phone number from the phone’s contact list. The woman was taken away in an ambulance and survived.
I was pleased to see the people of Danville respond so well, and I was glad to be involved.
I’VE BEEN moved and impressed by my daughters’ eagerness to help others.
Kate raised and trained two puppies for Guide Dogs for the Blind. The program sent us our first puppy, a yellow Labrador retriever named Misty, in November 2002. Kate immediately fell in love with the puppy. She worked day after day helping Misty understand verbal orders. To get a puppy to relieve herself on command, the trainer has to wait for her to go to the bathroom, and then say the command “Do your business!” The idea was that Misty would then associate the words with doing her business, and when serving a person with disabilities, would be able to “relieve on command.”
Kate, then nine years old, took her responsibilities very seriously. One stormy day, I looked out the window and saw she was outside in the pouring rain, wearing her yellow slicker and galoshes, waiting for Misty to relieve herself so she could tell her, “Do your business!”
I called Lorrie over to the window to watch. We were proud of Kate. She was so responsible. And she loved that dog so much.
Once Misty was trained, we had to give her back to the organization so she could be placed in a home with a person who needed a guide dog. We knew that the good-bye would be very hard on Kate. “Recall Day” turned out to be Valentine’s Day 2004, when Misty was fifteen months old. Kate held herself together until it was time to leave Misty behind. Then she began bawling. For a while after that, she said she didn’t want to allow herself to fall in love with anything or anyone because it was going to be too hard when it was over. She said losing Misty was the first time she’d ever had her heart broken.
Through it all, though, she saw the great value of the guide dogs program. “We’re helping people,” she’d say, “and giving them their freedom back. It feels good to be able to do that. Besides, it’s fun to have a puppy.”
Kelly, meanwhile, is one of the most empathetic people I know. Starting in preschool, she always has been the kid who’d raise her hand and volunteer to be the teacher’s helper. She also embraced “Books for the Barrios,” the brainchild of the wife of a former naval officer and American Airlines pilot. The program has sent twelve million books to impoverished students overseas.
In second grade, Kelly’s class took a field trip to the organization’s warehouse in Concord, California. They learned about all of the disadvantaged kids on the outlying islands in the Philippines. They were told that many of the children slept on dirt floors, and welcomed the cardboard boxes that Books for the Barrios were packed in. Families broke down the boxes and used the cardboard as mats to sleep on.
Kelly was moved by what she heard on that field trip, and for her eighth birthday party, she decided on her own to ask her friends to bring books and gifts for children in the barrios. The children were instructed, when selecting gifts for Kelly, to pick presents that were appropriate for children in the Philippines. The party was held at the warehouse, and Kelly placed the wrapped gifts into shipping boxes. She and her friends then spent an hour helping pack donated books into boxes they decorated.
Everyone’s reputation is made on a daily basis. There are little incremental things—worthwhile efforts, moments you were helpful to others—and after a lifetime, they can add up to something. You can feel as if you lived and it mattered.
Until Flight 1549, I had assumed that I would always live a pretty anonymous life. I’d try to do my job to the best of my ability. Lorrie and I would try to raise the girls with the values we cherish. I’d make an effort to volunteer for worthy projects. Perhaps, I thought, at the end of my life, in aggregate, it would all add up to my being able to say I’d made a difference to others and to my community in some small way.
Actually, I live in several communities. One is Danville, of course. But another is the community that keeps re-creating itself in the nation’s airports. It’s a community of familiar faces—airport workers, my colleagues at US Airways, the crews from other airlines—that also includes thousands of strangers who repopulate the terminals every day.
An airport is not always an easy place to connect meaningfully with other people. We’re all coming and going, trying to get somewhere else and then home. But there are little ways to show humanity, and I’ve admired those who find ways to do so.
A PILOT’S job, first and foremost, is to fly the airplane safely, delivering passengers from Point A to Point B. We have checklists outlining a host of other tasks, too. But there are many things that are not in our job description, things that are the responsibility of gate agents, baggage handlers, skycaps, caterers, cleaners.
Most of these people do their jobs well, but an airport and an airline are not perfect systems. That can be frustrating for travelers and for those of us in the industry. If I can help things along, I try to do so.
There was one time when we had flown from Philadelphia to Hartford, Connecticut, landing at 10:30 P.M. A young couple in their thirties with a toddler waited and waited on the jetway for their stroller, but it never showed up. I wanted to help them. My attitude with passengers in these situations is this: I’ve gotten you this far. I’m not going to leave you hanging now.
I went down the stairs and out to the ramp and talked to the baggage handlers. Then I came back and told the couple that the stroller was either lost or left in Philly. “Come with me,” I told them.
I walked the couple to baggage claim and showed them where to file a claim. It was late. The lights in the terminal were being shut off. If I didn’t get them to the right place, they’d be stuck in the airport with everything closed, including the baggage office.
A flight attendant saw me helping them and commented that not every pilot or flight attendant would bother to help. It was an awfully simple thing I had done. I barely had to walk out of my way, since I was headed to a hotel van right outside of baggage claim.
And yet, I understood completely what this flight attendant meant.
A lot of people in the airline industry, and especially at my airline, US Airways, feel beaten down by circumstance. We’ve been hit by an economic tsunami. Some people feel their companies have held a gun to their heads, demanding concessions. We’ve been through pay cuts, givebacks, downsizing, layoffs. We’re the working wounded.
People get tired of constantly fighting the same battles over and over again every day. The gate agent hasn’t pulled the jetway up to the plane in time. The skycap is supposed to bring the wheelchair and hasn’t. (I’ve helped more than a few older people into wheelchairs and pushed them into the terminal myself.) The caterer hasn’t brought all the first-class meals. Catering companies always seem to be the lowest bidders with the highest employee turnover. At the end of a long day, you and your crew will get off the plane and make your way out of the terminal, but the hotel van isn’t there when it’s supposed to be.
All of this stuff beats you down. You get tired of constantly trying to correct what you corrected yesterday.
Many pilots and other airline workers feel that if they keep picking up all the slack, those who run the companies we work for will never staff the airlines properly, or do the training necessary, or hire the contractor who will be most responsible about bringing wheelchairs. And my colleagues are right about that. In the cultures of some companies, management depends heavily on the innate goodness and professionalism of its employees to constantly compensate for systemic deficiencies, chronic understaffing, and substandard subcontractors.
At all airlines, there are many employees, including in management, who care deeply and try to make things better. But at some point, it can feel like a fine line between letting passengers fend for themselves and enabling the airline’s inadequacies. And so it becomes a decision whether to do the simple, easy act of walking a young couple and their toddler to baggage claim.
My way of handling these issues is to fight to improve the system but still help those I can.
There was another incident late one night at the airport in Charlotte. We were delayed because of weather and air traffic issues, and as my crew stood on the curb waiting for the hotel van, a woman saw me in my pilot’s uniform and approached me. She was around fifty years old with short brown hair. She had no purse, no luggage, only a cigarette in her hands.
She said she and her family had flown in on US Airways, and she was changing planes in Charlotte, on her way to another city. Her family was back at the gate, where their plane was delayed because of the weather.
“I asked an airport employee where I could smoke a cigarette, and he sent me out here to the curb,” she
