One More

I heard something on the radio this morning that's inspired me to make a notable addition to the list from yesterday. Notable enough that it gets its own post, and not just an editing addition to yesterday.
Captain Sully.
The radio blurb this morning was about how today will be his first flight (piloting, lord knows he traveled via plane since the incident for media engagements and what not) since the famous landing on the Hudson River in January.(1) Of course they carried on the tradition of liberally using the word "hero" in describing the man.
Now let's get this straight. What he did was impressive and admirable but not heroic. He was just doing his job, for chrissakes. I checked his bio and he joined the Air Force in 1969, so he's been piloting planes for at least 40 years. I'm pretty confident that any person licensed to fly commercial airplanes has the expertise to successfully land a plane on a smooth body of water, let alone one with 40 years of experience.
The act of flying is inherently dangerous.(2) People have constantly claimed that he saved the lives of the 155 people on board in January. If you accept that as truth you must also accept that every single pilot who ever captains a plane and lands it successfully then saves the lives of all passengers. This is not heroic, this is what these people do for a living. They take off, they usually kick it into autopilot for several hundred miles, then they land. Over and over. Oh, sometimes there is turbulence and they have to take it off autopilot.
Let me step back and say that clearly it's tougher to land a plane on water with no wheels than on land with wheels, but again, I'm sure all pilots are put through in-case-of-emergency training so that they know how to land on water and on non-runway land. I'm also not going out on a limb by saying that landing a plane with no engine power must be tougher than with, but then of course I'm sure they are all trained at that too.
And now a sidebar complaint about "heroes." A man doing his job is not by itself heroic, no matter what that job is. If heroism enters the equation (debatable but acceptable), then it exists only when the man decides to embark upon a career such as aviation, or firefighting, another profession that is constantly called heroic. It's a noble pursuit. It is admirable. It is not heroic.
Maybe my definition is just a bit stricter than others.


1. The radio blurb finished up mentioning that if anyone wanted to take his first flight back, you are out of luck because the flight is sold out. If there was any earnestness in that statement, then I really don't know what to think of our human society. To think someone would take a flight from NYC to Charlotte purely because it's the first one for the pilot after an eight-and-a-half-month layoff is beyond ridiculous.
2. Dangerous, meaning there is always a chance of death, not dangerous because death is likely. Sorta like walking on the yellow part of the subway platform while a train is coming into the station. But not dangerous like walking through a minefield.