Highest Duty (Large Print)

Excerpt

A pilot can have thousands of takeoffs and landings, most of them unremarkable. Certain ones, though, he never forgets.

The 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 and again as a military pilot, about the adventures 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.

From the book HIGHEST DUTY: My Search for What Really Matters by Chesley B. Sullenberger and Jeffrey Zaslow. Copyright 2009 by Chesley B. Sullenberger III. Reprinted by permission of William Morrow, an Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.