Still Graceful Under Pressure, the Hudson River Pilot Retires
Mar 15th, 2010 • Posted in: Commentaryby Rushworth M. Kidder
Given the way Capt. Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger III retired from US Airways, you couldn’t be blamed for thinking that pilots land airliners in the Hudson River every day.
It’s been a little over a year since a flock of geese knocked out both engines of his Airbus A320 during its ascent from New York’s LaGuardia Airport, giving him and first officer Jeffrey Skiles only minutes to choose a plan, put it into action, and glide the plane safely into a splashdown with no loss of life. Earlier this month, after 30 years with his company, Capt. Sullenberger wrapped up his career with a distinct lack of fanfare. In an age starved for heroes and stark mad for celebrity, he refused to be lionized or put on a pedestal. That day, he simply commanded a final flight from Ft. Lauderdale to Charlotte, walked off the plane into a brief news conference, and joined a private farewell party in the crew room.
But then, that’s been his point all along: If need be, the kind of thing he did on January 15, 2009, should be just a part of a day’s work for a true professional. Learning by flying crop dusters as a teenager in North Texas, he’s been studying his profession ever since. He’s deeply concerned at what he sees as the declining standards in his industry and the lack of experience among newly hired pilots. For him, the competencies and standards that come from time-on-task practice are crucial. “There’s simply no substitute for experience in terms of aviation safety,” he said after his final flight — a point he drives home in his recent book, Highest Duty: My Search for What Really Matters. “My message going forward,” he told the media in Charlotte, “is that I want to remind everyone in the aviation industry, especially those who manage aviation companies and those who regulate aviation, that we owe it to our passengers to keep learning how to do it better.”
Good points, but there’s more to his story than simply experience. Some people have had 30 years of experience; others have had one year of experience 30 times. What makes the difference? In this case, I’d chalk it up to his moral courage — his willing endurance of significant danger for the sake of principle. Without that, no mere tallying of years and skills could have produced that life-saving performance.
But wait! the cynics bluster, Anyone in that situation, if they knew enough, would have done what he did. He’s not a hero, and there’s no special morality to his act. He’s just a guy pressed to the wall who figured out how to save his own skin.
I disagree. Lots of people “know” what to do, but in the heat of the moment, they lose their focus, surrender to fear, and either freeze up or panic. Of course training helps. Of course experience is essential. But unless we marry the experience gained from steady, repetitious practice to a willingness to address danger in the service of our values, we’ve missed the point. Sullenberger grasps this values component. He understands that when serving as a commander in charge of others, he has the moral responsibility for their safety and security.
Here at the Institute, our research on morally courageous individuals tells us that the key to standing for conscience can be articulated in a single word: trust. If you have no trust — no confidence that things just might work out for the best — you’ll never take a stand for courage. Why would you, if you’re absolutely convinced that everything is futile and all hope is gone? It’s hard to see how, if that had been Sullenberger’s mental state, he could have used those tense minutes over New York for such good decision making, rather than falling into despair or surrendering to doubt. What mattered about his experience is not just that he had it but that he trusted it.
What Sullenberger’s example teaches us, then, is that in training future leaders we’ve got to build not only experience but courage. For that, we need to help them cultivate trust and confidence. We need to build in them a settled habit of grace under pressure. And we need to help them develop an irreversible sense of responsibility — not only for themselves but for those within their radius of concern and control.
Looking at what might have become of Flight 1549 that winter day, I’m immensely grateful for Sullenberger’s decades of experience. But I’m even more grateful for his level-headed confidence, his conviction that failure wasn’t an option, and his willingness to endure danger for the sake of principle — in short, for his moral courage. That, for me, is what makes him a real hero.
©2010 Institute for Global Ethics
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I have to disagree with aligning Capt. Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger III ‘s form of bravery with moral bravery. And I am not sure I agree with trust having a correlation with bravery. It is not cynical to recognize that bravery and heroics come in many flavors. These flavors enhanced or dulled by the level of risk, sacrifice, and perceived inevitability of the circumstances.
To stoically face an inevitable death from an untimely illness is one form of bravery. (Facing ones own mortality)
To coolly and effectively control an emergency in which you must face the consequences of failure by avoiding panic or freezing up is another bravery. (confidently leading others under a common threat, such as stopping a crash, controlling a panic or leading a group to safety)
To effectively intercede in a crisis before witnesses, under circumstances where you could simply run away or hide but risk the label of coward, is another bravery. (interrupting a robber or gang assault, falling on a hand-grenade, or pushing someone from in front of a moving vehicle)
To voluntarily intercede against an unrecognized danger, anonymously and without knowing if there is a benefit is another bravery. (to stand against the threat gang reprisals, to be the first minority to move into a majority neighborhood, to be willing to vote in the face of corruption and violence, to be the lone voice in an unpopular issue.)
There are many, many flavors of courage that are influenced by the circumstances of risk, consequences, sacrifice, and available options. A courageous leader must exude confidence and command trust. Be if she/he is entirely confident and trusting, there is no risk in his/her mind and there is no real bravery. Just competence. Which is not a bad thing.
If Capt. Sullenberger had failed, would he have been a coward or morally inadequate?
I think you have misperceived this situation somewhat. Those with years of experience operating complex pieces of machinery such as an airliner understand fully how it works and what it can do. It doesn’t require any special moral courage to trust what you know is true about your equipment and your ability to operate it. It’s a little like the three cajuns, two buddies and an out of town guest, who were out fishing on a lake in south Louisiana when one of them suddenly remembers he forgot his Dixie Beer back on shore. He leaps up from his seat in the bateaux and proceeds to run across the surface of the lake back to shore to retrieve his beer. Totally amazed, the guest exclaims, “my God, did he just walk across the water like Jesus Christ!” The thirsty fisherman’s buddie replies, “well it ain’t actually that amazing if you know where the stumps are.” I would argue that unlike those of us who have no piloting training, Capt. Sullenberger “knew where the stumps were.” The moral choices he made all during his career — to work hard at piloting skills when the plane’s computer might have done it better, to work hard during simulator refresher training for handling casualties when he might have just gone through the motions — probably seemed small at the time, but reflect a positive work ethic and a love of his profession that, in the aggregate, allowed him to easliy land the plane in the river. For me, morality assumes you have some choice in how to behave — once he was at the controls, he made no moral decisions because his skills and the airplane’s capability were assured and he had no choice but to act. The moral decisions had already been made years earlier.
But there are ethical decisions that need to be made. Designers of airliners need to make tradeoffs between assigning control to onboard computers or allowing the pilots to do the flying. The Air Bus is regarded by many experts as having crossed the line toward too much computer control, while Boeing aircraft put more trust in the human pilot. I’d like to know whether part of Capt. Sullenberger’s expertise involved knowing how to override the computers so as to allow himself to fly the airplane in what was clearly an “outside design parameters” event. But I’m sure Air Bus doesn’t want that story to be told.
I agree with you concerning the role that moral courage plays in situations like that of Capt. Sullenberger. I would like to add an additional view from my own 40+ years in a cockpit.
The moral courage, in this case, comes from years of doing the right thing when no one else around him wanted to. Pilots are very often the only people inclined to say, for safety reasons, “No, we’re not going to do that.” In the real world, some pilots do not have the moral fortitude to stand ground against a supervisor by doing what is safe and correct. The easy solution is to cave in and take the path of least resistance: don’t make waves, don’t stand out, don’t be the one to cancel or delay a flight. The moral solution is to do what is right as a professional.
So what does this have to do with Capt. Sully? It is this moral-driven mind set that keeps some pilots doing the right thing even though he or she knows it will cause problems for a lot of people (maybe even the boss). This in turn feeds the confidence to “keep flying the plane”. It strengthens resolve in bad situations because some pilots have years of experience being their own master for a higher cause, the cause of professionalism and the personal belief that the “highest duty” is to the safety of the operation. Some pilots look for and have faith in not only the “system” but also a high degree of faith in themselves.
Given the same situation and the same training, every pilot could not pull off the Hudson River Landing. You are right on track with sensing a difference in how humans live their lives, how aviators live as pilots and how it affects outcomes. The concept of “Some people have had 30 years of experience; others have had one year of experience 30 times” is priceless.