Saturday, January 17, 2009



Circled in white, US Airways Flight 1549 descends on its way to an emergency ditching in the Hudson River on Thursday after a bird strike apparently disabled both engines.


Hudson River Plane Landing
-Thursday, January 15th

NEW YORK – A US Airways pilot ditched his disabled jetliner into the frigid Hudson River on Thursday afternoon after a collision with a flock of birds apparently knocked out both engin0es, but officials said rescuers safely pulled all 155 people on board into boats as the plane sank. Gov. David Paterson pronounced it "a miracle on the Hudson."

Flight 1549 went down minutes after takeoff from LaGuardia Airport for Charlotte, N.C., splashing into the river near 48th Street in midtown Manhattan — one of the busiest and most closely watched stretches of the river.

Passenger Accounts:

"There was an explosion on the plane and we had to make an emergency landing in the water. They did a phenomenal job getting everybody out," said one passenger.

"The left engine just blew — fire, flames coming out of it and I was looking right at it because I was sitting right there and it started smelling a lot like gasoline," said another passenger. "And a couple minutes after that the pilot said, 'You guys got to brace for a hard impact.'

"And that’s when everyone started, to be honest, saying prayers and looked over the water — and we thought we had a chance because there was some water, and got to give it to the pilot, man, he did a hell of a landing."

Some passengers stood on the wing of the plane waiting for help as the plane floated in the water, while other passengers in the water had to be rescued. The most serious injury appeared to be a woman who suffered two broken legs.

The pilot, who is being hailed a hero, said he walked the length of the plane twice after the crash and was the last one up the aisle to make sure no one was behind him.


Capt. Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger -

He began his career as an Air Force fighter pilot, and became a captain when flying for American carriers was still a high-status, high income job. The crack training he received enabled him to become an expert and start an aviation consulting business called Safety Reliability Methods, Inc. as well as to work with both the National Transportation Safety Board and the United States Air Force in working on accident investigations. He is currently a visiting scholar at the University of California's Berkeley's Center for Catastrophic Risk Management.

His co-pilot was not identified. Three flight attendants aboard were credited with safely evacuating the plane and getting passengers into life vests and onto partially submerged wings.



I hope that the airline industry can see that great captains are worthy investments and the economic situation will not put flight training like this a thing of the past.


Go to You Tube and watch Kanookle's eye-witness account!

He doesn't have the video embedded, but you can enter what's below into You Tube and see it!

Crash/emergency landing from my point of view



Here's a great video of pics from bestsong4u blogger on You Tube



ALL of my info above(including photos) came from the media outlets listed:
CBCnews.com, thechristianmonitor.com(right?! I didn't know they had a website-strange), telegraph.co.uk, and contributor Kanookle from YouTube, and Yahoo!news.com

1 comment:

ArtSparker said...

So, seems like he's pretty well-qualified to be a visiting scholar in Catastrophic Risk Management.