9/13/2020 Sully's Remarkable Journey: What We Can Learn From It - WSJ

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https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703790404574469160016077646

What We Can Learn From Sully's Journey

By Jeffrey Zaslow
Updated Oct. 14, 2009 12 01 am ET

US Airways Capt. Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger has flown thousands of flights in the last
42 years. "But now," he says, "my entire career is being judged by how I performed on one
of them."

That flight, of course, came last Jan. 15, when his Airbus A320 suffered a bird strike en
route from New York to Charlotte, N.C., and lost both engines. Sully and First Officer Jeff
Skiles executed an emergency landing later dubbed "The Miracle on the Hudson," but that
description never felt right to Sully.

He is a precise, methodical, cerebral man who carefully chooses his words. In recent
months, while working on his new book, "Highest Duty: My Search for What Really
Matters," Sully spent a great deal of time reviewing his life and career. He has tried to
understand what experiences from his past prepared him for Flight 1549.

As Sully's co-author, I clearly saw that it wasn't only his skills as a veteran pilot that
carried him in those tense moments over Manhattan. It was also his upbringing, his
family bonds, his sense of integrity—and his own losses. Flight 1549 wasn't just a five-
minute journey from LaGuardia Airport to the Hudson. Sully's entire life led him to safely
to that river.

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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 learn 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."

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9/13/2020 Sully's Remarkable Journey: What We Can Learn From It - WSJ

Chesley Sullenberger at about eight years old, with a model airplane he received for Christmas.
CAPTAIN CHESLEY SULLENBERGER

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 outside 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.' "

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."
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9/13/2020 Sully's Remarkable Journey: What We Can Learn From It - WSJ

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."

There are other moments in Sully's personal life that he feels helped prepare him for
Flight 1549. Sully and his wife struggled with infertility, then endured the arduous
journey of trying to become adoptive parents. "The challenges Lorrie and I faced made me
better able to accept the cards I've been dealt," Sully says, "and to play them with all the
resources at my disposal." The couple eventually adopted two daughters, now ages 16 and
14.

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 Tri-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."

Chesley Sullenberger, about to board his irst light in a military jet.

CAPTAIN CHESLEY SULLENBERGER

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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.

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."

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
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9/13/2020 Sully's Remarkable Journey: What We Can Learn From It - WSJ

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."

Since saving 155 lives that day, Sully has received thousands of emails and now has
635,000 Facebook fans. His actions touched people so deeply that they felt compelled to
reach out and share their own seminal experiences with him.

Adapted from "Highest Duty: My Search for What Really Matters," by Capt. Chesley "Sully"
Sullenberger with Je rey Zaslow. Copyright 2009 by Chesley B. Sullenberger III. Published by
William Morrow/HarperCollins Publishers.
PATRICK CONLON / THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

"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.

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One letter that was particularly touching to Sully came from Paul Kellen 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.

Write to Jeffrey Zaslow at jeffrey.zaslow@wsj.com

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