NEW YORK (AP) — Investigators brought in a giant crane, divers and a barge Friday to help pull a US Airways jetliner from the Hudson River, as many of the 155 people aboard recounted survivor stories and hailed the pilot as a hero who delivered them from certain death.
Pilot Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger III was in good spirits and showing no outward signs of stress from the ordeal, a pilots union official said. His wife on Friday said he was “a pilot’s pilot” and called talk of him being a national hero “a little weird.”
But passengers like Billy Campbell were effusive in their praise for the way Sullenberger handled things. Campbell said he approached the pilot while they were standing on a rescue raft in the frigid cold.
“I leaned over and grabbed his arm, and I said I just want to thank you on behalf of all of us,” Campbell told NBC’s “Today” show. “He just said, ‘You’re welcome.””
The parents of a 3-year-old girl and a 9-month-old boy recounted how they and a fellow passenger held the children tight while preparing to crash land.
“I held Sophia and we did the best we could to brace ourselves up,” Martin Sosa, the father, told NBC’s “Today.”
“And the gentleman beside me said, “Would you like me to brace your son?” said his wife, Tess Sosa. “And I said okay, because he mentioned that he had been on scary flights before.”
“And he did, he braced my son. There was an impact. My son was crying. That was such a good sign to me.”
Mark P. Hood, of Charlotte, N.C., said said he felt a jolt ripple through the jet as though a baseball bat hit the engine close to the George Washington Bridge.
“I think everyone was holding their breath, making their peace, saying their prayers,” Hood said Friday.
“When we hit the water, as soon as we hit I realized we’d survived. I grabbed (the passenger sitting next to him) and said, ‘We made it. We made it.'”
National Transportation Safety Board investigators will now focus on recovering the black box from the plane and interviewing the crew about the accident — apparently caused by birds that slammed into the plane’s two engines.
The Airbus A320, built in 1999, was tethered to a pier on the tip of Lower Manhattan on Friday morning — about four miles from where it touched down. Only a gray wing tip could be seen jutting out of the water near a Lower Manhattan sea wall.
Crews of NYPD divers went underwater Friday to inspect the belly of the plane to make sure it was stable enough to lift and secure a bed of ropes underneath it. Police and emergency crews also pulled about 15 pieces of carry-on luggage, the door of the plane, sheared pieces of metal and flotation devices from the water.
Arnold Witte, president of the Donjon Marine salvage company, said it wasn’t clear whether the plane would be pulled out in one or several segments, or whether it could be raised on Friday.
“We want to get the plane recovered as soon as possible but we want to do it a safe way,” NTSB spokeswoman Kitty Higgins said.
Higgins said one challenge will be hauling the plane out of the water without causing it to break apart.
Sullenberger and co-pilot Jeff Skiles and crew have become instant heroes for guiding the plane to safety and safely evacuating the passengers.
Lorrie Sullenberger and her two daughters emerged from her Danville, Calif., home Friday and called her husband “a pilot’s pilot who “loves the art of the airplane.”
She said hearing her husband’s story “was really a shock. … My husband said over the years that it’s highly unlikely for any pilot to ever have any incident in his career, let alone something like this.”
She called the talk of Sullenberger being a national hero “a little weird.” When her two daughters went to sleep Thursday night, “I could hear them talking, ‘Is this weird or what?'”
James Ray, a spokesman for the U.S. Airline Pilots Association, said he spoke with Sullenberger on Friday and described him as being “in good shape physically, mentally and in good spirits.”
“He was just very calm and cool, very relaxed, just very professional,” Ray said.
Ray said the flight crew was resting and likely would meet with investigators later Friday or Saturday. He said the crew has been asked not talk to the press about the accident until after the NTSB investigation is complete.
Sullenberger, 57, of Danville, Calif., is a former Air Force fighter pilot who has flown for US Airways for 29 years. He also runs a safety consulting firm.
At a City Hall ceremony to honor those who came to the aid of the stranded passengers, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Sullenberger’s actions “inspired people around the city, and millions more around the world.”
Bloomberg planned to present the pilot with the key to the city.
US Airways chief executive Doug Parker, who attended the ceremony, declined to address the investigation. But he expressed gratitude “for the way the people of New York City and the surrounding areas pulled together to help the passengers and crew of Flight 1549.”
The crew, he said, “are safe and doing well.”
Federal Aviation Administration spokeswoman Laura Brown said there was no immediate indication the incident was “anything other than an accident.”
It was a chain of improbability. Birds tangle with airplanes regularly but rarely bring down commercial aircraft. Jet engines sometimes fail — but both at once? Pilots train for a range of emergencies, but few, if any, have ever successfully ditched a jet in one of the nation’s busiest waterways without any life-threatening injuries.
“We had a miracle on 34th Street. I believe now we have had a miracle on the Hudson,” Gov. David Paterson said.
If the accident was hard to imagine, so was the result: Besides one victim with two broken legs, there were no other reports of serious injuries to the 155 people aboard.
US Airways Airbus A320, bound for Charlotte, N.C., took off from LaGuardia Airport at 3:26 p.m. Less than a minute later, the pilot reported a “double bird strike” and said he needed to return to LaGuardia, said Doug Church, a spokesman for the National Air Traffic Controllers Association.
Passengers quickly realized something was terrifyingly wrong.
“I heard an explosion, and I saw flames coming from the left wing, and I thought, ‘This isn’t good,'” said Dave Sanderson, 47, who was heading home to Charlotte from a business trip.
Then came an ominous warning from the captain: “Brace for impact because we’re going down,” according to passenger Jeff Kolodjay, 31.
Onshore, from streets and office windows, witnesses watched the plane steadily descend off roughly 48th Street in midtown Manhattan.
“I just thought, ‘Why is it so low?’ And, splash, it hit the water,” said Barbara Sambriski, a researcher at The Associated Press, who watched the water landing from the news organization’s high-rise office.
The 150 passengers and five crew members were forced to escape as the plane quickly became submerged up to its windows in 36-degree water. Dozens stood on the aircraft’s wings on a 20-degree day, one of the coldest of the winter, as commuter ferries and Coast Guard vessels converged to rescue them.
One ferry, the Thomas Jefferson of the company NY Waterway, arrived within minutes. Riders grabbed life vests and rope and tossed them to plane passengers in the water.
“They were cheering when we pulled up,” Capt. Vincent Lombardi said. “People were panicking. They said, ‘Hurry up! Hurry up!'”
Paramedics treated at least 78 patients, many for hypothermia, bruises and other minor injuries, fire officials said.
From 1990 to 2007, there were nearly 80,000 reported incidents of birds striking nonmilitary aircraft, about one strike for every 10,000 flights, according to the Federal Aviation Administration and the Department of Agriculture.
The Hudson accident took place almost exactly 27 years after an Air Florida plane bound for Tampa crashed into the Potomac River just after takeoff from Washington National Airport, killing 78 people. Five people on that flight survived.
On Dec. 20, a Continental Airlines plane veered off a runway and slid into a snowy field at Denver International Airport, injuring 38 people. That was the first major crash of a commercial airliner in the United States since Aug. 27, 2006, when 49 people were killed after a Comair jetliner took off from a Lexington, Ky., runway that was too short.
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