Downed Plane Missing Both Engines

Robert Stolarik for The New York Times


The Airbus A320 was tied to a pier in Battery Park City in preparation for being lifted from the Hudson River.

By MATTHEW L. WALD and LIZ ROBBINS

Published: January 16, 2009

The left and right engines are both missing from the US Airways Airbus A320 that splashed down in the Hudson River on Thursday afternoon, a member of the National Transportation Safety Board investigating the accident said in a news conference Friday afternoon.

While the two engines are situated somewhere in the Hudson River, the black box data recorders and other important components that will help in determining the cause of the crash are still in the tail of the airplane, which is moored to a bulkhead at Battery Park City, said the transportation board member, Kathryn O. Higgins.

On Saturday, Ms. Higgins said that investigators planned to extract the aircraft with two large cranes, which will place it on a barge for transit to a secure location.

“The hope is to lift it up and out in one piece, if that’s possible,” Ms. Higgins said. “Once the recorders are removed, we’ll document the damage to the plane, and obviously there is damage we can see already.”

As for the engines, which probably floated downstream in the swift current after the accident, Ms. Higgins added, “One of the reasons we want to get the engines obviously is because there would be physical evidence in the engines if there was a bird strike.”

She said the transportation safety board had not yet interviewed the crew or the pilot of the plane, Capt. Chesley B. Sullenberger III, 57, who has been uniformly praised as a hero for landing the crippled jetliner in the icy river moments after takeoff.

All 155 people aboard the medium-range jet escaped safely because of the pilot’s quick thinking as well as the swift efforts of rescue personnel who converged on the crippled aircraft.

After the passengers and five-member crew were removed from the debilitated plane, it was towed downriver, intact, and moored to a bulkhead at Battery Park City , where it still rested on Friday morning with the left wing and tail sticking out of the water.

As investigators prepared to extract the aircraft from the frigid Hudson, divers from the New York Police Department were helping to stabilize the plane as it leaned near a bulkhead.

“They are diving to help inspect it," Paul Browne, a police department spokesman, said. "They are putting these big harnesses underneath it."

Officials said that one possibility was to have a crane lift the plane onto the barge and then float it to an airport, where it could be examined in a hangar.

High on the list of questions is the location of the jet engines, which were possibly incapacitated by a flock of birds during the plane’s ascent.

Investigators commonly use sonar to find such objects, and the search area is small compared with what must be searched if an airplane breaks up at sea. Engines mounted under the wings, as is the case on the A320, commonly detach in crashes.

Investigators want to examine the engine to look for signs of damage from the birds, and they will also examine the airframe for signs of bird strikes. Mr. Sullenberger had radioed air traffic control minutes after takeoff from LaGuardia Airport and said the plane had suffered a “double bird strike.”

Ms. Higgins said investigators would also examine audio tapes and radar tapes to see if there were reports from other planes of birds in the area.

Mr. Sullenberger, widely praised for his heroism, is one of the crucial components of the investigation, and he was expected to meet with members of the transportation board later on Friday.

On Friday morning, Mayor Bloomberg showed off a key to the city for Mr. Sullenberger, which he said he would present when he saw him in person. “His brave actions have inspired people in this city and millions around the world,” he said.

The mayor also presented certificates of appreciation to 22 first responders from the various city agencies and 3 employees of New York Waterway.

What might have been a catastrophe in New York was averted by Mr. Sullenberger’s quick thinking and deft maneuvers, using the river as a landing strip.

“If it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t be here today,” said one passenger, Mary Berkwits, of Stallings, N.C., who prepared to return to Charlotte on Friday morning at La Guardia Airport. “He was just wonderful.”

The lead officials in Thursday’s rescue spoke about the coordinated efforts amid the brisk current and freezing temperatures that enabled every passenger and crew member to reach the shore safely.

“I was worried if we didn’t get them out right away,” said New York Waterway captain Vincent Lombardi, first on the scene, “there would have been casualties.”

The chief of Emergency Medical Services, John Peruggia, agreed: "If we weren’t there in another few minutes and got them on board and got them warm, they could have died."

Many on board and others watching from the shore were shocked that the aircraft did not sink immediately. Instead, the pilot landed the plane nose up, and on its fuselage. The Airbus 320 has a “ditching switch,” which the pilot probably engaged to close valves and vents to slow the flow of water into the plane. The aircraft, floating, then twisted and drifted south in strong currents as three New York Waterway commuter ferries moved in.

Capt. C.B. "Sully" Sullenberger, the US Airways pilot who made an emergency landing in the Hudson River.

Moments later, terrified passengers began swarming out of the emergency exits into brutally cold air and onto the submerged wings of the bobbing jetliner, which had begun taking on water.

“I was on the wing hanging on with a lot of other passengers,” Ms. Berkwits said. “We’re slowly sinking further and further into the water. And the water was very cold. We’re all trying to stay as warm as possible by holding on to one another.”

As the first ferry nudged up alongside, witnesses said, some passengers were able to leap onto the decks. Others were helped aboard by ferry crews. Soon, a small armada of police boats, fireboats, tugboats and Coast Guard craft converged on the scene, and some of them snubbed up to keep the jetliner afloat. Helicopters brought police divers, who also helped with the rescue efforts.

A picture emerged late Thursday and Friday morning of just how perilous the rescue operations and the actual towing of the aircraft was, as boat operators battled the swift tide.

Capt. Richard Johnson, 52, of the New York Fire Department, who was on another one of the first rescue boats to reach the plane, said: “We came right alongside the wing and the pilot did a great job of holding position. They kind of jumped toward the boat and we pulled them off, one at a time. Their legs would be hanging over the side and then we had to heave them over the side of the boat and we had to do that with each individual person.”

Captain Vincent Lucante, 41, of New York Waterway, who helped rescue two infants from an emergency life raft, had his own harrowing tale to tell. He said he saw the mothers handing the babies to a crew member, before climbing the steps to the ferry.

"They were all shivering,” he said. “I felt so much relief to get the children off that life raft. When they got up to the second deck of the ferry, where it is warmest, they started to cry, which was the best sound you could hear.”

Brought ashore on both sides of the river, the survivors were taken to hospitals in Manhattan and New Jersey, mostly for treatment of exposure to the brutal cold: 18 degrees in the air, about 35 degrees in the water that many had stood in on the wings up to their waists.

Once all the passengers had been evacuated onto rescue boats — and the pilot walked up and down the aisle twice to make sure the plane was empty — the fire boat, a 27-foot rescue vessel, had to secure the plane.

“We ran the rope through the cockpit door, open, and out the other side, through the other side and got it lashed through,” Mr. Johnson said. “We wrapped it around the tail. We were not sure the two lines would hold up. And they could have snapped anytime. A couple times, we were attempting to get more lines on it, but we were nearing close to Battery Park.”

On Friday, investigators focused on recovering the "black boxes," the cockpit voice recorder, which would probably capture conversations between the two pilots, and the flight data recorder. On this airplane, 10 years old, the flight data recorder keeps a detailed record of the functioning of engines, flight-control surfaces, pumps, valves and many other airplane parts.

Another priority, said Ms. Higgins of the transportation safety board, was to talk to the cockpit crew and the cabin crew.

"We’ve got to chase it all down,” she said.

The N.T.S.B. and state and local agencies are to investigate the cause of the crash, which could take months, but early indications were that the plane’s engines had shut down after having ingested a flock of birds — variously described as geese or gulls.

W. Douglas Parker, chairman and chief executive of US Airways, and officials of the Federal Aviation Administration said on Thursday that Flight 1549 had taken off from La Guardia at 3:26 p.m., bound for Charlotte. It headed north, across the East River and over the Bronx on a route that would involve a sweeping left turn to head south. But both engines lost power about a minute into the flight.

At the news conference with the mayor on Friday, Mr. Parkers said, “Yesterday’s event unfolded in a matter of minutes and determining what happened will take longer than that.”

Airbus issued a statement saying that the plane had been delivered to US Airways on Aug. 2, 1999, and that the company would send investigators to New York to help determine the cause of the accident.

F.A.A. records showed that the aircraft involved in the crash had made at least two other emergency landings in this decade. On Feb. 2, 2002, pilots spotted flames in the left engine, and on June 23, 2003, indicators warned about problems with a landing gear. A later inspection showed it was a false warning.

Reporting was contributed by Michael Barbaro, Carla Baranauckas, Ken Belson, Viv Bernstein, Ralph Blumenthal, Cara Buckley, Russ Buettner, David W. Chen, Glenn Collins, Jim Dwyer, Kareem Fahim, Kevin Flynn, Anemona Hartocollis, Christine Hauser, Javier C. Hernandez, C. J. Hughes, Tina Kelley, Corey Kilgannon, Patrick LaForge, Andrew W. Lehren, Robert D. McFadeden, Patrick McGeehan, Jo Craven McGinty, Mick Meenan, Christine Negroni, Kenny Porpora, William K. Rashbaum, Ray Rivera, Liz Robbins, Marc Santora, Nate Schweber, Kirk Semple, Joel Stonington, A. E. Velez, Mathew R. Warren and Margot Williams.