crews—while knowing intimately what the plane can and cannot do. Even when the controls are being manipulated through automation, pilots have to back up the computer systems with their own mental math. I like the challenge of that.
I also like sharing my passion for flying. It’s a disappointment to me that a lot of kids today aren’t especially fascinated by flight. I’ve watched countless children walk past the cockpit without paying much attention; they’re too focused on their video games or their iPods.
When there are children who eagerly want a look inside “my office” at the front of the plane, their enthusiasm is contagious. It’s so gratifying to see their excitement about something I care deeply about. If we aren’t busy during boarding, the first officer and I enjoy inviting inquisitive children to sit in our seats in the cockpit, ask questions, and let their parents take photos of them wearing a captain’s hat.
Being a pilot has a tangible end result that is beneficial to society. It feels good to take a planeload of 183 people where they need or want to go. My job is to reunite people with family and friends, to send them on long- awaited vacations, to bring them to loved ones’ funerals, to get them to their job interviews. By the end of a day, after piloting three or four trips, I’ve taken four or five hundred people safely to their destinations, and I feel as if I’ve accomplished something. All of them have their own stories, motivations, needs—and helping them brings a rewarding feeling.
This is what gets me ready for work, and one of the things I look forward to.
I DID not kiss my wife good-bye.
It was five-thirty Monday morning, and I was leaving home for a four-day trip. My schedule had me piloting seven US Airways flights, with the last leg set for Thursday, January 15: Flight 1549 from New York to Charlotte.
I didn’t kiss Lorrie because, over the years, I’ve come to realize that Lorrie is a light sleeper, and though I’d like to quietly kiss her before every trip and whisper “I love you,” doing so at 5:30 A.M. wouldn’t be fair to her. I’d leave, and she’d be left there in bed, eyes open, to contemplate everything that she and our two daughters needed to do in the days ahead—all of it without me or my help.
Despite my passion for flying, the constant departures that define a pilot’s life have been very hard on us. Gone from home about eighteen days per month, I have missed well over half of my children’s lives.
My leaving isn’t an indication that I love flying more than I love my wife and kids. In fact, Lorrie and I have talked in recent years about my doing something besides commercial aviation, something that would keep me closer to home. Despite the limits on how a man can reinvent himself, I’ve been confident about finding another way of meeting my family’s financial needs that would equal being an airline captain. But I’ve wanted it to be a good fit that would take advantage of my life experiences. In the meantime, my dedication to the profession remains strong. And Lorrie knows me. She knows what flying means to me. We’ve found our ways to cope.
And so on that Monday, like so many before, I took my leave. Lorrie and our daughters, Kate, sixteen, and Kelly, fourteen, were fast asleep when I pulled the car out of our garage in Danville, California, and headed for San Francisco International Airport.
As the sun rose, I was already thirty-five miles away, crossing over San Francisco Bay on the San Mateo Bridge. I needed to be on a 7:30 A.M. flight to Charlotte—as a passenger.
Flight crews all have a base of operation, and mine is Charlotte, North Carolina. I used to be based in San Francisco, beginning in the early 1980s, when I flew for Pacific Southwest Airlines. In 1988, PSA merged with USAir, and I became a USAir pilot. In 1995, when USAir closed its San Francisco base, my base became Pittsburgh and then Charlotte. Lorrie and I wanted to remain in California, so like others based far from home, I’ve made a decision to commute across the country to start my work. We have chosen this life, and I’m grateful the airline allows it. Still, the logistics of it are wearying.
I don’t have to pay for my flights to get to work, but I do have to go standby. If no seat is available, I can usually ride in the jumpseat in the cockpit. That’s my ace in the hole. Mostly, though, I prefer to be in the back of the plane, out of the way of the pilots doing their job. In the back, I can read a book or close my eyes and try to sleep.
Because I’m in uniform, passengers will sometimes ask me a question about the flight, the turbulence, or how to best jam their overstuffed bags into the overhead compartment. Just as often, no one really notices me.
That’s how it was on the flight that day to Charlotte. I sat there in my middle seat in coach, as anonymous as always, with no conception that by week’s end everything would change. These were the final days of my old familiar life as a pilot.
I AM a man of routine, and there’s a precision to my life that leaves Lorrie rolling her eyes sometimes. She says I’m very controlled and regimented, and though she believes that is part of what makes me a good pilot, it also makes me hard to live with on occasion. Lorrie knows other pilots’ spouses who describe them the same way. Like me, they’ll come home after days away and try to take charge, annoying loved ones by reorganizing the dishes in the dishwasher, finding a more efficient way to stack everything. I guess the flying culture—all our training—is what makes us so organized. Or, as Lorrie suspects, maybe there’s a certain type of personality attracted to the profession. In any case, I suppose I’m guilty as charged. But my exacting approach to things may serve me well in a lot of ways.
I had packed for this four-day trip the same way I pack for every four-day trip. I never want to bring more than necessary. I wore my captain’s uniform—jacket and pants—and in my pilot’s “roll-aboard” carry-on, brought three clean shirts, three pairs of underwear, three pairs of socks, my shaving kit, running shoes, an umbrella, an iPod, my laptop to check e-mail, and four books to read. I also had my American Express
I enjoy listening to music on an iPod when I am in a city for an overnight. I always try to make a point of leaving the hotel to go for a walk, with music in my ears. Lately, I’ve been partial to Natalie Merchant, Green Day, the Killers, and Evanescence. I also find myself listening again and again to the works of Fritz Kreisler, the legendary Austrian violinist. He composed and recorded
In recent years, I’ve also been spending more time on the road focused on my future up the road. I am fifty-eight years old, and I face mandatory retirement from the cockpit when I turn sixty-five. What will I do then? Since September 11, 2001, the airline industry has been ailing, and as a result of cutbacks, I’ve lost 40 percent of my salary. Meanwhile, the US Airways pension I thought I could count on was terminated in 2004, and a government-backed replacement plan is a very weak substitute. As a result, I’ve lost more than two-thirds of my pension. My story is a familiar one across the airline industry.
Trying to earn money elsewhere, I’ve bought some real estate over the years, with mixed results. I own a property in Northern California that used to house a Jiffy Lube oil-change franchise. The operation didn’t renew its lease, however, and I’ve been unable to find a new tenant. So as I sat on that flight to Charlotte, I went over some of those details in my head.
About a year ago, I also started my own side business, a consulting company called Safety Reliability Methods, Inc. It seemed like the right fit for me as my flying career winds down. Long before the landing in the Hudson, I’d been passionately involved in matters of air safety, dating back to my days as an Air Force fighter pilot. And so I brought three books on this four-day trip that were related to issues I want to address as a consultant.
I’ve been slowly building my firm, designed to help those in other occupations benefit from the airline industry’s tactical and strategic approaches to safety. Pilots have extensive checklists that we follow in the cockpit. My firm encourages initiatives, such as those now under way in medicine, that mirror pilots’ checklists. For instance, the World Health Organization now suggests the use of surgical safety checklists, requiring hospital teams to make certain that a patient’s known allergies are checked, and instruments, needles, and sponges are counted to make sure none are left inside a patient.
