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US Airways Plane Missing Both Engines After Crash
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Earlier, rescued passengers described their harrowing experiences.
Darren Beck, a 37-year-old marketing executive, had just settled into Seat 3A of the Charlotte-bound 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 Flight 1549, which ditched into the Hudson River within minutes of takeoff from LaGuardia. Facing life-and-death choices, the pilot steered away from a catastrophic crash in the Bronx or in northern Manhattan, but the passengers and crew soon faced new peril as their 80-ton aircraft 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 the listing Airbus A320, which was already submerged on the starboard side.
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 rescue the weak and infirm, including an infant and an elderly woman in a wheelchair.
Sullenberger, who steered the aircraft to a skittering splashdown that left the fuselage intact, was hailed as a hero by aviation experts and political leaders including Gov. David A. Paterson and President Bush. Bloomberg said Sullenberger, as befits a captain, twice walked the length of the sinking plane to make sure he was the last to depart.
Molly Schugel, 32, who sat in a mid-cabin exit row, said that screams were audible and that there was "definitely fear in the plane." 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."
