I’ve flown over a lot of places in America—Montana, Idaho, the Dakotas—where you travel great distances without much evidence of human habitation. It’s a lonely kind of beauty, but it can tug at you. I also like flying on the East Coast, where the population density is striking. There’s a constant stream of lights between Washington, D.C., and Boston. From the air, it has almost become one continuous megalopolis.
Flying down to Ft. Lauderdale, I like passing over Cape Canaveral and seeing its three-mile-long runway. What a thrill it would be to land the shuttle there. Florida trips also have reminded me of how easily nature can tear apart hundreds of miles of human development. For years after a spate of hurricanes in 2004 and 2005, thousands of homes in South Florida had blue tarps covering their roofs. It was sobering to fly above that checkerboard carpet of blue squares, to see the destructive powers of wind and rain.
In the early 1990s, when I was lower on the seniority list, I had to pilot a lot of red-eye flights. On so many of those red-eyes, I got to see the northern lights again and again. Especially in the wintertime, there were nights when for the whole trip, west to east, the lights would fill the entire northern horizon. To me, these lights—formed by charged particles colliding in the earth’s magnetosphere—looked like curtains billowing gently in the wind, with their folds swaying in and out. Sometimes, the lights were a deep magenta or cherry red. Other times, as the lights were cycling, they were lime green. Rather than looking like a curtain, these green lights sometimes looked like an old TV with the vertical hold not adjusted properly and the lines on the TV rolling from bottom to top. I felt privileged to be in a place, night after night, where I could see such scenes.
A few years ago, my schedule included regular trips to Bermuda, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, and Antigua, which were a lot more fun than landing in Charlotte for the 141st time. I loved approaching the islands during daylight. We’d come in over shallow turquoise water, with the white, sandy beaches and lush green mountains ahead of us.
I USED to fly from Albany, New York, to LaGuardia, and we’d pass over West Point, a trip that would often jog memories for me. One winter, when I was a cadet at the Air Force Academy, I was sent to West Point for a week as part of an exchange program. On that visit, everything there felt gray to me: the stone walls of the old buildings, the winter sky, the cadets’ uniforms. I ate in the cavernous cadet dining hall, where I was told that General Douglas MacArthur made his last visit to West Point. He had come back to his beloved alma mater in 1962 to give his famous “Duty, Honor, Country” speech. Flying over West Point on winter days decades later, I’d find myself thinking about that speech and wondering what the current cadets were doing at that particular moment.
My schedule takes me into and out of LaGuardia about fifteen times a year, and in my career, I’ve flown there hundreds of times. So I know the general landscape and landmarks of the area very well.
In the New York corridor, when the weather is good, controllers often tell us to fly toward a specific landmark on the ground. This use of “reporting points”—especially important when pilots are flying visually in addition to using instruments—is less common in some other areas of the country, where the landmarks aren’t as large or well-known.
“Direct to the statue. Follow the river,” controllers will tell us, which means fly toward the Statue of Liberty and then follow the Hudson. Or they’ll point us to the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, at the mouth of upper New York Bay. “Direct to the Narrows.”
If time permits, I’ll allow myself to take a moment to appreciate the physical beauty of the New York landscape. Below me are millions of people in hundreds of thousands of structures. It’s pretty dramatic.
On a cloudless day with good visibility, when I can clearly see “The Lady”—pilots’ shorthand for the Statue of Liberty—I can often make out the flash of flame in her torch. Passing over the statue, I’m reminded of how I used to love reading an illustrated children’s book to Kate and Kelly when they were young. The book was about the building of the statue, how the French people gave it to the United States as a gift, and about “The New Colossus,” the Emma Lazarus poem engraved on a bronze plaque at the base. I enjoyed that children’s book even more than the girls did, partly because I’ve always found that poem by Emma Lazarus to be so moving and evocative. I can recite much of it from memory: “…and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand glows world-wide welcome; Her mild eyes command the air-bridged harbor…I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
When the girls were little and I was on a trip, I’d mail them postcards so they could get a sense of where I was. Sometimes, I’d also send postcards to their teachers to share with the class. I’d offer a few lines with my own observations about, say, the Liberty Bell in Philly or the famous statues of ducklings in Boston Public Garden. When I sent the girls postcards of the Statue of Liberty, I described the thrill I felt flying over it, and how I had thought of them and our shared bedtime book.
I WISH I could bring Lorrie and the girls with me to see the country more often. One of the perks of working in the airline industry always has been our ability to have our families fly free or at a reduced fare. We can fly in coach without charge on US Airways if seats are available. On other airlines, we pay a percentage of the fare, usually between a quarter and half of the regular price.
In past eras, pilots easily took their spouses and kids on vacations and impulsive sightseeing jaunts. These days, however, with low fares ensuring that airplanes are almost always full, it’s much harder to get seats. It’s yet another result of airline deregulation. Our employee travel benefits are now of limited usefulness.
In 2001, for instance, I was able to get four seats on a flight to Orlando, so Lorrie and I were able to take the girls to Disney World. But then we had trouble getting seats on a flight home to San Francisco. We kept running back and forth to different terminals, schlepping all our luggage, trying to find a flight on any available airline.
Kate, then eight years old, eventually had enough. “Why don’t we buy tickets like everyone else?” she asked. In her eyes, I wasn’t a big-shot pilot impressing her with my perks. I was a cheap, harried father making her pull her suitcase all over the airport.
Mostly, we buy regular tickets for flights now, because the hassles and uncertainties of trying to use my employee travel benefits just aren’t worth it.
I’d say our most memorable free trip as a family was to New York in December 2002, when the girls were nine and seven.
I had a four-day trip scheduled, and each night had a layover in Manhattan. Impulsively, I called Lorrie from Pittsburgh.
“Let’s take the girls out of school,” I told her. “I can get the three of you on the next red-eye to Pittsburgh, and from there we’re going to take a little surprise vacation.” It was an echo of the good old days, when my father would decide to pull my sister and me out of school for a trip to Dallas.
Lorrie and the girls agreed to come. They arrived early in the morning in Pittsburgh, and I was waiting for them at their gate. I piloted the next US Airways flight to LaGuardia, and I was able to get them seats on my plane.
I just loved having them on board. I did my usual welcome announcement, but with a twist. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is Captain Sullenberger, and Katie and Kelly, this is Dad. We are bound for New York’s LaGuardia Airport…”
Lorrie later told me the girls giggled when I said that. They felt like everyone was smiling at them. It was a nice moment.
We got to New York and it was bitterly cold, but we had a terrific time. We took a ferry by the Statue of Liberty. It was just fifteen months after the attacks of September 11, and Liberty Island itself was still off-limits. That night we went to see
The next day I piloted a flight from LaGuardia to New Orleans and back, and Lorrie and the girls stayed in New York. They went to Macy’s and visited Santa Claus. They took a sightseeing bus tour of the city. They went to Ground Zero.
I made it back by nightfall, and we saw the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center, and went ice-skating. Then we got tickets for the Rockettes’ Christmas show at Radio City Music Hall. Kate and Kelly were wide-eyed at the splendor of the theater, and having taken dance lessons themselves, they loved how the dancers were arranged perfectly by height, and how they performed together as a chorus line with such precision.
The next day I had to pilot a flight from New York to Nassau. As I was leaving LaGuardia, a major snowstorm began. I got the plane deiced and flew down to the Bahamas, where it was eighty degrees. As usual, I was only able to step out into the sunshine briefly, when I walked down the stairs to the tarmac. After a quick
