In 1939, when Herman was fifteen years old, he, his sister, and his parents were living in Vienna and trying desperately to get out of Austria. Because they were Jewish, their apartment had been ransacked by Nazis. They knew of the mass deportations of Jews and had heard the rumors of mass murder.
Herman’s family hoped to come to the United States, where relatives lived and were willing to sign paperwork vouching for them. In those days, the United States had strict quotas on how many European refugees could be admitted. At the U.S. embassy in Vienna, the family was told that only three visas were available—for Herman, his mother, and his sister. Because Herman’s father had a Polish passport, and there were different quotas for Poles, there would be no visa for him.
“Please,” Herman’s mother pleaded. “Let our family stay together.”
“You can stay together if you’d like,” the embassy clerk told them. “If you want to stay here in Austria, you can be together. If the three of you want to go, you can go. It’s your choice.”
The family made a decision. Herman’s father would stay behind. Herman, his sister, and his mother would escape to the United States, where life would be safer for them. The three of them arrived here in August 1939, and not long after that, Herman’s father was transported to Buchenwald concentration camp. He was murdered there in February 1940.
Almost seventy years later, Herman watched the rescue of Flight 1549 unfold, and it was, in part, these difficult memories that compelled him to call his daughter, Bracha. Afterward, Bracha continued to think about the connections between me and her father, and she reached out to me with her letter.
She wrote of Herman’s great reverence for life, forged through the Holocaust. She also wrote that her father was lucky that our flight found safety in the river, as opposed to crashing into buildings in Manhattan.
“Had you not been so skilled and such a lover of life,” she wrote, “my father or others like him, in their sky- high buildings, could have perished along with your passengers. As a Holocaust survivor, my father taught me that to save a life is to save the world.”
She explained to me the Jewish view that if you save one person, you never know what he or she might go on to accomplish, or how his or her progeny might contribute to peace and healing in the world. “May you know the joy of having saved generations of people,” Bracha wrote, “allowing them the possibility of humanitarianism such as yours. Bless you, Captain Sullenberger.”
Her letter continues to move and inspire me. I feel honored that she viewed the landing of the plane in the Hudson as “a powerful commitment to life.” She’s right: I don’t know the good things still to be accomplished by the 154 people on my flight. I can’t fathom what contributions might be made to the world by their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren yet to be born.
THERE WERE those who wrote to say they agreed with me: I am not a hero. I appreciated the ways they spoke to me. They wrote to say that preparation and diligence are not the same as heroism.
“In your interviews, you seemed uncomfortable being called a hero,” wrote Paul Kellen of Medford, Massachusetts. “I also found the title inappropriate. I see a hero as electing to enter a dangerous situation for a higher purpose, and you were not given a choice. That is not to say you are not a man of virtue, but I see your virtue arising from your choices at other times. It is clear you take your professional responsibilities seriously. It is clear that many of the choices in your life prepared you for that moment when your engines failed.
“There are people among us who are ethical, responsible, and diligent. I think there are many of them. You might have toiled in obscurity were it not for an ill-timed meeting with a flock of birds.
“I hope your story encourages those many others who toil in obscurity to know that their reward is simple— they will be ready if the test comes. I do not mean to diminish your achievement. I just want to point out that when the challenge sounded, you had thoroughly prepared yourself. I hope your story encourages others to imitation.”
I heard from more than a few people who lost loved ones in accidents, or who survived accidents themselves. Some of these tragedies involved airplanes.
People wrote of how they had found the courage to return to flying, mostly because they had resolved to trust the professionals in the cockpit.
Karen Kaiser Clark of St. Paul, Minnesota, wrote to me about Delta Air Lines Flight 191, which crashed in Dallas on August 2, 1985, “taking the lives of 139 people, each with a family, a circle of friends, and a place in the world no one could replace. It was wind shear, and my mom, Kate, was among the last seven identified. Her fifteen friends were also killed. Just five months prior, we had taken our father off life support. This was her first venture as a widow.”
In the wake of the tragedy, Karen said, she was able to find a path to acceptance and a new appreciation for life. “Following Mom’s funeral in Florida,” she wrote, “we flew with her ashes and Dad’s to inter them in Toledo, Ohio. However, our flight was caught in horrible turbulence. We were all terrified, but in those moments I vowed that if we were able to land, I would find a way to (1) grow through these terrible times and not become bitter, and (2) continue to fly, as I lecture internationally.”
Bart Simon, who owns a hair-products company in Cleveland, told me he was on USAir Flight 405 when it attempted takeoff from LaGuardia on the night of March 22, 1992, and crashed in Flushing Bay. “I was one of the lucky ones who walked away with just a small cut on my head,” Bart wrote. Twenty-seven people died, and nine of the twenty-three other survivors had serious injuries. The National Transportation Safety Board later said the probable causes were ice on the wings, failures of the FAA and the airline industry to have appropriate procedures regarding icing and delays, and the flight crew’s decision to take off without knowing for sure that the wings were free of ice.
“I had been successful in putting that evening out of my mind and getting on with my life,” Bart told me, “but the pictures of your landing last month and the similarity of the circumstances—US Airways, LaGuardia, the water—brought the memories rushing back.” He wrote that when he watched our crew on TV, it seemed as if we epitomized what passengers hope to find when they board flights: professionals who are “cool, calm, and most of all, in command, no matter how dire the circumstances.” He said he was writing to say thanks “on behalf of the millions of us who entrust our lives to you and your fellow pilots every year.”
He had boarded a plane out of LaGuardia bound for Cleveland the very morning after that 1992 crash. “The charred remains of Flight 405 were clearly visible in Flushing Bay as my plane taxied by, but I left that morning calm in the knowledge that a skilled professional was at the controls, and that in a short time I would be back home.”
As pilots, we sometimes sense that passengers have no awareness of us. It’s as if they’re just pushing their way past the cockpit, looking for space in the overhead compartments. But in the wake of Flight 1549, I’ve been able to hear from people such as Karen Kaiser Clark and Bart Simon, and it is humbling to contemplate the faith and trust that they and others like them have placed in us.
THERESA HUNSICKER, who runs a day-care center in Louisiana, learned about Flight 1549 while watching Fox News. A forty-three-year-old mother of a nine-year-old girl, she saw me on
“My name is Theresa Hunsicker,” her letter began, “and I am the daughter of Richard Hazen, who was the copilot of ValuJet 592. It went down in the Florida Everglades on May 11, 1996, with 110 people on board.”
Flight 592 had taken off from Miami International Airport, headed for Atlanta, with Captain Candalyn Kubeck at the controls. About six minutes into the flight, she and First Officer Hazen reported fire in the plane’s interior and smoke in the cockpit. On the cockpit recording, a female voice is heard shouting from the cabin: “Fire, fire, fire, fire!”
First Officer Hazen radioed to the controller, asking to return to the airport. A few minutes later, traveling at five hundred miles per hour, it crashed in the Everglades. The plane was destroyed on impact.
An investigation revealed that the jet was carrying chemical oxygen generators in its cargo compartment, which likely started or fueled the fire. The oxygen generators had been labeled “empty,” and did not have protective shipping caps that could have prevented the fire. The legacy of Flight 592 is that smoke detectors and fire-extinguishing systems are now placed in cargo holds, and changes have been made in how hazardous materials are transported.
In her letter to me, Theresa wrote that she cried watching news reports of Flight 1549. She was reminded of how much she had wished that her father’s flight could have had the same positive outcome—a safe water
