Miracle on the Hudson
When US Airways Flight 1549 landed on New York's Hudson River on a cold winter's day, what seemed destined to be a tragedy became an extraordinary tale of success and survival. After all 155 people were pulled from the icy waters by rescue boats, a story of a miracle began to emerge. It was a miracle created with the coordinated efforts of a highly trained pilot, flight attendants, ferry operators and rescue workers.

On January 15, 2009, US Airways Flight 1549 took off from LaGuardia Airport in New York City, heading toward Charlotte, North Carolina. It was a normal takeoff in every regard. About 90 seconds after the takeoff, however, Captain Chesley Sullenberger noticed large birds covering the cockpit windows, from top to bottom, from left to right, and they were too close to avoid. The next moment, the birds hit the engines of the plane. “It felt like the airplane was being hit by heavy rain,” Sullenberger later recalled. “I felt the engine shaking, and burned bird smell was being brought into the airplane.”

The airplane was about 3,000 feet over New York City when the engines failed, and the aircraft started to descend rapidly. Captain Sullenberger urgently looked for some place to land and contacted air traffic control. The idea of turning back to LaGuardia was quickly dismissed because the distance and altitude required for the return could not be maintained. If he had turned his plane back to LaGuardia, it would have made the emergency landing disastrous for everyone on board and people on the ground. And then the Hudson River came into sight on his left.

“The only smooth level place sufficiently large enough to land an airplane this size is the river,” Sullenberger thought. That decision to go on the Hudson was made just one minute after the birds had hit. Sullenberger and his co-pilot Jeff Skiles prepared to land on the water.

A water landing is never an easy job, one that only a few airline pilots have ever accomplished safely. In addition, Sullenberger had just three and half minutes to make it happen. He recalled an airplane that landed in the Indian Ocean in 1996 and broke into pieces, killing most of the passengers on board. He was determined to avoid such a disaster.

To do so, he needed to touch down with the wings exactly level, with the nose slightly up, and at a speed that was survivable, just above the minimum flying speed but not below it. Most importantly, he needed to make all these things happen simultaneously. Ninety seconds before hitting the water, Captain Sullenberger made an announcement to the passengers and the crew. Three simple words: “Brace for impacted.”

With Captain Sullenberger busy making the complex calculations needed for the emergency water landing, panic spread among the passengers. Doreen Welsh, one of the three flight attendants, got out of her seat and calmed everyone down. She said, “It's okay. We might have lost one engine. We'll circle around.” As soon as the Captain made the announcement, the flight attendants began yelling, “Brace, brace, heads down, stay down! Brace, brace, heads down, stay down!”

Sullenberger landed his plane between two ferry terminals so ferries and boats quickly came to the rescue. Despite his superb control of the plane, the impact was so powerful that it tore a hole under the airplane's tail. Water began to pour into the cabin. Seeing that the water level was lower than the emergency exit door, Sheila Dail, one of the flight attendants, opened the door and the chute automatically came out and inflated. At the command of Captain Sullenberger to evacuate, passengers started to get out.

As the three flight attendants worked to calm down the panicked passengers during the evacuation, one of the passengers just kept looking at Dail with a very anxious face. She tried to comfort him, saying, “Be calm, and just try to breathe.”

The man later told Dail that he could not tell her how frightened he was at the moment and how comforting it was to have someone looking at him and telling him that everything was going to be fine. It turned out that he had lost his brother, a firefighter, in 9/11. During the evacuation, he was thinking that his family would not survive another loss in the family. Within minutes after the landing, three New York Waterway ferries approached the airplane. Scared passengers began to get out of the emergency exits into the brutally cold air and onto the wings of the plane, which was taking on water. The first ferry pulled up alongside the plane and some passengers leaped onto the decks while others were helped aboard by ferry crew. Soon, police boats, Coast Guard craft and many other boats covered the scene. Helicopters brought police divers, who dropped into the water to help with the rescue.

When the crew had cleared out all the passengers, Captain Sullenberger walked up and down the cabin twice to make sure everyone was out. Then he took a final look at his sinking plane and got on the last life raft, now filled with passengers. The lives of all 155 people on board were saved, with only two people seriously injured.

Captain Sullenberger received thousands of letters after the accident. His wife Lorrie's favorite one read: “Dearest Captain Sullenberger. Big Apple hero. Yesterday I received a message from my 84-year-old father who lives on the 30th floor of a building with river views here in Manhattan. My father could have passed away along with your other passengers, if you had not landed in the river. As a Holocaust survivor, my father taught me that to save a life is to save a world as you never know what the person you've saved will go on to contribute to the peace and healing of the world.”

The final report by the National Transportation Safety Board on the accident credited the outcome to four factors. The first one was a good decision by the pilots. The second one was the fact that the plane carried life vests and additional rafts and slides, even though they were not required for that route, making it suitable for an extended overwater operation. The third one was
the performance of the flight crew during the evacuation. And the last one was the closeness of working boats to the landing site, which was crucial for a fast response from the ferry operators and emergency workers.

A Bird Strike
The event of a bird hitting an airplane in flight is referred to as a bird strike. Bird strikes usually occur when an airplane is flying at a low altitude, such as during takeoffs or landings because that is where most birds fly. Most airports adopt a system to scatter birds away, including “bird cannons” or bird alarms. In the spring and the fall, when many birds migrate, they set off bird alarms quite often, about twice an hour, from early in the morning till late in the evening. In the summer and the winter, the alarms are set off a couple of times a day.

What would happen if a bird were to hit an airplane in flight? The majority of bird strikes do little damage to the aircraft, although these clashes are almost always fatal to the birds involved. The most dangerous conditions arise when birds hit the jet engines of an airplane. The birds in the engine can slow down or block the motion of the fan blades, resulting in its partial or complete failure.

You may wonder how objects as small as birds can cause great damage to such a large and hard object as an airplane. It all depends on the speed of the plane. Consider a 5-kilogram bird hitting an airplane flying at a speed of 275 kilometers per hour. That impact is equal to the energy of a 100-kilogram bag being dropped from a height of 15 meters. Imagine what it would feel like to be hit by a bag weighing 100 kilograms from that height.