'Miracle' averts disastrous crash

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Photo taken by a ferry passenger (above) shows jet passengers wait­ing for rescue as they stand on the submerged wing. ( JANIS KRUMS / THE ASSOCIATED PRESS)

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A rescued passenger is escorted to safety by emergency personnel. (CP)

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US Airways Flight 1549 passengers await rescue on the wings of their plane in the Hudson River off New York City. ( STEVEN DAY / THE ASSOCIATED PRESS)

"We were gaining altitude, everything seemed normal, and there was a very, very loud bang on the left-hand side," he said in a telephone interview, hours later, from the unexpected venue of Manhattan's Pier 79. Beck watched aghast from his window seat as the spinning jet turbine began to kick and slow down, "almost like something was stuck in a washing machine."

Passenger Fred Berretta sat up straight and looked out the window. Smoke was billowing from the engine mounted on the wing outside his window.

"You'd hear thump-thump-thump-thump, and then the pilot came on, and all he said was, 'This is the captain speaking. Brace for impact,' " Beck recalled. The flight attendants, still strapped in for the initial ascent, "kept saying, 'Keep your head down -- brace for impact.' They said it over and over, chanting it."

Thus began the drama of US Airways Flight 1549, which was apparently crippled by a midair encounter with geese and ditched into the Hudson River within minutes of takeoff from La Guardia Airport. Facing life-and-death choices, the pilot steered away from a catastrophic crash in the Bronx or in northern Manhattan, but the 155 passengers and crew soon faced new peril as their 80-ton aircraft began to sink in the river's frigid gray current.

Scrambling for the exits and carrying the helpless, they perched ankle- and then knee-deep atop the wings as an improvised armada of tour boats and ferries streamed to their rescue. It was a race to escape before the listing Airbus A320, submerged already on the starboard side, disappeared.

Most of the passengers stood in shirtsleeves, fleeing without their life jackets, and a few fell into two-degree C water on a day when the air temperature barely reached -7 C. Some passengers began to wail, but witnesses described a scene of level-headed teamwork to evacuate the weak and infirm, including an infant and an elderly woman in a wheelchair.

Pilot Chesley B. "Sully" Sullenberger III, who steered the aircraft to a skittering splashdown that left the fuselage intact, was hailed as a hero by aviation experts and political leaders including Gov. David Paterson, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and President George W. Bush. The mayor said Sullenberger, as befits a captain, twice walked the length of the sinking plane to make sure he was the last to depart.

Molly Schugel, 32, who sat in a mid-cabin exit row, said screams were audible and that there was "definitely fear in the plane." But she and her seatmates used their last airborne moments to scan the emergency diagrams on the exit hatch.

"We're all studying the door, what to do," she said. "Every plane you fly has different handles. The guy next to me, soon as we hit the water, he opened the door within seconds, and we got out."

Schugel, a Bank of America executive, came to regret her choice of three-inch heels.

"They were very cute," she said, but they offered little purchase atop a wing slick with jet fuel and water. "We had to go out to the very narrow part to let more people out on the wing. I was trying to take them off, holding onto the lady next to me, and then I'm barefoot on the wing. I don't know if it was a wave or what, but I slid right off the wing into the water."

Submerged to her shoulders and gasping, Schugel said she knew she would not last long in the cold.

A stranger from the row in front of her, risking his own footing, reached to fish her out. Someone inflated the emergency ramp, but in the chaos, it overturned, and no one could use it.

Before police and Coast Guard vessels could respond, the Hudson's commercial flotilla converged on the scene. Ferry, tour boat and tugboat crews tossed life vests to the stranded passengers and began hoisting them up ladders. Soaked and shivering, Schugel had to plunge back into the river and swim a few feet to reach the first arriving boat. On deck, she then turned her attention to a fellow passenger who had suffered a deep gash in her leg and was bleeding heavily.

Grabbing a belt from one of the men, she recalled: "I tied it as tightly as I could, and we elevated her leg to stop the bleeding. The most amazing part was, I saw no pushing, no shoving. I saw nothing but help and compassion."

Sullenberger, the pilot, has 40 years of aviation experience and about 20,000 flight hours in jets, propeller planes and gliders, according to his online resume. He flew F-4 jets in the Air Force before beginning his civilian career, and now gives speeches on aviation safety, the resume indicates.

-- The Washington Post, with files from The Associated Press

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition January 16, 2009 A7