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Among Friends |
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| Intersection of history As Barack Obama readied himself in Washington for the task of a lifetime, US Airways pilot Chesley Sullenberger was doing a job for which he'd prepared his entire professional life. In less time than it takes to get a morning latte, Sullenberger's successful emergency landing of flight 1549 in New York's Hudson River on Jan. 15 became the exclamation point on Obama's call to action for every American: Work hard, sacrifice if necessary, keep faith, help one another, be brave and "make of our lives what we will." Sullenburger spent nearly five decades making himself one of the most skilled and highly trained pilots on the planet. When his 50-ton aircraft collided with a flock of birds on takeoff from LaGuardia Airport, his engines quit, and he made a split-second decision to ditch his Airbus A320. With 155 souls onboard, including his own, his proactive education about flight saved every life in a crash landing the National Transportation Safety Board's chief investigator of the accident predicts will "go down as a classic." "That's what we're trained to do," Sullenberger apparently told the NTSB's Robert Benzon and everybody else, including Obama, when he was hailed as a hero and asked how he pulled off one of the most dangerous feats in aviation. "Sully" Sullenberger was captain of a five-person crew that included a co-pilot and three flight attendants. All, according to passengers, performed magnificently in the crisis. Obama later told the Associated Press that when he spoke by phone with Sullenberger, the pilot said, "'Me and my crew were just doing our job.' And it made me think, if everybody did their job -- whatever that job was -- as well as that pilot did his job, we'd be in pretty good shape," said Obama, who invited the crew and their families to his inauguration. The crew's feat -- apparently the first landing of a jetliner on water without casualties in a half century of commercial aviation -- juxtaposes perfectly with Obama's call to every American to take personal responsibility for his or her own life. "Never forget," Obama told hundreds of thousands of cheering people three days later at the Lincoln Memorial, "that the true character of our nation is revealed not during times of comfort and ease, but by the right we do when the moment is hard." Sullenberger's actions personalize Obama's eloquent turn of phrase. His was as hard a task as any a pilot ever has. In his reaction to it as an aviator, we hear an echo of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s words in his Letter from the Birmingham Jail: "If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well." Sullenberger the pilot was reported by classmates, colleagues and friends to be a man always dedicated to safety, a professional always working to do his job better. The 57-year-old got his pilot's license as a teenager and graduated from the Air Force Academy in 1973 with the Outstanding Cadet in Airmanship Award recognizing him as the top flier in his class. As a cadet, he'd been one of seven picked to learn to fly gliders; by graduation, he was a glider instructor. He flew F-4 Phantom jets in the Air Force. A US Airways pilot for nearly 30 years, he became a safety expert who served on panels for the National Transportation Safety Board, was a safety representative for the Air Line Pilots Association, earned two master's degrees and co-authored with NASA scientists a treatise on "error-inducing contexts in aviation." He founded Safety Reliability Methods, Inc., his own consulting business, two years ago. His colleagues expressed no surprise that passengers and rescue officials alike hailed Sullenberger's calm, methodical decision to land in the river instead of risking a crash in the densely populated New York area. After bringing the plane in for a "soft" landing with minimum impact, he then helped people get out of it. Backing him up was a flotilla of rescuers who didn't wait to be called to help, responding instinctively in highly trained ways. Ferry Capt. Carl Lucas of the Athenia told The New York Times: "You train so much, you don't have to think about it. I didn't have to give any orders to my crew" to start pulling passengers from the frigid river. Sullenberger, carrying a metal clipboard with the passenger manifest, was the last person from the flight to board Lucas' boat. The ferry captain told The Times: "I asked him if he thought there was anyone left on the plane. He said no, that he had checked twice himself." A trained, brave veteran pilot in charge of a crippled airliner full of terrified passengers. A courageous, determined new president in charge of a damaged country's 300 million uneasy residents, now sharing an inaugural celebration of life and hope. Such are the amazing intersections of history. |
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