The Survivors of Flight 1549 - Miracle on the Hudson: The Survivors of Flight 1549 Tell Their Extraordinary Stories of Courage, Faith, and Determination

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THE FIRST 9-1-1 CALL CAME AT 3:29 P.M. A RATTLED VOICE, CHAFED BY A strong Bronx rasp, overwhelmed the operator with a burst of words:

Yeah, Im witnessing an airplane that is going down. Its on fire.

Where are you, sir?

Oh my God

Where are you?

I dont know where hes going to fall. Its gone now. Oh my God

Where are you?

In the Bronx. Oh my God. I heard a big boom and he came straight over us. Oh my God Wow.

The unidentified man, standing at an obscure tenement street corner, caught only the briefest glimpse of the aircraft before it disappeared behind the buildings, but he got a good look: It looked like an Airbus plane, a big plane. Oh my God Wow

Eight blocks away, at Middle School 45, vice principal Joy Smith-Jones heard the same explosion and looked up to see the seventy-five-ton aircraft passing above the nearby Bronx Zoo and still heading north.

Moments later, a New Yorker near the George Washington Bridge saw a plane now heading south and flying really, really low. His first thought was not again. Michael Sklar, commuting to his home in Fort Lee, New Jersey, just across the river, thought he was hallucinating when he saw a jet so low over the bridge. He waited in dread to hear a boom and see a fireball after the plane disappeared out of his sight.

Twenty-five miles away in Westbury, Long Island, at the control center that handles New Yorks major airports, flight-controller Patrick Harten had cleared the runways for an emergency landing of the troubled craft at either LaGuardia Airport or the smaller Teterboro Airport, a few miles west into New Jersey. Then came the last communication from the cockpit: We cant do it. Were gonna be in the Hudson. Harten, a ten-year veteran, was sure he had heard a death sentence. The controller quickly lost radio and radar contact with the plane as it disappeared below the tops of Manhattans skyscrapers and one thought riveted into his mind: He would be the last person to talk to anyone on that plane.

In this day and age, the first sign that an airliner might be descending toward any major American citybut New York City, of all placesflashes instantly through secret government channels around the country, alerting authorities to activate a range of contingency plans. On this January day, word moved immediately to the Transportation Security Administrations fifth-floor security center in Northern Virginia, where officials were going over plans to prevent air or rocket attacks on President-Elect Obamas inauguration, just five days away. It sped simultaneously to the FBI, the Homeland Security Department, a dozen other agencies, and cross-country to the North American Aerospace Defense Command headquarters in Colorado Springs. The thirty people in the duty room fell dead silent, listening intently to the loudspeaker updates about the planes behavior. Early reports said that a light plane was in trouble; then, that birds had struck one engine, then both, of a commercial carrier shortly after takeoff from LaGuardia.

Briefly, according to the New York Times, officials considered one of those post-9/11 contingency plansthe launch of supersonic fighter-interceptors to shoot down the plane, though that thought was quickly discarded: With the plane already well below the profile of New Yorks choicest skyscraper targets, it was far too late.

More important, and far more quickly than the government could have reacted, it became preeminently clear that the pilot was maneuvering for an attempted water landing in the Hudson River. The mere attempt at a water landing could save hundreds or more lives on the ground of the most densely populated island in the world. It would also give the 155 terrified occupants of the fatally crippled aircraftnow descending at more than three times the normal sink ratea dice rolls chance of coming out alive.

In the next ten seconds the shimmering white US Airways Airbus A320, Flight 1549, bound until minutes earlier from New Yorks LaGuardia Airport to Charlotte, North Carolinanow an unlikely glidercontinued toward its lumbering collision with the Hudson. Thousands of New Yorkers watched from their high skyscraper windows in Manhattan and riverside condos in New Jersey. Within moments television mesmerized millions around the nation, then billions around the world, as what seemed certain to be a most awful catastrophe in a string of calamities become a different story altogetherone with a sorely needed happy ending.

Few remembered the most deadly crash in one of the rivers that encircled their island. Almost fifty years to the day, in February 1959, an American Airlines Lockheed Electra prop jet (an airplane built in the transitional era between propeller flights and commercial jets) plowed into the East River while trying to land at LaGuardia. Of the seventy-three people aboard, sixty-five were killed. Given the national mind-set in January 2009, if people had known of that disaster, few would have imagined the possibility of a less catastrophic outcome.

The America of mid-January 2009 was not a happy place. In the previous several months, one disaster after another had battered folks around the country until many were downright scared. Jobs were shed, pensions and savings gone. The bottom had fallen out of housing prices, taking with it the security blankets of most Americans largest savings accounts. The stock market had lost almost half its value. The bulwark of the traditional American way of lifethat solid, sturdy, conservative bank on Main Streethad gone to Las Vegas with the peoples money and lost big. The country was still fighting two wars. For most Americans, the national mood was as bleak as it had ever been at any time in their lives.

If ever the countryand the worldwas ready for a feel-good story, it was ready on January 15.

Then Flight 1549 hydroplaned into the icy gray river somewhere around Fiftieth Street, a few blocks beyond the southern end of Manhattans Central Park, disappeared briefly in its own spray, and magically bobbed back into view seemingly intact. The river quickly ate up the speed of the aircrafts 150-mile-an-hour crash landing, ripped off its left engine, and gracefully turned it almost 45 degrees, pointing its nose at midtown Manhattan. Poetically, the plane seemed to be taking a slight bow to its stunned audiencethe city that makes legends, New York.

The first words and pictures went out within minutes by way of the new technological and sociological phenomenon, Twitter. But the plane also was positioned in such a way so that the first passenger out the door and onto the wing could have waved to the old-line media giants of the worldthe newspapers and the television networksalready bustling into gear for the story they yearned for as much as the public.