Highest Duty-A Review
I have CJ’s permission to post my review here because Captain Chesley Sullenberger has military piloting experience and it coincides with the military content of this website. ~~Thanks, CJ, for your indulgence.
I was recently offered the opportunity to read “Highest Duty: My Search for What Really Matters” by Chesley Sullenberger with Jeffrey Zaslow. If you are unaware of who Capt. Sullenberger is, he is the airline pilot, known as Capt. Sully, who put that airplane down in the Hudson River in January 2009. We all saw the stunning images of this huge airplane floating on the water with passengers standing on the wings and ferries gathered around like sheep herding dogs, nosing in to save people.
So I want to start off asking you a question.
What kind of pilot would you like to have in the cockpit if things go squirrelly on you?
Words that come to MY mind are calm, deliberate, fast-thinking, analytical, experienced.
The passengers of US Airways Flight 1549 had all that in spades. Capt. Sully is well versed in many previous air accidents and has many years experience as a pilot. He understands the whys and whats of what happened in a lot of cases. He saw firsthand, with his military experience, some accidents and how easy it is to panic or to lose situational awareness. So he is a very self-contained man.
But that analytical, dry breakdown of facts and scenarios bleeds through in his writing. I had a hard time reading this book.
There were interesting tidbits of information scattered throughout the book. But the overall pace, language, and feel of the book was very hard for me to deal with. I prefer fiction to non-fiction to begin with. Fast-paced, action-oriented. That’s the style and kind of person I am anyway. But Sullenberger is very stolid. He comes across as impervious to feather-ruffling.
From beginning to end, we get very little feel for his emotional state. I thought his first solo flight would be one of those “woo-hoooooooo” things, ya know? With him being so young, age 16 I believe, I thought he’d let that youthful enthusiasm leak through and draw the reader in. But that was nowhere to be found.
Capt. Sully is very honest about his admiration of previous pilots, the man who taught him, his wife, the passengers, and his crew. He very much downplays his “heroism,” and comes across as uncomfortable with, but accepting of his current status as That Amazing Pilot Who Saved 155 Lives By Landing a Freakin’ Jetliner in the HUDSON.
Despite the writing style, I was interested in some details left out of the public stories. Capt. Sully has access to the cockpit voice recorder, so he can fill us in on what was happening between himself and his First Officer, Jeffrey Skiles. He takes us through the incredibly short timeline, literally seconds, of how he made the decision to put the plane down in the river. He talks about the letters from strangers or witnesses or even family members of those on his plane. All of this stuff is interesting and gives us a view of the lives he’s touched.
If you enjoy reading a first hand account of an amazing feat of piloting, go ahead and get this book. It is filled with stories of previous piloting successes and failures and could give you a glimpse of how fantastic his landing was, in the big picture. One thing he points out is that pilots are not even trained on how to land on water because 1–it is so rare and 2–it has only been done successfully a few times so there is little data on the “right” way to do it. Capt. Sully did his landing only on instincts and a general knowledge of those who had gone before and those who had done it. That right there is a good reason to go through the exercise of reading his account.
His book can be found here and it might make a good gift for those people in your life who enjoy non-fiction and who have an interest in flying or piloting.
For me, I learned a few things that I would never have known and so I don’t think it was wasted time to read Captain Sullenberger’s book. In the end, I know more about the airline industry (he makes some very pointed remarks about cost-cutting and potential effects of those measures) and I know that out there exists pilots who love what they do and with whom my life and the lives of my loved ones are cherished over the multi-million dollar cost of a jetliner. That actually gives me a lot of comfort considering how much I dislike flying and giving up my self-determining power to a stranger.
I feel weird ending this with a cheesy rating system, but out of 5 stars, I’d probably give it 3 for content alone. So that’s pretty good considering I’m a tough cookie to impress. 
