Investigation Begins into Flight 1549 Crash

Photograph by Phillip Ritz on Flickr

Yesterday's crash of a U.S. Airways Airbus A320 into the Hudson River is being hailed as a "Miracle on the Hudson"—TM Governor Paterson—considering that no one was killed (the most serious injury may be one passenger's broken legs). The federal Department of Transportation is in lower Manhattan, as is a National Transportation Safety Board team, to begin the investigation; they will try to recover the plane's black box.

Speculation is that the plane hit a flock of Canada geese, which took out both engines of the Charlotte, NC-bound plane, but US Airways says it's too premature to determine the cause. The NTSB spokeswoman Kitty Higgins said, "We want to get the plane recovered as soon as possible but we want to do it a safe way," noting that the biggest challenge is removing the plane from the water—it's currently tied up near Battery Park City (it had drifted south after hitting the Hudson River near the West 40s)—and trying to keep it in one piece.

The plane's 155 passengers and crew, most of whom stood on the plane's wings—35 were in the water— while awaiting rescue from the NY Waterway ferries (which were first on the scene), NYPD, FDNY, Coast Guard and Circle Line boats, were treated at hospitals in NY and NJ. One passenger told the NY Times, "We’re slowly sinking further and further into the water. And the water was very cold. We’re all trying to stay as warm as possible by holding on to one another. We knew somebody would come and get us right away. We could see boats coming, helicopters flying around us."

Yesterday, it was 20 degrees and the water was 36 degrees; the Post reports, "Hypothermia, at that temperature, can hit within five to eight minutes... It would take just a half-hour to lose consciousness - and no more than 90 minutes to die." Couple Martin and Tess Sosa, who were traveling with their 4-year-old daughter and 9-month-old son, described their experience on the Today show:

Mayor Bloomberg is currently honoring those who helped rescue the passengers and crew—including NY Waterway employees, members NYPD and FDNY—and added that the pilot, Captain Chesley Sullenberger, was unable to attend because of the NTSB investigation, so Bloomberg is keeping the key until he can meet with him.

NY1's Dean Meninger took video of the plane over the Bronx, "when he heard a loud boom and looked up to fire shooting out of the engine of a plane." Also, NY1 reports that this is apparently the most successful water landing of an aircraft: "Aviation experts say there are only about a dozen instances in which pilots have ever attempted a controlled water landing of a commercial passenger airliner, called a "ditching" in the industry. Of those dozen known ditchings, most involved planes carrying 60 or fewer passengers."