The Hudson Landing

Part One · The Birds

On the afternoon of January 15, 2009, a passenger jet named US Airways Flight 1549 sat on a runway at LaGuardia Airport in New York City, awaiting clearance to depart. The weather was clear and bitterly cold, with a thin layer of ice along the edges of the nearby rivers. The plane was an Airbus A320, a jet with two engines and a long, narrow body, and it was bound for Charlotte, North Carolina. A hundred and fifty passengers were fastened into their seats, and five crew members were getting ready to look after them. Two pilots sat in the cockpit. The captain was Chesley Sullenberger, who was known to his colleagues as Sully, and the first officer was Jeff Skiles. Both men were highly experienced, and everyone expected the flight to be entirely routine.

Captain Sullenberger had been flying for almost thirty years. As a young man he had been a fighter pilot in the Air Force, and later he had spent many years with commercial airlines. Over that time he had accumulated about twenty thousand hours of flying time, and he had also devoted a great deal of effort to studying why accidents occur and how crews can prevent them. Jeff Skiles was a veteran pilot as well, although he had only recently qualified to fly the Airbus, and the two of them had never worked together before that week. That afternoon Skiles was the one handling the controls. Shortly after three o'clock, the control tower cleared them to leave, and the jet raced down the runway, rose into the icy air, and began a steady climb over the Bronx.

About two minutes after takeoff, when the plane was roughly two thousand eight hundred feet above the ground, the pilots noticed a dark formation rapidly filling the windshield. It was a flock of Canada geese, which are enormous birds that can weigh as much as ten pounds, and there was no opportunity to steer around them. The crew heard several loud thumps, and they detected the odor of something burning. Then the engines, which had been roaring a moment earlier, became eerily quiet. Investigators later concluded that the geese had been drawn into both engines, and that each of them had lost almost all of its thrust. A jet without its engines can still glide for a short distance, but it is steadily descending, and the pilots understood that they had only a few minutes to determine where the aircraft could safely come down.

Sullenberger took over the controls from Skiles and began to control the glide himself, while Skiles opened the emergency checklist and worked through its procedures as rapidly as possible. Sullenberger also reported the problem to an air traffic controller, who immediately began clearing other aircraft out of the way. The controller suggested returning to LaGuardia, and then proposed a smaller airport in New Jersey called Teterboro. The captain thought about both options carefully, and then he concluded that the plane could not reach either runway. A jet that falls short of an airport would strike the crowded neighborhoods below, which would endanger people on the ground as well. So he informed the controller that they would be landing in the Hudson River, a broad and open stretch of water that flows beside the city.

Part Two · The River

Most of the passengers did not realize how serious the situation was until the captain addressed them over the speakers. His announcement was brief and calm, and it instructed them to brace for impact. The flight attendants, who were Sheila Dail, Doreen Welsh, and Donna Dent, immediately began to shout the commands that they had practiced many times in training. They told everyone to bend forward and to keep their heads down, and they repeated those words again and again as the jet descended. Many passengers later reported that the cabin had been remarkably quiet, and that people held hands, prayed, or sent last messages to their families. Outside the windows, the skyscrapers of Manhattan and the bridges across the river loomed larger every second, and the aircraft seemed to glide directly past them.

Landing a jet on water is among the most difficult maneuvers a pilot can attempt, because the aircraft was never engineered for it. If the nose dips too low, it can plunge beneath the surface and break apart. If one wing touches the water first, the whole plane can spin around and tumble. Sullenberger needed to keep the wings level, to hold the nose slightly raised, and to bring the jet down at a shallow angle and at the slowest speed that the airplane could safely maintain. At about thirty minutes past three, the Airbus struck the surface of the Hudson River in a long, flat skid. Water sprayed up on both sides, and the passengers felt a hard jolt, but the fuselage remained intact and the plane gradually slid to a stop. The entire flight, from takeoff to splashdown, had lasted only about six minutes.

The danger was not yet over, because the water was cold enough to threaten anyone who fell into it. It measured about thirty-six degrees Fahrenheit, and the air temperature was roughly twenty. The exit doors were opened, and passengers began to climb out onto the wings and into the inflatable rafts, which also served as emergency slides. The crew worked steadily to guide everyone out in an orderly line. Water was gradually seeping in through the rear of the fuselage, so the plane was slowly settling, and some passengers had to wade through icy water that reached their knees. Even so, nearly everyone moved quickly and calmly. Many people stood on the wings, with their coats pulled tight, and waited for assistance while the current carried the floating jet slowly down the river.

Help arrived almost immediately, and that rapid response was a major reason the story ended so happily. Ferries that carry commuters across the Hudson were operating nearby, and their captains turned toward the plane as soon as they noticed it. Within a few minutes the boats had pulled alongside, and their crews lowered ropes and opened gates so that people could climb aboard. Police officers, firefighters, and the Coast Guard soon joined the effort. Before leaving the plane, Captain Sullenberger walked down the aisle twice to confirm that nobody had been left behind. Then he stepped out, and he was among the last to be rescued. A few people had broken bones or cuts, and many were dangerously chilled, but all one hundred fifty-five people who had boarded the flight were alive.

The news spread around the world within hours, and the landing soon became known as the Miracle on the Hudson. Sullenberger himself gave a great deal of credit to the people around him, including his first officer, the three flight attendants, the air traffic controllers, and the ferry crews who had responded so quickly. Investigators from a federal agency examined the accident in detail, and they confirmed that the engines had been struck by geese and that the captain's choice of the river had been a sound one. They also pointed out that crews manage a sudden emergency far more well when they have rehearsed their training. The aircraft itself was lifted out of the water and later displayed in a museum in Charlotte, the very city where the flight had been headed.