Highest Duty Read Free Page A

felt like they were bored with the conversation. Or maybe I wasn’t able to find the right words to convey the majesty of it.
    In any case, I decided to see if I could interest Carole. She was quiet—similar to me in that way—and so it was often difficult keeping conversations going with her. When I asked her if she’d like to go flying with me, I had no expectations. Even if she wanted to go, I figured her parents wouldn’t allow it. But she asked them, and they agreed to let her go on a forty-five-minute trip across the Arkansas and Poteau rivers to Fort Smith, Arkansas.
    This was my effort at a date, and I was pretty thrilled that itwas going to happen. Looking back, it’s remarkable that her mom and dad said yes. In essence, they were allowing a boy, not yet eighteen years old, to take their underage daughter across state lines. In a light airplane, no less.
    And so we went. It was a clear, cold day with smooth air and good visibility. You could see for miles in any direction. Airplanes are noisy, so it’s hard to converse. I’d yell, “That’s the Red River down there,” and she’d yell back, “What?” and I’d repeat myself. But I was so happy to have her aboard.
    We flew in a Cessna 150 I’d rented for two hours. This was a very small airplane, with room only for two people, sitting side by side. The whole cabin was just three feet wide, and so my right leg was touching her left leg. There was no other way to do it.
    Picture me, seventeen years old, with this pretty girl next to me, her leg touching mine for two hours, my arm rubbing against her arm. I could smell her perfume, or maybe it was her shampoo. Once in a while she’d lean over me to look at the sights out my window, her hair brushing against my arm. It was a new experience for me, realizing that flying could be such a sensual experience.
    Was it hard for me to concentrate on the controls? No. I guess that was just another example of how a pilot has to learn to compartmentalize. I was completely aware of Carole, but I was also on task and responsible. I wanted to woo her, but my most important job was to keep her safe.
    Not much came of our relationship, but that flight—sitting so close to her, shouting out landmarks of the Texas countryside, taking her to lunch at the Fort Smith airport—well, it’s just a sweet, warm memory.
    A pilot can have thousands of takeoffs and landings, most of them unremarkable. Certain ones, though, he never forgets.
     
    T HE LAST time I was out at L. T. Cook’s airstrip was in the late 1970s. I had lost touch with him in the early eighties, and I later learned he had cancer, and had several tumors removed from his neck and jaw. Some people speculated that his illness was a result of all the crop-dusting chemicals he sprayed every day. He died in 2001.
    After my emergency landing of US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River, I got thousands of e-mails and letters from people expressing gratitude for what my crew and I did to save all 155 people on board. In one stack of mail, I was thrilled to discover a note from Mr. Cook’s widow, whom I hadn’t heard from in years. Her words lifted my spirits. “L.T. wouldn’t be surprised,” she wrote, “but he certainly would be pleased and proud.”
    In many ways, all my mentors, heroes, and loved ones—those who taught me and encouraged me and saw the possibilities in me—were with me in the cockpit of Flight 1549. We had lost both engines. It was a dire situation, but there were lessons people had instilled in me that served me well. Mr. Cook’s lessons were a part of what guided me on that five-minute flight. He was the consummate stick-and-rudder man, and that day over New York was certainly a stick-and-rudder day.
    I’ve done a lot of thinking since then about all the special people who mattered to me, about the hundreds of books on flying that I’ve studied, about the tragedies I’ve witnessed again andagain as a military pilot, about the adventures