Highest Duty (12 page)

We headed back into the cockpit and then flew Ellen, and any other funny-ass passengers on the plane that day, up to New York.

F
LIGHTS ARE
almost always routine, but every time we push back from the gate, we must be prepared for the unexpected. About a decade ago, I was flying from Philadelphia to West Palm Beach, Florida. At 9
P.M.
, we were at thirty-five thousand feet, just about fifty miles south of Norfolk, Virginia, when I got word from a flight attendant that a fifty-seven-year-old woman was not feeling well.

From the cockpit, we began the process of getting a radio-to-phone patch to contact a medical advisory service, while flight attendant Linda Lory attended to the woman. Linda got a bit of medical history from the woman’s brother and another relative
traveling with her, and passed the information up to us in the cockpit. The relatives said the woman had a history of emphysema but hadn’t been to a doctor in years.

A few more minutes passed, and as soon as we established communications with the medical service, we got word that the woman was unconscious. Because the aisle was narrow, laying her flat on the floor of the plane was difficult. Passengers nearby were watching it all unfold.

“You have the aircraft,” I told the first officer, Rick Pinar. I called air traffic control, declared a passenger medical emergency, and received immediate clearance to a lower altitude and a left turn direct to Norfolk.

“Make an emergency descent and divert to Norfolk,” I said to Rick.

What are a pilot’s obligations to a sick passenger? We aren’t doctors. So how do we determine when a passenger is so ill that an emergency landing is required, diverting the flight to the nearest airport that has appropriate medical facilities, disrupting other passengers’ travel plans?

We have access to advice from contract medical services and they and the airline dispatcher help a captain make an informed decision about whether to divert and to what airport. When making such a decision, we have a legal obligation, but more than that, we have a moral obligation to protect life. It’s one of the responsibilities we signed up for. It’s part of our commitment to safety. If in my judgment I have to land a plane to save a life, I do so.

On this particular flight, we flew as fast toward Norfolk as the
airplane could go. There are federal aviation regulations about maximum speeds below ten thousand feet. For jets, it’s 250 knots, or about 288 miles an hour. In an attempt to save the woman’s life, we went above that speed—over 300 knots. We also made a rapid descent.

Once we touched down, we used heavy braking to shorten our landing roll, allowing us to turn off the runway more quickly. We taxied as fast as was reasonable to the gate.

It was all a bit disconcerting to the passengers. They could see the woman on the floor of the aisle, making no movements. They could feel the heavy braking. They knew we were taxiing faster than usual toward the gate.

Linda, the flight attendant, didn’t strap herself into her seat for landing. She was hunched over the woman, trying to save her through mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. It was an heroic attempt on her part.

When we got to the gate, paramedics were waiting for us right on the jetway. They hustled onto the plane as all the passengers watched. They brought a straight-back board, put it underneath the woman, and tried to lift her up. They had trouble turning her on an angle to get her out the door and onto the jetway. It took several minutes to get her off the plane.

I stood on the jetway with the paramedics and the ill woman’s relatives. They told me they were on their way to Florida for a funeral of another family member, so an already tragic moment for them was suddenly compounded.

The paramedics worked on the woman on the floor of the jetway for a number of minutes, using drugs, resuscitation equip
ment, and anything else at their disposal. But it wasn’t long before one of them looked up at me and said, “She didn’t make it.” It’s unclear when she died exactly. It may have been while we were taxiing to the gate.

It was a difficult moment, standing there with the woman’s family. I tried to say a few consoling words. They weren’t weeping; they just looked sad and stricken. My heart went out to them, but I couldn’t stay out there for long because I needed to get back on the plane and say something to the passengers.

The passengers had been understanding and cooperative, and had experienced this incident in full view. I felt they deserved to know the truth. And so I got on the public address system.

“The woman who was ill on our flight was under the care of paramedics out on the jetway,” I said, “but attempts to revive her were not successful.”

There was quiet in the cabin. It was a pretty sobering moment for all of us. Some of the other passengers had watched the woman come onto the plane just like everyone else, put her belongings in the overhead, and settle into her seat. Now, just over an hour after leaving Philadelphia, she was dead.

Because Linda had used emergency medical equipment to help the woman while in flight, we had to wait forty-five minutes for the maintenance staff in Norfolk to replace our medical kit. We also needed to refuel the jet and get a new flight plan. The passengers sat quietly in their seats while we did that.

The woman’s family removed their belongings from the plane—they’d be staying with her body in Norfolk—but their checked baggage, and the woman’s bags, would have to continue
on to Florida with us. There was no time to find their specific bags and remove them from the cargo hold. They’d have to be retagged in Florida and sent back to the family.

About five minutes before we were set to take off again, I called the four flight attendants into the cockpit to join me and Rick, the first officer. As the captain, I was the person ultimately responsible for the decisions made that night. I knew it had been stressful for all of us. I wasn’t sure whether the flight attendants felt they could have done more to try to save the woman’s life.

First, I thanked them for their efforts. “You did your best. But as tragic as this outcome was, it would be even more tragic if a stressful situation allowed us to be distracted from our duties going forward.”

The flight attendants looked a bit ashen and weary. “Rick and I here in the cockpit, we’re going to do what we were trained to do,” I said. “We’ll do our checklist. We’ll get the plane into the air. We’ll make it safely down to West Palm. I know you have all of your procedures to do, and I know you’ll do them as you always have. We’ll all need to just fall back on our procedures, and get back into the routine, safe operation that we work so hard to maintain.”

The flight attendants headed back into the cabin. We pulled away from the gate with three fewer passengers than had arrived with us.

The flight from Norfolk to West Palm was routine. We arrived just an hour and fifteen minutes late, and I stood outside the cockpit door as all the passengers deplaned.

“Thank you for your patience this evening,” I said, nodding at them as they passed. They acknowledged my words with slight
smiles or nods of their own. And all of us went to bed that night thinking of the family we had left behind in Norfolk.

E
ARLY ONE
Tuesday morning in September 2001, I was driving from my home in Danville to the airport in San Francisco. I had to catch a plane to Pittsburgh, where I was then based, to fly an MD-80 on to Charlotte. I was listening to the radio, an all-news station, and I heard that a plane had just crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York.

How could someone be that off course?
I thought.
It must have been pretty foggy there
. As I listened to the radio report, I was reminded of the infamous 1945 crash of a B-25 into the Empire State Building, when an Army Air Forces bomber pilot lost his way on a foggy Saturday morning, killing himself and thirteen others. I figured this World Trade Center crash must have been a similar accident.

I parked my car in the airport lot, walked into the terminal, and that’s when I heard that another airplane had hit the South Tower and a third plane had hit the Pentagon.

By 6:30
A.M.
Pacific time, every airplane in the skies above the United States had been ordered to land, and the FAA had banned takeoffs of all civilian aircraft. It was clear I wouldn’t be getting to Pittsburgh that day to fly my scheduled flight. (My particular flight was one of some thirty-five thousand canceled that day nationwide.)

I spent a little time in the US Airways operations office in San Francisco, and there were two crews there. Unlike me, they
didn’t live in Northern California. They were stranded, and no one knew when planes might fly again. “You’d better get hotel rooms right now,” I suggested, “before they’re all gone.”

I called pilot scheduling and told them that I couldn’t make it to Pittsburgh, obviously, and then I went home and watched CNN. As an American and as a pilot, I found the coverage very hard to take. It was so upsetting and disturbing that, at one point, I had to stop watching. I turned off the TV and went into the backyard to compose myself. It was a beautiful day in California, and it was remarkably quiet outdoors. Because all aircraft were grounded, you couldn’t hear any airplanes flying anywhere. My ears are always pretty attuned to the sounds of jets, and this saddened me.

On Wednesday and most of Thursday, only the military was flying. I felt anxious about the terrorism and the national ground stop instituted by the FAA, and was eager to return to flying. Like so many pilots, I also felt a renewed sense of patriotism. I wanted to fly to prove our system could function, that we could take passengers safely to where they needed to go, and that the terrorists would not succeed.

On Thursday night, I was able to get on a red-eye to Pittsburgh. On Friday morning, I was set to fly again.

It was pretty chaotic in the crew room underneath the terminal at Pittsburgh International Airport. Not all crew members were able to make it in, and so a captain would say, “I have a first officer but need a flight attendant,” and a flight attendant would volunteer to take the trip with him.

Eventually, I was assigned to fly from Pittsburgh to Indianap
olis. Not many Americans were yet ready to return to the skies, so we took just seven people to Indianapolis and eight people back from there to Pittsburgh.

There were so few of them, they barely outnumbered the crew. We put them all in first class. Some of the passengers said that they were nervous, and I tried to reassure them with small talk when they boarded.

It was just three days after the attacks, and our planes were still vulnerable to terrorism. But I wanted passengers to know that even though the cockpit doors hadn’t yet been strengthened, there was a strengthened resolve among us in the cockpit, and the flight attendants in the cabin. The passengers had strengthened their resolve, too.

“We’re determined not to let anything like this happen again,” I told a few passengers.

The pilots murdered on September 11, 2001, were the very first victims. And so it was natural for pilots to discuss how we might have responded that day. The reality was that all our training until then had been aimed at preventing or managing a potential highjacking, not a kamikaze-style suicide mission.

For airline employees, life is different now. The airline industry suffered a financial collapse after the attacks, and a great many people at the bottom of the seniority list were laid off. So many of them were good pilots, and they are missed.

The attacks of September 11 don’t come into my head as often as they once did. That’s true for a lot of Americans. Time has passed. New tragedies have followed. I’ve piloted hundreds of flights since that day.

But for someone who works for an airline, the reminders are still here, offering reasons for reflection. Sometimes I’ll be at Boston Logan International Airport, passing by the gates from which two of the flights departed on September 11—American Airlines Flight 11 from Gate 32 in Terminal B, and United Airlines Flight 175 from Gate 19 in Terminal C.

There are American flags flying outside both of those gates as silent tributes. They are not part of any formal memorial. They were placed there by airport and airline employees. When I pass the flags, I am reminded of the sense of duty I felt on the day of the attacks—to get back in the air, to keep flying passengers to their destinations, to maintain our way of life.

I
N RECENT
years, I’ll often come home from work weary. I’ve been gone for days. I may have traveled twelve thousand miles. I’ve endured all sorts of weather or traffic delays. I’m ready for bed. A lot of wives ask, “How was your day at the office?” Their husbands talk about big sales they’ve made or deals they’ve closed. I’ve also had my good days at the office.

One evening I came home and Lorrie was standing in the kitchen. She asked how my day had gone. I began to tell her.

I had piloted an Airbus A321 from Charlotte to San Francisco. It was one of those nights when there wasn’t much traffic. Air traffic controllers didn’t have to impose many constraints about altitude or speed. It was up to me how I wanted to travel the final 110 miles, and how I would get from thirty-eight thousand feet down to the runway in San Francisco.

It was an incredibly clear and gorgeous night, the air was smooth, and I could see the airport from sixty miles out. I started my descent at just the right distance so that the engines would be near idle thrust almost all the way in, until just prior to landing. If I started down at the right place, I could avoid having to use the speed brakes, which cause a rumbling in the cabin when extended. To get it right, I’d need to perfectly manage the energy of the jet.

“It was a smooth, continuous descent,” I told Lorrie, “one gentle, slowly curving arc, with a gradual deceleration of the airplane. The wheels touched the runway softly enough that the spoilers didn’t deploy immediately because they didn’t recognize that the wheels were on the ground.”