing they could have done. The FBI quickly took over and turned the crash site into a crime scene. Over the days of searching, the handgun was recovered with six spent cartridges. So was the note on the airsickness bag, and Burke’s identification badge, which he had used to avoid going through security.
    When I got there, the crash site looked like an outdoor rock concert where everyone had left trash all over a hillside. There were hardly any big pieces of the plane besides landing gear forgings and engine cores. It was a very disturbing feeling being at the scene of a mass murder, knowing what had happened in the sky above us. The smell in the air was a mixture of jet fuel and death.
    I had known one of the flight attendants on the plane, and itwas horrifying to imagine what the crew and passengers went through. Working on this sort of investigation focuses your attention on how to prevent similar tragedies in the future. It renews your dedication to never let it happen again.
    In the wake of Flight 1771, some groups of airline workers were subjected to security requirements similar to those set for passengers, better methods of employment verification were instituted, and federal law required employees to turn in their IDs after being terminated from airline jobs. But larger problems with security would still need to be addressed. Standing on that hillside in California, I couldn’t have imagined the way cockpits would be breached on September 11, 2001.
    In my role helping with accident investigations, I also was called upon to talk to passengers who survived crashes.
    On February 1, 1991, there was a runway collision at Los Angeles International Airport between USAir Flight 1493 and SkyWest Airlines Flight 5569. It happened in part because the local air traffic controller cleared the USAir jet, a 737–3B7, to land while the SkyWest commuter plane, a Fairchild Metro III, was holding in position to take off on the same runway. All ten people on the SkyWest plane died, and twenty-two passengers were killed on the 737. I was given the task of interviewing some of the sixty-seven survivors from the 737.
    The NTSB gave us a long questionnaire, with questions such as: What announcements do you recall hearing? Did the emergency exit lights come on? Which exit did you use to escape? Did you help anyone else get out? Did anyone help you get out?
    All of these questions were designed to help the airline industry learn from these events and improve the next outcome.
    It was not especially pleasant work investigating accidents, but I was grateful for the opportunities to do so. When I talked to survivors, I listened carefully, trying to understand, and I filed away the details, in case I’d ever need to draw on them.

4
“MEASURE TWICE, CUT ONCE”
    I GREW UP in a home where each of us had our own hammer.
    When I think about the work ethic and the values that carried me through life, and through seven million miles as a pilot, I think at times about the hammer my dad gave me as a boy.
    He had married my mom in 1948, bought a piece of farmland from her parents, and borrowed $3,000 to build a house on it. It was a very small ranch house, just one bedroom. But over the years that followed, my dad devoted himself to enlarging the homestead again and again. He built a series of additions with the help of three not-always-willing assistants: my mother, my sister, and me.
    My parents were born in Denison, Texas, and my mom only lived in two homes her entire life, and they were within