Hudson River plane skirted disaster at many turns

NEW YORK – Before it became an unforgettable story of luck and heroism, US Airways Flight 1549 was on course to be a catastrophe. In five minutes of flight, the stricken jetliner sprinted past one nightmare scenario after another.

The plane skirted skyscrapers and threaded through crowded airspace, horrifying spectators on the streets below. With no working engines, it had to clear the heavily traveled George Washington Bridge. Its landing strip was a stretch of the Hudson River full of commuter ferries. Had it not splash-landed in the river, the plane could have gone down in densely packed neighborhoods in New York City or northern New Jersey.

The abundance of possible catastrophic scenarios was clearly on the mind of the pilot, who told controllers that the jet was "too low, too slow" and near too many tall buildings to reach any airport.

"It was an amazing confluence," said Karlene Roberts, co-director of the Center for Catastrophic Risk Management at the University of California, Berkeley. "So many things could have gone wrong that didn't."

The run of good luck on the flight will be examined further by investigators as they inspect the jet wreckage for more clues about how a flock of birds managed to disable both engines and send the jet on its frightening obstacle course over a city of 8 million people.

The airliner was hoisted late Saturday from the ice-laden current and placed on a barge, its two flight data recorders sent to investigators in Washington. The barge was moved on Sunday night to a Jersey City, N.J., marina, where investigators hope to examine the plane more closely.

National Transportation Safety Board investigators interviewed the pilots on Saturday, and what emerged was a harrowing account of the split-second decisions they made in avoiding a crash.

It started with a wild stroke of misfortune minutes after the plane left LaGuardia Airport on Thursday for Charlotte, N.C. While bird strikes are common, commercial jet engines are fortified against them. They seldom disable an engine, let alone two. Archie Dickey, who teaches aviation environmental science at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, says bird strikes that cripple both engines are "extremely rare."

While the pilot quickly leveled the plane off after the bird strike to keep it from stalling and thought about where to land, the co-pilot kept trying to restart the engines. He also began working through a three-page list of procedures for an emergency landing. Normally, those procedures begin at 35,000 feet.

This time, he started at 3,000 — somewhere over the Bronx, a borough of more than 1 million people.

The pilot, Chesley B. "Sully" Sullenberger, could hardly have been better prepared. The 58-year-old former fighter pilot was named best aviator in his class at the Air Force Academy, had flown for US Airways for 29 years and mastered glider flying. He also has investigated air disasters, even studying how airline crews behave in a crisis.

His plane was crippled over a city still haunted by the devastation wrought by the hijacked planes that brought down the World Trade Center towers on Sept. 11, 2001. And two months after that, American Airlines Flight