All OK After Hudson River US Airways Crash

NEW YORK -- A US Airways jet crash-landed in the Hudson River off of Manhattan Thursday afternoon, shortly after taking off from New York's LaGuardia Airport.

The FAA confirmed US Airways Flight 1549, an Airbus A320 headed from LaGuardia to Charlotte Douglas International Airport, was down in the river following a failed takeoff. The U.S. Coast Guard said units were also responding, and a ferry on site was dropping life jackets into the water.

The plane took off from LaGuardia at 3:26 p.m., and crash-landed minutes later. According to New York NBC affiliate, WNBC-TV, local air temperature in New York at the time of the crash was 21 degrees, with a wind chill of 6 degrees. Officials said 150 passengers and 5 crew were on board the plane. An Airbus A320 has 150 seats -- 12 in first class and 138 in economy, according to the Airbus Web site.

US Airways officials said Flight 1549 was headed from LaGuardia to Charlotte, then on to Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.

Television images show the plane in the water off of 43rd Street in Manhattan.

According to broadcast reports from WNBC-TV and MSNBC, FAA officials said that all 155 people on the plane were able to escape safely.

Witness Barbara Sambriski, a researcher at The Associated Press, said she thought, "Why is it so low?" And then, she says, "splash, it hit the water."

The plane approached the water at a gradual angle and made a big splash, according to a witness watching from an office building.

"It wasn't going particularly fast. It was a slow contact with the water that it made," the witness, Ben VonKlemperer, told CNN.

Witnesses said the plane's pilot appeared to guide the plane down.

"I see a commercial airliner coming down, looking like it's landing right in the water," said Bob Read, who saw it from his office at the television newsmagazine "Inside Edition." "This looked like a controlled descent."

Passenger Jeff Kolodjay of Norwalk, Conn., said he heard an explosion two or three minutes into the flight. He looked out of the left side of the plane and could see one of the engines on fire.

"The engine blew. There was fire everywhere and it smelled like gas," he said. "The captain said, 'Brace for impact because we're going down,'" Kolodjay said.

He added, "It was intense. It was intense. You've got to give it to the pilot. He made a hell of a landing."

"Prepare for impact" -- all that was said by the pilot before the craft landed in the river according to passenger Alberto Panero in a phone interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer.

"Somehow the plane stayed afloat and we were all able to get on the raft," said Panero. "Some people were on the wings and had to wait there but most of the people were able to get on the raft."

"I don't even know how to put it into words right now," he said. "I actually grabbed one of the seats, that was the first thing that came to my mind. Some people grabbed the inflatable one. Immediately there were folks coming to us and throwing life jackets to us and helping us get to safety."

"There were a couple of people who took charge and started yelling for everyone to calm down," Panero said. "Once people everyone realized we were going to be okay, they settled down."

"I can't say 100% but I'm pretty sure everyone was able to get off," he said. "It was just like a car crash, the impact."

An official speaking on condition of anonymity because the investigation was still going on identified the pilot as Chelsey B. Sullenberger III. A woman answered and hung up when the AP asked to speak with Sullenberger's family in Danville, Calif. Sullenberger, 58, described himself in an online professional profile as a 29-year employee of US Airways, flying routes in North America, Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean and Hawaii. He started his own consulting business, Safety Reliability Methods Inc., two years ago.

The extraordinary rescue effort was due in large part to the ferries who quickly came to the plane's aid.

"We just started taking people from the wing and the inflatable rafts," Janis Krums who was riding on one of the first ferries to arrive and rescue the passengers. "And we just started giving them clothes and keeping them warm...in less than six or seven minutes we just had five or six boats helping."

New York City firefighters and the Coast Guard worked to rescue the passengers. The fuselage appeared intact, and the plane appeared to be sitting high in the water well after the crash with rescuers standing on the wings once they reached the site.

"I saw what appeared to be a tail fin of a plane sticking out of the water," said Erica Schietinger, whose office windows look out over the Hudson. "All the boats have sort of circled the area."

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg says police divers had to rescue some passengers from underwater after the crash. Bloomberg says he has spoken with the pilot and a passenger who claimed to be the last one off the plane. All passengers survived.

The mayor said, "It would appear that the pilot did a masterful job of landing the plane in the river, and then making sure everybody got out."

Bloomberg says most of the rescued were picked up right away and put on police, Coast Guard and ferry boats. He says divers pulled a few passengers from underwater.

New York Governor David Paterson added, "We've had a miracle on 34th Street, Now I believe we've had a miracle on the Hudson."

FBI officials said there was no information that there was terrorism involved in the crash.

The Associated Press is reporting that a government official says both engines of the plane that went down in Hudson were disabled by a bird strike. WNBC's Tim Minton said a pilot had reported he'd hit a flock of geese.

Joe Mazzone, a retired Delta Air Lines pilot, said it is not unusual for birds to strike planes. In fact, he said, when planes get ready to take off, if there are birds in the area, the tower will alert the crew.

"They literally just choke out the engine and it quits," Mazzone said.

National Air Traffic Controllers Union spokesman Doug Church says the Airbus 320 reported the bird strikes about 30 to 45 seconds after takeoff from New York's LaGuardia Airport and asked to return to the ground. As the controller began to turn the aircraft, the pilot radioed that he saw an airport below him and asked what it was.

Church said the controller in Westbury, N.Y., replied, "That's Teterboro." The pilot asked to land there. The last transmission between the pilot and controller was the controller's order to divert to Teterboro, N.J., for an emergency landing.

Eric Doten, a Florida aviation safety consultant, said he could not recall another example of a modern jetliner water crash in which everyone survived. He said many things had to go right to avert catastrophe: The plane didn't cartwheel when it hit, the fuselage remained intact, and the fuel did not ignite – in fact its buoyancy probably helped the plane stay afloat.

The plane sank slowly as it drifted downriver. Gradually, the fuselage went under until about half of the tail fin and rudder was above water. A Fire Department boat tugged the plane to the southern tip of Manhattan and docked it there.

Worldwide since 1960, crashes of more than 25 large aircraft were caused by bird strikes, according to a published study by Richard Dolbeer, a retired ornithologist with the Department of Agriculture at the Wildlife Services in Sandusky, Ohio. In 23 of these incidents, the strike occurred below 400 feet.

In the U.S., the FAA tracked more than 38,000 bird strikes from 1990 to 2004, according to a study by Dolbeer. He used data from the FAA's National Wildlife Strike Database for Civil Aviation. He concluded that management of birds should focus on the airport environment.

People who believe they may have had relatives on the flight may call US Airways at 1-800-679-8215 within the United States, the airline said.

National Transportation Safety Board officials were on their way to New York Thursday evening to investigate the crash.

Twenty-seven years ago this week, an Air Florida plane bound for Tampa crashed into the Potomac River after hitting a bridge just after takeoff from Washington National Airport. The crash on Jan. 13, 1982, killed 78 people including four people in their cars on the bridge. Five people on the plane survived.

On Dec. 20, a Continental Airlines plane veered off a runway and slid into a snowy field at the Denver 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 mistakenly took off from the wrong runway in Lexington, Ky.