Highest Duty Read Free Page B

and setbacks in my airline career, about the romance of flying, and about the long-ago memories.
    I’ve come to realize that my journey to the Hudson River didn’t begin at LaGuardia Airport. It began decades before, in my childhood home, on Mr. Cook’s grass airfield, in the skies over North Texas, in the California home I now share with my wife, Lorrie, and our two daughters, and on all the jets I’ve flown toward the horizon.
    Flight 1549 wasn’t just a five-minute journey. My entire life led me safely to that river.

2
A PILOT’S LIFE
    I WAS LUCKY enough to discover my passion for flying when I was very young, and to indulge that passion day after day. Lucky that some things went my way; my eyesight, for instance, was good enough to allow me to become a fighter pilot. And lucky that when I left the military, I found work as an airline pilot, when such jobs weren’t plentiful.
    I still feel fortunate, after all these years, to be able to follow my passion. The airline industry has its problems, and a lot of the issues can be troubling and wearying, but I still find purpose and satisfaction in flying.
    There’s a literal freedom you feel when you’re at the controls, gliding above the surface of the earth, no longer bound by gravity. It’s as if you’re rising above the nitty-gritty details of life. Even at a few thousand feet, you get a wider perspective. Problems thatloom large down below feel smaller from that height, and smaller still by the time you reach thirty-five thousand feet.
    I love that flying is an intellectual challenge, and that there’s mental math that needs to be done all along the way. If you change the angle of the nose versus the horizon by even one degree while traveling at a typical commercial airliner speed of seven nautical miles a minute, it’s enough to increase or decrease your rate of climb or descent by seven hundred feet per minute. I enjoy keeping track of all the calculations, staying aware of the weather conditions, working with a team—flight attendants, air traffic controllers, first officers, maintenance crews—while knowing intimately what the plane can and cannot do. Even when the controls are being manipulated through automation, pilots have to back up the computer systems with their own mental math. I like the challenge of that.
    I also like sharing my passion for flying. It’s a disappointment to me that a lot of kids today aren’t especially fascinated by flight. I’ve watched countless children walk past the cockpit without paying much attention; they’re too focused on their video games or their iPods.
    When there are children who eagerly want a look inside “my office” at the front of the plane, their enthusiasm is contagious. It’s so gratifying to see their excitement about something I care deeply about. If we aren’t busy during boarding, the first officer and I enjoy inviting inquisitive children to sit in our seats in the cockpit, ask questions, and let their parents take photos of them wearing a captain’s hat.
    Being a pilot has a tangible end result that is beneficial to society.It feels good to take a planeload of 183 people where they need or want to go. My job is to reunite people with family and friends, to send them on long-awaited vacations, to bring them to loved ones’ funerals, to get them to their job interviews. By the end of a day, after piloting three or four trips, I’ve taken four or five hundred people safely to their destinations, and I feel as if I’ve accomplished something. All of them have their own stories, motivations, needs—and helping them brings a rewarding feeling.
    This is what gets me ready for work, and one of the things I look forward to.
     
    I DID not kiss my wife good-bye.
    It was five-thirty Monday morning, and I was leaving home for a four-day trip. My schedule had me piloting seven US Airways flights, with the last leg set for Thursday, January 15: Flight 1549 from New York to Charlotte.
    I didn’t kiss