LaGuardia bound passengers enjoyed the calm before the storm landing

The flight up from Atlanta had been so calm and comfortable that Robert Isherwood had nearly nodded off to sleep by landing.

Then the wheels hit the snow-covered LaGuardia Airport runway hard and fast with a series of thumps and the 47-year-old business executive from Decatur  sensed something was wrong.

He didn't yet realize the full danger he and his fellow passengers were in Thursday morning until after their Delta MD-88 had skidded off the runway and crashed into a fence in a blinding winter storm, shearing off the right wing in the process.

“I got off the plane and saw it was up on the embankment and you could look and see how close it was to the water’s edge,” Isherwood told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution by phone Thursday afternoon as he sat sipping hot coffee and nibbling on a chocolate chip cookie in the Delta Sky Miles Club.

“It was a grave situation, but prior to that there wasn’t a sense of the gravity. “

After the plane stopped, and Isherwood saw where it was and what had happened to it, he and the 126 other passengers on Flight 1086 realized how close they’d come to disaster.

“From my seat, it looked terrible,” Isherwood recalled.

Other passengers “were having an emotional moment” as they got off the plane, he said, recognizing what might have been.

"We just crash landed at LGA. I'm terrified," wrote Jaime Primak, a blogger and publicist, on Twitter, The New York Times reported.

"I felt for sure that we were going into that water. Thankfully, we did not," a passenger who identified himself as Aaron Smith wrote on Twitter, according to Reuters.

The calm on the plane until that point was made possible by the five-member flight crew, Isherwood emphasized.

“They were amazing,” he said. “Very comforting.”

Safety personnel on the ground were equally adept, he added. That made for what was called an orderly evacuation.

Reports indicated two people were hurt, not seriously.

A student pilot himself, Isherwood said of the pilot’s landing prospects coming in around 11 a.m., “I can’t imagine how it looked from the cockpit. Looking out the window, the conditions were terrible.”

The executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey Patrick Foye said at a news conference that the airport runway was plowed and two other pilots reported good braking conditions minutes before the Delta plane skidded, the Associated Press reported.

He said the pilot did everything he could to slow the aircraft.

A Delta spokesman told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that “Delta will work with all authorities and stakeholders to look into what happened in this incident.”

LaGuardia  was closed immediately after the incident. But one runway was opened by early afternoon, The Associated Press reported.

Isherwood, not fearful of getting back on a plane, hoped to fly back to Atlanta from his business trip Thursday night.

Talking on the phone from LaGuardia, he noted, “A cup of coffee and a chocolate chip cookie will cure many an ill.”

— Staff writer Kelly Yamanouchi contributed to this report.