Flight 1549 - Hudson
Я даже не в тихом шоке....
The Miracle of Flight 1549 began with a shuddering bang and blue flames shooting from the engine. Then came the haunting warning from the cockpit:
"Brace for impact."
Jeff Kolodjay, 31, was on the plane with five golf buddies, headed to Myrtle Beach, S.C., for an annual tournament.
They had booked on Spirit Air, but that flight was canceled and they wound up on a US Airways jet out of LaGuardia Airport.
"It was only a couple of minutes after we took off an engine blew," Kolodjay said outside the NY Waterway ferry terminal on the West Side.
He was in seat 22-A, just over the left engine. He looked out the window, saw flames and smelled gasoline.
"Fire just started blowing out the left engine pretty hard," he said.
The plane was losing altitude, but it seemed like the pilot still had control. Then a flight attendant dashed down the aisle in search of a fire extinguisher and panic spread.
"Within a minute, everyone knew what was happening. It became real," said Bill Zuhowski, 23, a Long Islander sitting directly behind Kolodjay.
Any thought that the plane might return to LaGuardia for an emergency landing vanished with the voice of pilot Chesley Sullenberger over the public address system.
"The captain just said, 'Brace for impact,'" Kolodjay said. "And that's what we all did. We put our heads down. We got ready."
Some people locked arms. Others prayed.
"I thought we were going to die. I kept thinking to myself, 'I never got to tell my family I love them every day,'" said grandmother Elizabeth McHugh, 64, of Charlotte, N.C.
An eerie silence fell over the cabin as the blue-and-gray jet plunged a final 100 feet.
"I noticed the New York skyline getting closer and closer," said Dave Sanderson, 47, a married father of four who works for Oracle in Charlotte and was here on business.
The plane hit the water and Sanderson, sitting in 15-A, smacked his head on the seat in front of him. He lifted it to see "controlled chaos" unfolding around him.
"People started running up and down aisles. People were yelling and pushing," Sanderson said.
A crowd surged to the back of the plane, where the emergency exits were located. The rush caused the rear of the plane to start sinking, and water poured into it.
"The water was up to my neck. I thought I was going to drown right there because I couldn't move," said Zuhowski, who stripped down to his underwear so his wet clothes wouldn't weigh him down.
As the 40-degree river water sloshed through the fuselage, some passengers clambered over seats - ignoring calls to "Calm down!"
Chivalry proved to be very much alive on the flight, full of business executives from Bank of America, Wachovia and TIAA-Cref.
"Women and children first!" the men shouted as 85-year-old Lucille Palmer, on her way to celebrate her great-grandson's birthday, was helped to the front.
Sanderson hung back and helped a woman with a 6-month-old baby through the door. She stood on the wing with the child in her arms while people in the rafts yelled to her.
"Just throw the baby to me," one woman urged. She reluctantly dropped the infant down and was then helped into the raft.
Most people readily abandoned their coats and carry-on luggage - grabbing yellow life vests and seat cushions instead as they headed for the exits.
One woman wouldn't get off without her luggage and had to be shoved through the door, Sanderson said. He went back and retrieved her purse to calm her.
Sanderson said he was the last passenger off the plane. He ditched when a rescue boat bumped the disabled jet, sending more water cascading inside.
'God put me on that plane'
"God put me in there for a reason," he said at Palisades Medical Center in North Bergen, N.J., where he was being treated for exposure.
"I was supposed to take the later flight, and God put me on that plane."
After they disembarked, some passengers boarded life rafts. Others stood on the wings of the half-submerged aircraft waiting for help.
Retired detective Wendell Fox, a fraud investigator for Bank of America, used a BlackBerry that passengers were sharing to call his wife, Terri, in Cornelius, S.C.
"He told me he was all right, that the plane had crashed into the Hudson River and that he'd call as soon as he was on dry land," she said.
"Considering the circumstances, he seemed pretty composed."
Rescue boats arrived quickly, but a few people ended up in the water, including Barry Leonard, 55, who tried to swim to shore but quickly thought better of it.
"He tried to swim to shore, but he realized about a minute into it that there was no way he could make it," said Leonard's wife, Sherri, from their home in Charlotte. "That's just him. He's definitely a leader and a survivor."
Leonard, CEO of a New York home furnishings manufacturer, commutes back and forth from his office in New York to his home in Charlotte. He was recovering from minor injuries Thursday night, also at Palisades Medical Center.
Most passengers taken to hospitals - including a 4-year-old girl and a toddler boy - were suffering from exposure and being treated with warm air and IV fluids. A few had broken bones or cuts and bruises. And there were, of course, emotional scars.
William Bayer, an emergency worker at Jersey City Medical Center, soothed a Vietnam veteran searching for his son, who had been sitting in a different section of the plane.
"He was crying and I kept telling him, 'You are alive,'" Bayer said.
In fact, everyone was alive - and everyone credited Sullenberger's cool handling of the crippled aircraft.
"The pilot did a hell of a job," Kolodjay said.
"Everybody owes their life to that pilot," Zuhowski added at Roosevelt Hospital in Manhattan. "Period."
Dr. Ronald Weiss, who works for NY Waterway, responded to a scene he said reminded him of 9/11, when he treated victims at the same place. Only this time, "There was a lot of calmness," he said. "People weren't running around."
The first passenger he treated had been sitting in the front row.
"He suffered a blunt abdominal trauma," Weiss said. "He was calm. He was talking. He just said that the pilot told them to prepare for impact and it happened really fast."
"It was a miracle, thank God. If the river had not been there, all those people would have died," he said.
Joe Hart, 50, a salesman from Massapequa, seconded Weiss' praise for the pilot.
"He was phenomenal," Hart said as he stood outside a senior citizens center in Weehawken, N.J., where some passengers had been taken to wait for a bus back to New York.
"He landed it - I tell you what - the impact wasn't a whole lot more than a rear-end [collision]. It threw you into the seat ahead of you."
One survivor quipped that the ordeal was the "best landing I ever experienced," and a couple were in a rush to book new flights to their destination.
Not Brett Cimino. The 24-year-old Queens man, who was on his way to a wedding, said he won't be flying to the ceremony.
"Not a chance," he said. "I'll take the train or something else."
Nine survivors, happy to be alive but exhausted, flew into Charlotte shortly after midnight.
One willing to talk was Vince Spera, 39, who works for the California-based Pacific Life Insurance Company.
He said he was scared but something in Sullenberger's voice told him everything would be okay. "I never thought I was gonna die," he said.
Carl Bavarian, a 62-year-old international investment banker from South Carolina, said, "We all won the lottery of life."
Bavarian also made a new friend, 31-year-old salesman Brad Wentzell, whom he met on the wing of plane and helped pull a woman out of the frigid water.
"He's my uncle Carl now," Wentzell laughed. The two vowed to stay in touch.
Wentzell also had a good word for the pilot. "Because of him my little girl still has a father and my wife still has a husband," he said.
Anyone finding luggage or other items possibly from US Airways Flight 1549 should call 311 and report it. Callers from outside the city are asked to call (212) NEW-YORK.
tconnor@nydailynews.com
To friends and family, he's just "Sully." To the rest of the world, Chesley Sullenberger is now a miracle worker with a pilot's license.
The former Air Force fighter pilot remained cool, calm and collected both before and after successfully ditching his US Airways flight into the Hudson River.
"That pilot is a stud," said one police source. "After the crash, he was sitting there in the ferry terminal, wearing his hat, sipping his coffee and acting like nothing happened."
Sullenberger, 57, looks more like Clark Kent than Superman: He's balding, slightly built, with a thin mustache. But he emerged from the slowly sinking fuselage of Flight 1549 as one of Gotham's brightest heroes, able to land engineless airplanes in a single try.
"Brace for impact," he warned the passengers before ditching the plane, a voice of lone calm in the seconds before they crashed.
Sullenberger wasn't done once his plane was down. He undid his safety belt and walked the length of the plane to make sure all the passengers were safely outside, Mayor Bloomberg said.
Once finished, Sullenberger turned around and made a second pass as the plane steadily took on water - and only then did he finally exit.
"He did a masterful job of landing the plane in the river and then making sure everybody got out," said an admiring Bloomberg, who is a licensed pilot.
John and Jane Garcia, neighbors of Sullenberger in Danville, Calif., weren't at all taken aback by the pilot's utter nonchalance.
"If you met Sully, you'd understand," said John. "You'd say, 'Yep, that's Sully.'"
"It's not surprising," agreed Jane. "He's a great guy."
However, family friend Jim Walberg said being called a hero isn't likely to please Sullenberger.
"Sure, he's a hero, but he's also a humble man," said Walberg. "'Hero' isn't a name he'll take to very easily."
One of the first rescuers on the scene said Sullenberger seemed impervious to the chaos around him.
"He looked absolutely immaculate," the rescuer said. "He looked like David Niven in an airplane uniform. He looked unruffled. His uniform was sharp. You could see him walking down the aisles making sure everybody got out."
Sullenberger maintained his calm facade in a phone call to his wife, fitness expert Lorrie Sullenberger, after his death-defying heroics.
"When he called me, he said, 'There's been an accident,'" she told CNN. "At first I thought it was something minor. But then he told me the circumstances, and my body started shaking and I rushed to get our daughters out of school."
A still-rattled Lorrie Sullenberger said she heard about the crash on television at their East Bay area home but never made the connection that her husband was flying the plane.
"We're really proud of him," daughter Kate told the Daily News.
Sullenberger joined US Airways 29 years ago and became a well-known figure within the industry.
He's a graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy and earned master's degrees at both Purdue University and the University of Northern Colorado. Sullenberger is also a visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley.
He's participated in several National Transportation Safety Board investigations - and will sit down with NTSB investigators to offer details of Thursday's crash.
He has served as safety chairman for the Air Line Pilots Association, and worked with hundreds of colleagues on safety issues.
Sullenberger founded his own company, Safety Reliability Methods, Inc., to pass on his expertise to other businesses.
The veteran pilot also can boast a bit. On his résumé, Sullenberger notes that he is "respected for wide range of industry knowledge, solid sense of integrity and demonstrated passion for industry as a whole as evidenced by lifelong career of flying."
His wife recalls Sullenberger saying that it's rare for a pilot to have an incident in their career. But when he finally did, the old fighter pilot proved more than equal to the task.
Although flanked by worshiping cops, firefighters and city officials after the crash, Sullenberger remained detached and low-key.
"That guy is one cool customer," said a police source. "He was a rock star. He had saved everybody and was behaving like it was just another day at the office."
Anyone finding luggage or other items possibly from US Airways Flight 1549 should call 311 and report it. Callers from outside the city are asked to call (212) NEW-YORK.