‘MIRACLE ON THE HUDSON’

New York —- Darren Beck, a 37-year-old marketing executive, had just settled into Seat 3A of a Charlotte-bound passenger jet Thursday afternoon when he heard a sickening thump.

“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.”

“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 LaGuardia Airport.

Facing life-and-death choices, Pilot Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger III at first asked air traffic controllers about making a landing at a small airport in Teterboro, N.J., then decided to ditch the now-powerless plane in the river.

Sullenberger glided the 80-ton Airbus A320 to a skittering splashdown that left the fuselage intact and avoided a catastrophic crash in the Bronx or in northern Manhattan. But the 155 passengers and crew soon faced new peril as the plane 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 airliner, submerged already on the starboard side, disappeared.

Most of the passengers stood in shirtsleeves, fleeing without their life jackets, and a few fell into 36-degree water on a day when the air temperature barely reached 20 degrees. 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.

“We had a miracle on 34th Street. I believe now we have had a miracle on the Hudson,” New York Gov. David Paterson said.

Paterson joined President George W. Bush and Mayor Michael Bloomberg in hailing Sullenberger as a hero. Bloomberg said Sullenberger, as befits a captain, twice walked the length of the sinking plane to make sure he was the last to depart.

“It would appear that the pilot did a masterful job of landing the plane in the river, and then making sure everybody got out,” he said.

Molly Schugel, 32, who sat in a mid-cabin exit row, said screams were audible and that there was “definitely fear in the plane” as it went down. 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 clamber aboard.

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.”

Paramedics treated at least 78 patients, fire officials said. Coast Guard boats rescued 35 people who were immersed in the frigid water and ferried them to shore. Some of the rescued were shivering and wrapped in white blankets, their feet and legs soaked.

Two police scuba divers said they pulled another woman from a lifeboat “frightened out of her mind” and lethargic from hypothermia. Another woman fell off a rescue raft, and the divers said they swam over and put her on a Coast Guard boat.

The plane remained afloat but was sinking slowly as it drifted downriver. Gradually, the fuselage went under, leaving about half of the tail fin and rudder above water. Bloomberg said the aircraft finally wound up near Battery Park, at the lower tip of Manhattan about four miles from where the pilot ditched it.

The Hudson crash took place almost exactly 27 years after an Air Florida plane bound for Tampa crashed into the Potomac River just after takeoff from Washington National Airport, killing 78 people. Just five people on that flight survived.

On Dec. 20, a Continental Airlines plane veered off a runway and slid into a snowy field at the Denver airport, injuring 38 people. That was the first major crash of a commercial airliner in the United States since Aug. 27, 2006, when 49 people were killed after a Comair jetliner mistakenly took off from the wrong runway in Lexington, Ky.

The Associated Press contributed to this article.

 Associated Press 
Plane crashes 
Map locates site where plane crashed. Inset map outlines area of detail in relation to the states of N.Y. and Pa. 
Source: ESRI 

 Staff
US Airways A320  
Overall length: 123 ft., 3 in. 
Wingspan: 111 ft., 10 in. 
Typical passenger seating capacity: 150 
Range (w/max. passengers): 3,000 miles 
Maximum fuel capacity: 6,300 U.S. gal. 
Maximum speed: 625 mph 
Image source: McClatchy/Tribune
Source: Airbus