Pilot Is Hailed After Jetliner’s Icy Plunge (Published 2009) (2024)

A US Airways jetliner with 155 people aboard lost power in both engines, possibly from striking birds, after taking off from La Guardia Airport on Thursday afternoon. The pilot ditched in the icy Hudson River and all on board were rescued by a flotilla of converging ferries and emergency boats, the authorities said.

What might have been a catastrophe in New York — one that evoked the feel if not the scale of the Sept. 11 attack — was averted by a pilot’s quick thinking and deft maneuvers, and by the nearness of rescue boats, a combination that witnesses and officials called miraculous.

As stunned witnesses watched from high-rise buildings on both banks, the Airbus A320, which had risen to 3,200 feet over the Bronx and banked left, came downriver, its fuselage lower than many apartment terraces and windows, in a carefully executed touchdown shortly after 3:30 p.m. that sent up huge plumes of water at midstream, between West 48th Street in Manhattan and Weehawken, N.J.

On board, the pilot, Chesley B. Sullenberger III, 57, unable to get back to La Guardia, had made a command decision to avoid densely populated areas and try for the Hudson, and had warned the 150 passengers to brace for a hard landing. Most had their heads down as the jetliner slammed into the water, nose slightly up, just three minutes after takeoff on what was to be a flight to Charlotte, N.C.

Many on board and watching from the shores were shocked that the aircraft did not sink immediately. Instead, it floated, twisting and drifting south in strong currents, as three New York Waterway commuter ferries moved in. Moments later, terrified passengers began swarming out the emergency exits into brutally cold air and onto the submerged wings of the bobbing jetliner, which began taking in water.

As the first ferry nudged up alongside, witnesses said, some passengers were able to leap onto the decks. Others were helped aboard by ferry crews. Soon, a small armada of police boats, fireboats, tugboats and Coast Guard craft converged on the scene, and some of them snubbed up to keep the jetliner afloat. Helicopters brought wet-suited police divers, who dropped into the water to help with the rescues.

Over the next hour, as a captivated city watched continuous television reports and the Hudson turned from gold to silver in the gathering winter twilight, all of the passengers, including at least one baby, and both pilots and all three flight attendants, were transferred to the rescue boats — a feat that unfolded as the white-and-blue jetliner continued to drift south.

When all were out, the pilot walked up and down the aisle twice to make sure the plane was empty, officials said.

Brought ashore on both sides of the river, the survivors were taken to hospitals in Manhattan and New Jersey, mostly for treatment of exposure to the brutal cold: 18 degrees in the air, about 35 degrees in the water that many had stood in on the wings up to their waists.

Still, most of them walked ashore, some grim with fright and shivering with cold, wrapped in borrowed coats. But others were smiling, and a few were ready to give interviews to mobs of reporters and television cameras. Some described their survival as a miracle, a sentiment repeated later by city and state officials; others gave harrowing accounts of an ordeal whose outcome few might have imagined in such a crisis.

Even the aircraft was saved for examination by investigators — towed down the Hudson and tied up at Battery Park City. In the glare of floodlights, the top of its fuselage, part of a wing and the blue-and-red tail fin jutted out of the water, but its US Airways logo and many of its windows were submerged.

“We’ve had a miracle on 34th Street,” Gov. David A. Paterson said at a late-afternoon news conference in Manhattan. “I believe now we’ve had a miracle on the Hudson. This pilot, somehow, without any engines, was somehow able to land this plane, and perhaps without any injuries to the passengers. This is a potential tragedy that may have become one of the most magnificent days in the history of New York City agencies.”

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said that there had been few injuries and that the pilot had done “a masterful job.”

W. Douglas Parker, chairman and chief executive of US Airways, and officials of the Federal Aviation Administration said that Flight 1549 had taken off from La Guardia at 3:26 p.m., bound for Charlotte. It headed north, across the East River and over the Bronx on a route that would involve a sweeping left turn to head south. But both engines lost power about a minute into the flight.

The National Transportation Safety Board and state and local agencies are to investigate the cause of the crash, which could take months, but early indications were that the plane’s engines had shut down after having ingested a flock of birds — variously described as geese or gulls. It was not clear where the birds were encountered.

The pilot radioed air traffic controllers on Long Island that his plane had sustained a “double bird strike.” Without power, returning to the airport was out of the question, aviation experts said. He saw a small airport in the distance, apparently at Teterboro, N.J., but decided to head down the Hudson and make a water landing, a rare event that is mentioned in the safety instructions given by flight crews to all passengers on every flight.

Susan Obel, a retiree who lives on West 70th Street and Amsterdam Avenue in a 20th-floor apartment, saw the plane flying amazingly low. “When you see a plane somewhere that it isn’t supposed to be, you get that eerie feeling,” she said. “I didn’t think it was a terrorist, but I did worry.”

On the plane, passengers heard the pilot say on the intercom, “Brace for impact.” One passenger, Elizabeth McHugh, 64, of Charlotte, seated on the aisle near the rear, said flight attendants shouted more instructions: feet flat on the floor, heads down, cover your heads. “I prayed and prayed and prayed,” she said. “Believe me, I prayed.”

Fulmer Duckworth, 41, who works in computer graphics for Bank of America — coincidentally, more than 20 of the passengers work for the bank, which is based in Charlotte — was in a meeting on the 29th floor of a building at 42nd Street and Avenue of the Americas when he saw the plane hit the water.

“It made this huge, gigantic splash, and I actually thought it was a boat crash at first,” he said. “It didn’t occur to me that it was a plane in the water.”

Neil Lasher, 62, a consultant for Sony Music Publishing who lives in a 27th-floor apartment near the shore in Guttenberg, N.J., watched the plane go down.

“As soon as the plane hit the water,” he said, “I could see the New York Waterway ferries from New York York and the Jersey side, within a minute, heading toward the airplane.”

The aircraft began to spin counterclockwise in the water and to drift south with the current.

“As soon as we hit, we all jolted frontward and sideways, and then the water started coming in around my feet,” Ms. McHugh said. She got up and was pushed along the aisle and out an exit, then slid down an inflated slide into a life raft.

One of the passengers who scrambled out onto the wing was Jeff Kolodjay, 31, who had been in Seat 22A in the rear. He said that after the emergency doors were opened, the plane began to take on water. In what he described as “organized chaos,” the passengers, all wearing life vests, “just walked through the water” toward the exits.

“We were just looking to be calm, and walking a straight line,” he said.

Dozens of survivors were taken to St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center and St. Vincent’s Hospital in Manhattan. Jim Mandler, a spokesman at Roosevelt, said 10 patients, ranging from their early 30s to a woman about 85, had been treated, mainly for hypothermia. A flight attendant had suffered a lacerated leg.

At the Weehawken ferry terminal, passengers shivered under blankets. A woman on a stretcher was carried from the terminal to an ambulance, a dazed look on her face.

F.A.A. records showed that the aircraft involved in the crash had made at least two other emergency landings in this decade. On Feb. 2, 2002, pilots spotted flames in the left engine, and on June 23, 2003, indicators warned about problems with a landing gear. A later inspection showed it was a false warning.

Tom Fox, president of New York Water Taxi, which sent boats to the scene in the Hudson but did not participate in the rescues, said the setting was, in a sense, ideal for a crash landing on water. “It couldn’t have gone down in a better location because there are so many water-borne assets there,” he said. “The pilot must have been both talented and charmed.”