Michael Appleton for The New York Times US Airways Flight 1549 had taken off from La Guardia at 3:26 p.m., bound for Charlotte, N.C.Plane down in the Hudson. No sign of it at 42nd and 12th Avenue. Where was it? Moving downstream, or downtown, fast.
I chased.
A colleague says she took notes by phone from me as I ran. My only memory is of the rod of ice that seemed to have grown inside my body, from both the wind whipping off the river on a frigid day, and the dread over what was sure to be an awful loss of life. Maybe a few people had been able to get out alive.
It was a cold day, about to get awful.
Somewhere, past the towed-car pound, maybe around the Javits Center, I spotted it. Well, not quite. What you could see from the street was a flotilla of ferries, nestled around the downed plane, keeping perfect pace with it as the Hudson currents pulled it toward the ocean.
The commuter ferries were just about 45 minutes from starting the evening rush, and all of them had gone full speed for the plane, including one with a 20-year-old woman in her first week as a captain.
The survivors would be coming out of a ferry terminal at 42nd Street. A few of us ducked into the bar of a bowling alley to get coffee. Then people began to emerge, some wrapped in blankets, ones and twos, but big numbers.
Their heads were full of escape stories: clambering out to the wing, getting into little boats, then into ferries. A warning from the intercom. Wet clothes. Ripped clothes. Water in the cabin. The details are a blur now, except for one.
Every passenger was there to tell his or her story.
Somehow â€" maybe from one of the passengers â€" came the first word that everyone, every last one, had gotten out.
The final person to leave a life raft was a tall, white-haired man named Chesley B. Sullenberger III, the pilot who had brought the plane down safely. He climbed into the ferryboat Athenia.
“Very calm,†said Capt. Carl Lucas of the Athenia. “He had a metal clipboard with the passenger manifest. He came up into the wheelhouse, and we tried to organize a count of who was recovered from the water. I asked him if he thought there was anyone left on the plane. He said no, that he had checked twice himself.â€
This time a year ago, I met Captain Sullenberger, by then retired, at a dinner with the family of Rory Staunton, a boy who had worshiped him, read his memoir dozens of times and taken his first flying lesson on his 12th birthday. Mr. Sullenberger, an expert in aviation safety who believes that many of its principles can be applied to medicine, had contacted the family after reading that Rory had died of untreated sepsis.
By that evening, Mr. Sullenberger had already told his story a million times, no doubt, but I’d never heard what had happened in the cockpit after the plane struck a flock of birds. What did he talk about with the first officer, Jeff Skiles? As it happened, the plane was being flown by Mr. Skiles at the moment of impact with the birds. The two men did not know each other.
“There wasn’t much talking, we both knew what had to be done,†Mr. Sullenberger said. He was the ranking officer and assumed command.
But how did that happen?
“I said to him, ‘My plane.’ And Jeff said, ‘Your plane.’ That was it.â€
And a few minutes later, having skidded perfectly into the Hudson, his plane became the plane of the tidal currents, until the ferry crews rushed in. “They made all the difference,†Mr. Sullenberger said.
I thanked him. “For what?†he asked.
For the most exhilarating day I’ve had as a news reporter.
