Highest Duty is the story of an ordinary man who managed to do an extraordinary thing under the urgency of a few minutes. He landed an airplane in the Hudson River.

Many pilots land on water, but they generally have smaller airplanes, as well as planes equipped with pontoon for water landing. The pilot of UU Air fight 1549 didn’t have the luxury of pontoons, nor was he prepared to think in terms of landing any other place than the tarmac at the Charlotte, NC, airport.

Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, and his co-author, Jefftey Zaslow, present a straight forward story of one man’s life, from his birth in Sherman, Texas in 1950, through his dreams to be come a pilot, through gaining his license at age 16 - and subsequently taking his parents and grandparents and a girlfriend for rides over the flat, dusty Texas prairies, to his years at the U. . Air Force Academy(1969-1973), his subsequent years in the Air Force, from which he retired in 1980, to his years as a commercial airline pilot, until the day theFrench Built, Airbus320-214 was ditched into the Hudson River, January 15, 2009.

“Sully” tells us of his courting and eventually marrying his wife of 20 years, his two teenaged daughters, his dedication to his employer despite repeated pay cuts and the lost of nearly 40% of his pension as airlines struggled to stay afloat - no pun intended - throughout the 90’s and the years of the new century.

“Sully” doesn’t consider himself a hero, rather a competent, capable, qualified pilot with 29 years of experience and some 290,000 years of actual airtime, flying F-$’s to modern jet air aircraft meant for the commercial airways.

He missed the days of “Coffee, Tea, or Me?” and the drunken parties., but then he isn’t a man prone to such frivolity. Today - that day - his co-pilot was also a captain, recently authorized to take off and land the sophisticated Airbus320, and the cabin crew was made up of three experienced women who had decades of experience as cabin attendants. The co-pilot, Jeffery Skiles, had almost as many years - 23, as “Sully” and slightly more air miles. The cabin attendants were Doreen Welsh, Donna Dent and Sheila Dahl.

The plane was cleared for take-off at 15:24:54. The gears went up at 15:25:39

The flight recorder had the following dialogue between pilot and co-pilot.

15:24:54 (Sully) “Birds”

15:25:39 (Skiles) “Whoa.”

15:27:12 (Sully) :Oh, shit!”

15:27:13 (Skiles) “On, yeah!)

At 15:24:21, the air traffic controller, knowing the plane was in danger, suggested the plane divert to the Teteboro, NJ, airport.

“Sully” made the decision to ditch. He had to reduce the speed, keep the nose up, and lower the flaps. The recorder ended with a transmission at 15:30:01, with Skiles acknowledging: “Got flaps out.”

The book includes the entire transmission, even when Skiles, who controlled the craft as it took off, said “Your plane,” and the captain acknowledged, “My plan,” as the controllers were handed off.

Not in the book, or afterward during any of "Sully's" various interviews, did we hear about prayers. This was straightforward management of a plane in an emergency. This was bravery and courage and experience, not exactly heroism, but close enough. 155 passengers and crew members were safe that day - wet, shaken, but safe.

There’s an old adage - “There are old pilots, and bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots.” There’s another adage: “Never run out of airspeed, altitude and ideas at the same time.”

Sullenberger was at the time 58 years old. He knew both adages, and in the case of the later one, applied ideas as soon as altitude and airspeed seemed to conspire against him and his plane.

Sullenberger has sic more years until he retires. He has been working to improve the flight deck pilot’s manual to suggest how to make water landings in an emergency. Also, the existing manual, for the sake of cost saving, had eliminated the tabs that were originally supplied, and which were meant to guide the pilot quickly to each section of the manual. Those tabs has since been mandated.

“Sully” says he has long searched for what really matters, and honor, dignity, and competence are among the things he values.

This book was a joy to read.

Cowboy walks into the bedroom carrying a sheep in his arms and says,

"Honey, this is the cow I make love to when you have a headache."

The wife, laying in the bed reading a book, looks up and says, "If you weren't such an idiot, you'd know that's a sheep, not a cow."

The guy replies, "If you weren't such a bitch, you'd realize I was talking to the sheep."

Engineering takes its place in Derby schools, Lori Yount, Wichita Eagle

The Derby school district is leading the Wichita area in providing state-of-the-art engineering classes in middle and high schools, and it will lead the nation by being the first to offer the engineering classes at an elementary school.

The district rolled out Project Lead the Way, a national program that provides engineering curriculum, at three of its schools this year.

Next year, one of its elementary schools will be the pilot program for a primary aerospace engineering lesson plan designed by Project Lead the Way.

By offering the engineering classes, Derby school leaders said they hope to spark students' interest in math and science by providing hands-on and computer-based activities.

"Half didn't even know what engineering was," said Christopher Shetlar, who teaches a high school engineering course. "As things get going, they like it a little more."

Fun classes

Kristin Wilcox's sixth-grade class seemed eerily quiet for a group of 20 students left to work independently on computers.

They were engrossed in building a peg board in a computer-assisted design program. When students struggled, they would quietly ask Wilcox — or a classmate — for help.

Wilcox's six sixth-grade design and modeling classes are full.

"Every class is fun," said Wilcox.

Derby sixth-grader Hannah Steinert said she took the engineering class because she wants to follow in the footsteps of her father, who is an aviation engineer.

"I like experimenting and finding the answer — seeing if there's more than one right answer," said Hannah, who was sketching the mallet she would design on the computer.

Across the street at Derby Middle School, seventh-grader Katelyn Minks said designing the peg board was complicated. She finished it in two weeks. Not bad for a student who got there by a scheduling accident.

"At first I didn't know I was in the class," Katelyn said. "Once we started to build things, I started to like it."

Her teachers told her she was a talented designer, and she said she might take more engineering classes.

"Math takes you places," Katelyn said.

Updating the district's career-technical education program to the pre-engineering program was a large investment of money and dedication.

District officials started planning to revamp its vocational program about two years ago to meet changing state technical education standards and serve more students, said Kendal Warkentine, career and technical education coordinator.

"Even though they might not go on to be engineers, it reinforces basic math skills," he said. "They're shown a different way to apply math concepts."

Students can't enroll in the engineering courses if they are taking remedial math or reading classes.

Derby received a $100,000 grant this spring from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to establish the Project Lead the Way curriculum in its schools. It should receive money for another three years, said Gaylord Dold, the district's grant coordinator.

Another $15,000 from a Wichita State University grant helped the district train five teachers in a two-week session over the summer.

Derby had to pay for the renovation of classrooms, and school principals had to figure out how to devote teachers to the engineering classes.

The two middle school teachers were already devoted to technology classes, as was one of the high school teachers. The other high school teacher gave up some of her geometry classes to teach a few periods of engineering.

Classrooms were gutted to make room for more computers and project space. Some administrators designed the rooms themselves.

Ideal place to launch

Derby students have responded to recruiting efforts. Almost 700 are enrolled in one of the Project Lead the Way classes, Dold said.

Derby high school sophomore Kelly Mahon saw a video about the engineering class and thought "it looked cool."

"We do stuff on the computer I didn't think we'd go into so much," she said while coloring a wooden cube with markers to help her conceptualize her design project.

Derby was an ideal place to launch a districtwide program because of its size of about 6,500 students, Dold said. With one sixth-grade center, one middle and one high school, officials could ensure all students learned the same lessons, and teachers could anticipate where they should be in the course.

The size definitely helped in the districtwide roll out, said Anne Corriston, local program director for the Knight Foundation, which provided the start-up money.

"It's a great lesson for other districts that size can mobilize," she said.

Wichita has been implementing Project Lead the Way curriculum in its classrooms for the past few years. But it adds a few courses at a few schools at a time versus a cohesive program from grades 6 to 12.

Wichita and Derby are the only districts in Sedgwick County that have received Knight Foundation grants for the pre-engineering courses.

School leaders said they think they can expand and maintain the program in lean budget years, although it might take some sacrifice, said Tim Hamblin, assistant principal at Derby High.

"In a budget crisis, if a teacher goes, an area is not being filled," he said. "It is a concern for the future."

Just a start

This is just the beginning, Derby officials said.

Wineteer Elementary School teachers are starting training to be the first to teach Project Lead the Way's aerospace engineering lessons in grades three to five.

Derby received a $318,000 grant from the Department of Defense to pay for it for three years. About 70 percent of the students at Wineteer have parents who work at McConnell Air Force Base.

Next year, the high school will add the next class in the curriculum, and the middle school will expand its course options, including electrical engineering and flight.

As the program grows, Derby leaders said they plan to draw support from engineers in the surrounding aircraft industries in the form of mentors and guest speakers for students.

"With the economy the way it is and competitiveness with jobs, it connects them with the workplace," said Rod Coykendal, principal at Derby Middle School. "It's heavy on real-life learning."

For sixth-grader Hannah, the class has changed her perspective on little things — like hitting pegs into a board.

"It makes you look at it differently," Hannah said. "It took a long time to make — a lot of trial and fail."