Last Jan. 15th US Airways Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger and his and First Officer Jeff Skiles executed an emergency landing later dubbed “The Miracle on the Hudson,” after their flight had been struck by birds en route from New York to Charlotte, N.C.and lost both engines. In his many public appearances since then Capt. Sullenberger has proven to be a cerebral man who carefully chooses his words. In his new book, “Highest Duty: My Search for What Really Matters” Sully, as he is affectionately referred to, has spent a great deal of time reviewing his life and career trying to understand what experiences from his past prepared him for the five minutes of white knuckled crisis that was flight 1549. It is a revealing and surprising look at the man and God’s providence in preparing him for that trial.
This past week the Wall Street Journal featured a review written by the man who co-authored the writing of the book. Here are some selections from it:
His Youth
He was born in Denison, Texas, the son of a dentist and a teacher who had high expectations. “I grew up in a home where each of us had our own hammer,” says Sully. That was because his dad kept enlarging the family home with the help of three not-always-willing assistants: Sully, his sister and his mom. “The goal was to do everything ourselves, to earn what we didn’t know and then have at it,” Sully says. The house wasn’t perfect, but Sully knew where every nail was.
‘Sometimes I’d brood, wishing we lived in a professionally built house like everyone else,” he says. “But each time the house grew, I felt a sense of accomplishment.”
As a boy, Sully was a classic introvert who felt things deeply. In 1964, for instance, he saw news reports about a New York woman named Kitty Genovese. Her neighbors heard her screams as she was being stabbed to death by a stranger )utside her apartment. Allegedly, they did nothing to help.
“I made a pledge to myself, right then at age 13,” Sully recalls, “that if I was ever in a situation where someone such as Kitty Genovese needed my help, I would choose to act. No one in danger would be abandoned. As they’d say in the Navy: ‘Not on my watch.’”
His Father
People tell Sully that his success on Jan. 15 showed a high regard for life. Their words led him to reflection. “Quite frankly,” he says, “one of the reasons I think I’ve placed such a high value on life is that my father took his.”
Suffering from depression, Sully’s father killed himself in 1995. “His death had an effect on how I view the world,” he says. “I am willing to work hard to protect people’s lives, to not be a bystander, in part because I couldn’t save my father.”
Learning To Fly
He first yearned to fly at age five. At 16, in 1967, he began taking lessons from a no-nonsense crop-dusting pilot named L.T. Cook Jr.
Sully was an earnest, hard-working student who paid close attention. One day he noticed a crumpled Piper Tn-Pacer at the end of Mr. Cook’s grass airstrip. A friend of Mr. Cook’s had tried to land the plane and didn’t realize that power lines stretched across a nearby highway. The plane slammed into the ground nose first. The pilot died instantly.
Sully peered into the blood-splattered cockpit. “I figured his head must have hit the control panel with great violence,” he says. “I tried to visualize how it happened — his effort to avoid the power lines, his loss of speed, the awful impact. I forced myself to look into the cockpit, to study it. It would have been easier to look away, but I didn’t.”
That sobering moment taught Sully to be vigilant and alert. For a pilot, one simple mistake could mean death.
He went on to the U.S. Air Force Academy, then a military career, and continued to study accidents. Twelve fellow military pilots died on training runs. “I grieved for my lost comrades,” he says, “but I tried to learn all I could about each of their accidents.”
As an airline pilot, he helped develop an air-safety course and served as an investigator at crash sites. He’d page through transcripts from cockpit voice recorders, with the last exchanges of pilots who didn’t survive.
Influence of Charles Lindbergh
Since childhood, Sully has been fascinated by Charles Lindbergh. In “We,” Lindbergh’s 1927 book, he explained that his success was due almost entirely to preparation, not luck. “Prepared Lindy” wouldn’t have had the same magic as his nickname “Lucky Lindy,” but his views resonated with Sully.
One aspect of preparing well is having the right mindset, he says. “In so many areas of life, you need to be a long-term optimist but a short-term realist. That’s especially true given the inherent dangers in aviation. You can’t be a wishful thinker. You have to know what you know and don’t know, and what your airplane can and can’t do in every situation.”
Focus
Sully has always kept in mind the air-crew ejection study he learned about in his military days. Many pilots waited too long before ejecting from planes that were about to crash, they either ejected at too low an altitude, hitting the ground before their parachutes could open, or they went down with their planes.
Why did these pilots spend extra seconds trying to fix the unfixable? The answer is that many feared retribution if they lost million-dollar jets. And so they remained determined to try to save their airplanes.
Sully says he has never shaken his memories of fellow Air Force pilots who didn’t survive such attempts. Having those details in the recesses of his brain was helpful as he made quick decisions on flight 1549. “As soon as the birds struck,” he says, “I could have tried to return to LaGuardia so as not to ruin a US Airways aircraft. I could have worried that my decision to ditch the plane would be questioned by superiors or investigators. But I chose not to.”
Sully values the concept of “goal sacrificing.” When it’s no longer possible to complete all your goals, you sacrifice lower-priority goals. He instinctively knew that goal-sacrificing was paramount on Flight 1549. “By attempting a water landing,” he says, “I would sacrifice the ‘airplane goal — trying not to destroy an aircraft valued at $60 million — for the goal of saving lives.
Able to compartmentalize his thinking, even in those dire moments over the Hudson, Sully says his family did not come into his head. “That was for the best. It was vital that I be focused; that I allow myself no distractions. My consciousness existed solely to control the flight path.”
Performing At Our Best
“I am now the public face of an unexpectedly uplifting moment,” Sully says, and he accepts that. Still, he’s not comfortable with the “hero mantle. A hero runs into a burning building, he says. “Flight 1549 was different because it was thrust upon me and my crew. We turned to our training, we made good decisions, we didn’t give up, we valued every life on that plane — and we had a good outcome. I don’t know that ‘heroic’ describes that. It’s more that we had a philosophy of life, and we applied it to the things we did that day.”
Sully has heard from people who say preparation and diligence are not the same as heroism. He agrees.
One letter that was particularly touching to Sully came from Paul Mellen of Medford, Mass. “I see a hero as electing to enter a dangerous situation for a higher purpose,” he wrote, “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’s clear that many 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 hope your story encourages those who toil in obscurity to know that their reward is simple — they will be ready if the test comes. I hope your story encourages others to imitation.”
Sully now sees lessons for the rest of us. “We need to try to do the right thing every time, to perform at our best,” he says, “because we never know what moment in our lives we’ll be judged on.”
He always had a sense of this. Now he knows it for sure.
There is nothing in this review that indicates that Capt. Sullenberger views the events that transpired on Flight 1549 as other than worldly, no mention of luck, for example, which often functions as the secular equivalent of divine providence. However when I read the review I kept thinking of a short video I have on Paying Attention To The Sky where Fr. Robert Barron makes some short comments following a speech by George Weigel. He salutes Weigel on magnificent biography of John Paul II and says he was deeply moved by it. His favorite section of that biography dealt with the young manhood of Karol Wojtyła. Wojtyła went to the Jagiellonian University in September of 1939. — the very same moment that the Nazi’s arrived in Poland. Very quickly Polish society became incapacitated, if not utterly decapitated. Many of the professors of Karol Wojtyła were killed outright or sent to camps.
“What did he do?”asks Barron. He answers: “During that terrible time he went underground. With a few friends from the Rhapsodic Theater he would gather behind closed and locked doors reading texts of Polish literature, often by flashlight. Many who were on their way to those meetings or going home from them were arrested, some killed by the Germans.”
Barron poses the question again: “What was he doing, Wojtyła and his friends?” And replies: “They were preserving more than Polish literature. Because ingredient in that literature were all the ideas that George Weigel was just speaking of. Ingredient in all that great literature was the Catholic imagination. During those terrible years Karol Wojtyła hunkered down and with his friends he preserved it. In 1945 the Nazis were expelled and they were replaced by only a slightly less repressive Communist presence. During those terrible years what did Karol Wojtyła do? He hunkered down and with many of his young friends and colleagues whom he trained in Catholic spirituality in Catholic literature in Catholic theology in the formation of a Catholic mentality and culture.”
And then of course as we know through God’s amazing Grace that beleaguered young man became the Pope and at the propitious moment at a very dark time in Polish history again he returned and this time with the full power of the papacy behind him he unleashed the life he had preserved during those terrible years. He unleashed these young people whom he had formed who were now leaders in society — editors and teachers and business leaders — and with full force and authority he sent them out. And, as we know, it transfigured Polish society — it transfigured the world.
The biblical image that Barron calls to mind is Noah’s ark. “During that terrible time when human sin had overwhelmed the human project, God preserved Noah and his family and a remnant of his creation on the ark, carefully preserving a microcosm of what God desired. But that life was not meant to hunker down behind the walls of that ark. At the propitious moment when the waters had receded Noah opened the windows and he opened the doors and let that life out. That is precisely what Karol Wojtyla did.”
That is precisely the dual call of the Catholic church claims Barron. The culture will always be to a greater or lesser extent hostile to the Church’s project. And therefore we Catholics will always be called upon to in some degree to hunker down and to preserve a form of life, whereever that happens for us, above all in the liturgy, the source and summit of the Christian life.
At this point Fr. Barron demurs: “May I say that the fact that 70 to 75 percent of our brothers and sisters who stay away from the source and summit of the Christian life on a regular is a tragedy. If you had told to Henri de Lubac or Jean Danilieu or Hans Urs von Balthazar, the great fathers of Vatican two, if you had told them that in 2008 75 percent of American Catholics would be staying away from the liturgy? They would have thought the project had failed. They wanted to revive the liturgy — this place where the catholic form of life is on display and cultivated.”
“Where else does it happen?” asks Barron. He answers: “It happens in our great intellectual life: Chrysostom, Jerome, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, Dante, John Henry Newman, G.K. Chesterton, John Paul II, Teresa of Avila, the Little Flower. We have this very rich intellectual and cultural tradition. We must preserve it. We must love it. We must pass it on to our children.”
Barron tells us a personal story to illustrate this: “When I was 13 years old, 1973, at the height of a lot of the post conciliar confusion in Catholic schools and education, I sat in a classroom at Fenwick High School and heard one of the Dominican friars teach us the five arguments of Thomas Aquinas for God’s Existence. It changed my life. It set me on a path that I’ve never gotten off of.” “When we preserve our great intellectual tradition and pass it on to our kids,” he says, “We keep this Catholic thing going.
Barron sums up: “Now. That’s the moment of preservation. But the second great moment of the Church’s life, as exemplified in John Paul II, we must find in prudence those propitious moments when we let that life out. And that’s the Vatican II vision. That’s the Vatican II vision of the role of the laity.
Yes to be great Catholic lawyers not incidentally Catholic; to be great .Catholic politicians, not incidentally so. To be great Catholic teachers and writers. To be great Catholic journalists and actors. That is how we transfigure the world by spreading the seed that we carefully preserve. There’s the work of the new evangelization. That we might let loose this life, this dunamis, as Paul called it, this power of the gospel for the transformation of the world. That is the properly subversive role of the great evangelization.”
If you have seen the little video I feature here, you will know this is a rousing ending and Fr. Barron leaves his audience roaring approval. It truly is unforgettable. And do you see how it dovetails nicely with the Catholic view of God’s providence and the life of Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger? It is sad that Sully doesn’t seem to be aware of how his life has been touched by God’s providential grace but he innocently describes exactly that. In some ways the book may be more powerful for the fact that it calls upon us to provide what Paul Harvey used to call “The Rest of the Story.”
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Highest Duty: A Search for What Really Matters
October 19, 2009This past week the Wall Street Journal featured a review written by the man who co-authored the writing of the book. Here are some selections from it:
His Youth
He was born in Denison, Texas, the son of a dentist and a teacher who had high expectations. “I grew up in a home where each of us had our own hammer,” says Sully. That was because his dad kept enlarging the family home with the help of three not-always-willing assistants: Sully, his sister and his mom. “The goal was to do everything ourselves, to earn what we didn’t know and then have at it,” Sully says. The house wasn’t perfect, but Sully knew where every nail was.
‘Sometimes I’d brood, wishing we lived in a professionally built house like everyone else,” he says. “But each time the house grew, I felt a sense of accomplishment.”
As a boy, Sully was a classic introvert who felt things deeply. In 1964, for instance, he saw news reports about a New York woman named Kitty Genovese. Her neighbors heard her screams as she was being stabbed to death by a stranger )utside her apartment. Allegedly, they did nothing to help.
“I made a pledge to myself, right then at age 13,” Sully recalls, “that if I was ever in a situation where someone such as Kitty Genovese needed my help, I would choose to act. No one in danger would be abandoned. As they’d say in the Navy: ‘Not on my watch.’”
His Father
People tell Sully that his success on Jan. 15 showed a high regard for life. Their words led him to reflection. “Quite frankly,” he says, “one of the reasons I think I’ve placed such a high value on life is that my father took his.”
Suffering from depression, Sully’s father killed himself in 1995. “His death had an effect on how I view the world,” he says. “I am willing to work hard to protect people’s lives, to not be a bystander, in part because I couldn’t save my father.”
Learning To Fly
He first yearned to fly at age five. At 16, in 1967, he began taking lessons from a no-nonsense crop-dusting pilot named L.T. Cook Jr.
Sully was an earnest, hard-working student who paid close attention. One day he noticed a crumpled Piper Tn-Pacer at the end of Mr. Cook’s grass airstrip. A friend of Mr. Cook’s had tried to land the plane and didn’t realize that power lines stretched across a nearby highway. The plane slammed into the ground nose first. The pilot died instantly.
Sully peered into the blood-splattered cockpit. “I figured his head must have hit the control panel with great violence,” he says. “I tried to visualize how it happened — his effort to avoid the power lines, his loss of speed, the awful impact. I forced myself to look into the cockpit, to study it. It would have been easier to look away, but I didn’t.”
That sobering moment taught Sully to be vigilant and alert. For a pilot, one simple mistake could mean death.
He went on to the U.S. Air Force Academy, then a military career, and continued to study accidents. Twelve fellow military pilots died on training runs. “I grieved for my lost comrades,” he says, “but I tried to learn all I could about each of their accidents.”
As an airline pilot, he helped develop an air-safety course and served as an investigator at crash sites. He’d page through transcripts from cockpit voice recorders, with the last exchanges of pilots who didn’t survive.
Influence of Charles Lindbergh
Since childhood, Sully has been fascinated by Charles Lindbergh. In “We,” Lindbergh’s 1927 book, he explained that his success was due almost entirely to preparation, not luck. “Prepared Lindy” wouldn’t have had the same magic as his nickname “Lucky Lindy,” but his views resonated with Sully.
One aspect of preparing well is having the right mindset, he says. “In so many areas of life, you need to be a long-term optimist but a short-term realist. That’s especially true given the inherent dangers in aviation. You can’t be a wishful thinker. You have to know what you know and don’t know, and what your airplane can and can’t do in every situation.”
Focus
Sully has always kept in mind the air-crew ejection study he learned about in his military days. Many pilots waited too long before ejecting from planes that were about to crash, they either ejected at too low an altitude, hitting the ground before their parachutes could open, or they went down with their planes.
Why did these pilots spend extra seconds trying to fix the unfixable? The answer is that many feared retribution if they lost million-dollar jets. And so they remained determined to try to save their airplanes.
Sully says he has never shaken his memories of fellow Air Force pilots who didn’t survive such attempts. Having those details in the recesses of his brain was helpful as he made quick decisions on flight 1549. “As soon as the birds struck,” he says, “I could have tried to return to LaGuardia so as not to ruin a US Airways aircraft. I could have worried that my decision to ditch the plane would be questioned by superiors or investigators. But I chose not to.”
Sully values the concept of “goal sacrificing.” When it’s no longer possible to complete all your goals, you sacrifice lower-priority goals. He instinctively knew that goal-sacrificing was paramount on Flight 1549. “By attempting a water landing,” he says, “I would sacrifice the ‘airplane goal — trying not to destroy an aircraft valued at $60 million — for the goal of saving lives.
Able to compartmentalize his thinking, even in those dire moments over the Hudson, Sully says his family did not come into his head. “That was for the best. It was vital that I be focused; that I allow myself no distractions. My consciousness existed solely to control the flight path.”
Performing At Our Best
“I am now the public face of an unexpectedly uplifting moment,” Sully says, and he accepts that. Still, he’s not comfortable with the “hero mantle. A hero runs into a burning building, he says. “Flight 1549 was different because it was thrust upon me and my crew. We turned to our training, we made good decisions, we didn’t give up, we valued every life on that plane — and we had a good outcome. I don’t know that ‘heroic’ describes that. It’s more that we had a philosophy of life, and we applied it to the things we did that day.”
Sully has heard from people who say preparation and diligence are not the same as heroism. He agrees.
One letter that was particularly touching to Sully came from Paul Mellen of Medford, Mass. “I see a hero as electing to enter a dangerous situation for a higher purpose,” he wrote, “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’s clear that many 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 hope your story encourages those who toil in obscurity to know that their reward is simple — they will be ready if the test comes. I hope your story encourages others to imitation.”
Sully now sees lessons for the rest of us. “We need to try to do the right thing every time, to perform at our best,” he says, “because we never know what moment in our lives we’ll be judged on.”
He always had a sense of this. Now he knows it for sure.
There is nothing in this review that indicates that Capt. Sullenberger views the events that transpired on Flight 1549 as other than worldly, no mention of luck, for example, which often functions as the secular equivalent of divine providence. However when I read the review I kept thinking of a short video I have on Paying Attention To The Sky where Fr. Robert Barron makes some short comments following a speech by George Weigel. He salutes Weigel on magnificent biography of John Paul II and says he was deeply moved by it. His favorite section of that biography dealt with the young manhood of Karol Wojtyła. Wojtyła went to the Jagiellonian University in September of 1939. — the very same moment that the Nazi’s arrived in Poland. Very quickly Polish society became incapacitated, if not utterly decapitated. Many of the professors of Karol Wojtyła were killed outright or sent to camps.
“What did he do?”asks Barron. He answers: “During that terrible time he went underground. With a few friends from the Rhapsodic Theater he would gather behind closed and locked doors reading texts of Polish literature, often by flashlight. Many who were on their way to those meetings or going home from them were arrested, some killed by the Germans.”
Barron poses the question again: “What was he doing, Wojtyła and his friends?” And replies: “They were preserving more than Polish literature. Because ingredient in that literature were all the ideas that George Weigel was just speaking of. Ingredient in all that great literature was the Catholic imagination. During those terrible years Karol Wojtyła hunkered down and with his friends he preserved it. In 1945 the Nazis were expelled and they were replaced by only a slightly less repressive Communist presence. During those terrible years what did Karol Wojtyła do? He hunkered down and with many of his young friends and colleagues whom he trained in Catholic spirituality in Catholic literature in Catholic theology in the formation of a Catholic mentality and culture.”
And then of course as we know through God’s amazing Grace that beleaguered young man became the Pope and at the propitious moment at a very dark time in Polish history again he returned and this time with the full power of the papacy behind him he unleashed the life he had preserved during those terrible years. He unleashed these young people whom he had formed who were now leaders in society — editors and teachers and business leaders — and with full force and authority he sent them out. And, as we know, it transfigured Polish society — it transfigured the world.
The biblical image that Barron calls to mind is Noah’s ark. “During that terrible time when human sin had overwhelmed the human project, God preserved Noah and his family and a remnant of his creation on the ark, carefully preserving a microcosm of what God desired. But that life was not meant to hunker down behind the walls of that ark. At the propitious moment when the waters had receded Noah opened the windows and he opened the doors and let that life out. That is precisely what Karol Wojtyla did.”
That is precisely the dual call of the Catholic church claims Barron. The culture will always be to a greater or lesser extent hostile to the Church’s project. And therefore we Catholics will always be called upon to in some degree to hunker down and to preserve a form of life, whereever that happens for us, above all in the liturgy, the source and summit of the Christian life.
At this point Fr. Barron demurs: “May I say that the fact that 70 to 75 percent of our brothers and sisters who stay away from the source and summit of the Christian life on a regular is a tragedy. If you had told to Henri de Lubac or Jean Danilieu or Hans Urs von Balthazar, the great fathers of Vatican two, if you had told them that in 2008 75 percent of American Catholics would be staying away from the liturgy? They would have thought the project had failed. They wanted to revive the liturgy — this place where the catholic form of life is on display and cultivated.”
“Where else does it happen?” asks Barron. He answers: “It happens in our great intellectual life: Chrysostom, Jerome, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, Dante, John Henry Newman, G.K. Chesterton, John Paul II, Teresa of Avila, the Little Flower. We have this very rich intellectual and cultural tradition. We must preserve it. We must love it. We must pass it on to our children.”
Barron tells us a personal story to illustrate this: “When I was 13 years old, 1973, at the height of a lot of the post conciliar confusion in Catholic schools and education, I sat in a classroom at Fenwick High School and heard one of the Dominican friars teach us the five arguments of Thomas Aquinas for God’s Existence. It changed my life. It set me on a path that I’ve never gotten off of.” “When we preserve our great intellectual tradition and pass it on to our kids,” he says, “We keep this Catholic thing going.
Barron sums up: “Now. That’s the moment of preservation. But the second great moment of the Church’s life, as exemplified in John Paul II, we must find in prudence those propitious moments when we let that life out. And that’s the Vatican II vision. That’s the Vatican II vision of the role of the laity.
Yes to be great Catholic lawyers not incidentally Catholic; to be great .Catholic politicians, not incidentally so. To be great Catholic teachers and writers. To be great Catholic journalists and actors. That is how we transfigure the world by spreading the seed that we carefully preserve. There’s the work of the new evangelization. That we might let loose this life, this dunamis, as Paul called it, this power of the gospel for the transformation of the world. That is the properly subversive role of the great evangelization.”
If you have seen the little video I feature here, you will know this is a rousing ending and Fr. Barron leaves his audience roaring approval. It truly is unforgettable. And do you see how it dovetails nicely with the Catholic view of God’s providence and the life of Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger? It is sad that Sully doesn’t seem to be aware of how his life has been touched by God’s providential grace but he innocently describes exactly that. In some ways the book may be more powerful for the fact that it calls upon us to provide what Paul Harvey used to call “The Rest of the Story.”
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Posted in Commentary | Tagged Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, Fr. Robert Barron, Highest Duty: My Search for What Really Matters, John Paul II, Karol Wojtyła, The Miracle on the Hudson |