be prepared for whatever may come while never knowing when or even if you’ll face an ultimate challenge.
Because a commercial career can feel routine, I truly didn’t think I’d face a situation as dire as Flight 1549. On reflection, however, I realize this: Though I never saw battle, I spent years training hard, paying close attention, demanding a great deal of myself, and maintaining a constant readiness. I survived my own close calls and carefully observed the fatal mistakes made by other pilots. That preparation did not go to waste. At age fifty- seven, I was able to call upon these earlier lessons, and in doing so, answer the questions I’d had about myself.
I GRADUATED from the Air Force Academy on June 6, 1973, and within a few weeks, I enrolled in the summer term at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, getting my master-of-science degree in industrial psychology (human factors). It’s a discipline focused on designing machines that take into account human abilities as well as human limitations. How do humans act and react? What can humans do and what can’t they do? How should machines be designed so people can use them more effectively?
It was a cooperative master’s program designed to fast-track academy graduates, allowing us to get a graduate degree from a civilian school very quickly, without delaying entry into flight school, which was the next step for many Air Force officers. I had taken graduate-level courses my senior year at the academy, so once the credits were transferred to Purdue, it took me just six more months to get my master’s.
At Purdue, I studied how machines and systems should be designed. How do engineers create cockpit configurations and instrument-panel layouts, taking into account where pilots might place their hands, or where eyes might focus, or what items might be a distraction? I believed learning these things could have applications for me down the road, and I was right. It was helpful to get an academic and scientific perspective on the underlying reasons for procedural requirements in flight. When you’re learning how to be a pilot, you’re often taught the correct procedures to follow, but not always why those procedures are important. In later years, as I focused on airline safety issues, I realized how much my formal education allowed me to view the world in ways that helped me set priorities, so I understood the why as well as the how.
After my six months in Indiana, the Air Force sent me to Columbus, Mississippi, for a year of what is called UPT—Undergraduate Pilot Training. It was a mix of classroom instruction about flying, flight simulator training, and a total of two hundred hours in the air. At first I got to fly the Cessna T-37, which is a basic twin-engine, two-seat trainer aircraft used by the Air Force. It was twenty-nine feet long with a maximum speed of 425 miles per hour. Eventually, I graduated to the Northrop T-38 Talon, which was the world’s first supersonic jet trainer. It could reach a maximum speed of over 800 miles an hour, which is more than Mach 1.0.
I’d come a long way from the days of slowly circling Mr. Cook’s field in his Aeronca 7DC propeller plane, barely topping a hundred miles an hour. Now I was being taught skills that would allow me to fly at high speeds in formation, my wings just feet away from the jets on either side of me. And I was sitting on an ejection seat, ready to bail out if my jet became unflyable.
I was twenty-three years old then and my two instructors in the T-37 and then the T-38, both first lieutenants, were a few years older. They were from Massachusetts and Colorado, and they had something wonderful in common: They weren’t just teaching me because they were required to do so. “I want you to succeed,” they each told me, and they offered every bit of guidance they could give me.
After Mississippi, the Air Force sent me to Holloman Air Force Base near Alamogordo, New Mexico, a base with a storied history. During World War II, it had served as the training ground for men flying Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses and the Consolidated B-24 Liberator, which was the most common heavy bomber used by Allied forces.
The B-24 was designed to have a long range, and more than eighteen thousand of them were manufactured quickly during the war. But flight crews found that the plane was too easily damaged in battle, and given a design that placed fuel tanks in the upper fuselage, it was too likely to catch on fire. The B-24s delivered their payloads— each plane could hold eight thousand pounds of bombs—but a lot of lives were sacrificed in order to do so. Many of those lost men passed through Holloman before me.
Holloman was known for other historical achievements, too. On August 16, 1960, Captain Joseph Kittinger Jr. took an open balloon gondola to 102,800 feet to test the feasibility of high-altitude bailouts. He stepped out of the balloon over Holloman and fell for four minutes and thirty-six seconds, at a velocity of 614 miles an hour, the longest free fall a human being had ever endured. His right glove malfunctioned, and his hand swelled to twice its normal size, but he survived and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.
Like Holloman, every base where I was stationed had a history that inspired me. It was almost as if you could feel the presence of heroes in the winds over the runways.
I was at Holloman for “FLIT,” which stood for “fighter lead-in training.” We worked on basic air combat maneuvers, tactics, and flying formation in the T-38. I knew I wasn’t a true fighter pilot yet, but training at Holloman, I knew I was going to be. I had a lot to learn, but I had the confidence that I could do it.
You couldn’t avoid the feeling that you were in elite company. There had been thirty-five men in my pilot training class in Mississippi. Many of them wanted to fly fighters. Just two of us were chosen to do it. So I took seriously that my superiors had faith in me, and I worked hard at Holloman to live up to their expectations.
Next stop was a ten-month stint at Luke Air Force Base near Glendale, Arizona, where I checked out on the F-4 Phantom II. The supersonic jet, which can fire radar-guided missiles beyond visual range, flies at a maximum speed of over 1,400 miles an hour, or Mach 2.0. Unlike many fighters, the F-4 was a two-seat airplane. The pilot sat in the front seat and a specially trained navigator called a Weapons Systems Officer (WSO) sat in the back seat.
We went through the F-4 system by system—electrical, hydraulics, fuel, engines, flight controls, weapons, everything. We looked at each system individually and how they worked together as a whole.
My fellow pilots and WSOs and I learned not just how to fly the F-4—that was the easy part—but how to use it as a weapon. We dropped practice bombs. We engaged in air-to-air combat training. We practiced flying in tactical formation. We also learned to work closely with our WSOs as an effective team.
Day after day, we learned the intricacies of the machine, and learned about our abilities or inabilities to master it. And equally important, we learned a great deal about one another.
This kind of flying was very demanding and exciting at the same time. So much of what we had to do in the cockpit was manual. We didn’t have the automation that exists today to help us figure out things. Unlike those who pilot current fighters, with complex computerized systems, we had to do most everything visually. Today, computerization enables flight crews to release bombs that hit targets with pinpoint accuracy. In the older fighters that I flew, you had to look out the window and make estimations in your head. Before you flew, you’d go over the tabulations of numbers, determining when you’d have to release a bomb given a certain dive angle, speed, and altitude over the target. If you were slightly shallow or steep in the dive angle, the bomb would go short or long. In a similar fashion, the speed at release and the altitude at release also affected whether the bomb would go short or long. You also had to allow for crosswinds when you flew over the target. Modern airplanes provide pilots with far more guidance about how to do all these things precisely.
In 1976 and early 1977, I spent fourteen more months flying the F-4 while stationed at Royal Air Force Lakenheath, seventy miles northeast of London. It was my first assignment as an operational fighter pilot.
JIM LESLIE, now a captain with Southwest Airlines, was a contemporary of mine in the Air Force. We arrived at Lakenheath within a few days of each other back in 1976, and we looked a lot alike. We were both skinny, six-foot-two blond-haired guys with mustaches. When we showed up together, people would get us mixed up. Some didn’t even realize we were two separate guys until they saw us in the same room.
A lot of the older pilots knew one of us was named Sully, but they weren’t sure at first which one of us it was. “Hey Sully!” they’d say, and after a while, Jim got so used to being addressed that way that he’d turn around, too. When I landed Flight 1549 in the Hudson, I’m guessing there were some old fliers from the Lakenheath days who pictured Jim as the “Sully” at the controls.
By his own admission, Jim was a bit of a hot dog in the skies. I had the predictable call sign of “Sully.” His call sign was “Hollywood,” and he wore fancy sunglasses and unauthorized boots that were part cloth, part leather. He was a bit flamboyant, but he was also smart and observant. He’d put things in perspective. As he liked to say it: “It’s impossible to know every last bit of technical stuff about how to fly fighter planes, but we ought to know as much as we can because we need to be the go-to guys.”
