“Land in River, Write a Book”
I was reading Capt. Chesley Sullenburger’s book about his life as an a Air Force fighter pilot then as an airline pilot. He’s the guy that landed in the Hudson river and saved all those people. Lately I have been writing about some of my experiences working on the ground at an airport so guys like him could take off or land those planes…. I don’t mean anything by that. I just loved my job. I always thought of it as a very exciting thing to do for a living. I mean who else gets to see a plane land with no landing gear. Or a F-105 fighter make a 300 foot pass over main runway at just below the sound barrier speed. That’s about 600 miles an hour. Talk about earth shaking…. You can’t imagine what that sounds like. You cannot duplicate that sound in the movies. We, the air traffic controllers, flight deck personal and myself are called Penguins.…. The birds that don’t fly… We just make sure that the pilots can…We get them off the ground or land them as safely as possible…I was reading an excerpt on how he diverted to another destination airport to try to save a woman who had a heart attack. She didn’t make it. He said, “She died as he was landing the plane“. I never told the story of the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) pilot who was landing on the same runway I was working on. I glanced up towards the approach and in the distance seen that a Cessna Citation was landing. I seen him in the air coming towards us. I just cleared the runway in time as he touched down where the car was……I saved some lives that day. …Me and my helper, the pilot, the co-pilot and the people on that plane…..I think I’ll write a book about that, leading up to events that happened that day. I’ll describe how I got ready to go to work, not knowing I could be close to losing my life if it wasn’t for my quick decision making and experience. If I didn’t see that plane people would have lost their lives…I could write about how I went over to that pilot and got really close to his face and with my finger pointing at him told him what I thought of the way he landed. I could describe in detail how I reported him to FAA officials… Well, I don’t want bore with details…After all, I didn’t land in a river…….
"My Life in a Nutshell" 