Investigators Offer Details of Flight’s Few Minutes

Robert Stolarik for The New York Times



The Airbus A320 that splashed down in the Hudson on Thursday remained off Battery Park City on Saturday.

Article Tools Sponsored By
By MATTHEW L. WALD and AL BAKER
Published: January 17, 2009

Just seconds after the first officer of US Airways Flight 1549, leaving La Guardia Airport and bound for Charlotte, N.C., pointed the nose of his jet into the sky, he noticed that there were birds on the right side — “in a perfect line formation.”

The plane’s captain, who had been busy watching the cockpit instruments, managing the radios and looking at charts, then looked up.

The windscreen, he told investigators, was filled with birds. The plane, at roughly 3,000 feet, was going at least 250 miles an hour. The captain’s first instinct, he said, was to duck.

Seconds later, flight attendants aboard the plane reported hearing a thud or a thump — a sound they had never heard before. The engines went quiet. And the plane’s captain, Chesley B. Sullenberger III, smelled something.

“Burning birds,” he told investigators.

Since Flight 1549 landed — safely but spectacularly — in the Hudson River on Thursday afternoon, no one had heard the accounts of the two pilots who had helped keep 153 other people alive. On Saturday night, Kathryn O. Higgins of the National Transportation Safety Board gave the first version of what the pilots saw, said and did in the course of executing one of the more remarkable safe endings in American aviation history.

The account offered by the safety agency — based on interviews conducted Saturday with the plane’s crew — has numerous startling elements, not the least of which was the fact that Captain Sullenberger, who has been hailed by the mayor and the president for his skill and bravery, was not at the controls at takeoff. Instead, the plane’s first officer, 49-year-old Jeffrey B. Skiles, was in control — a 23-year veteran of the airline, but a pilot who had just 35 hours of flying time in this particular kind of craft, the Airbus A320.

But as soon as the plane encountered the birds and the engines quit nearly simultaneously, Captain Sullenberger, 58, took over.

“My aircraft,” he announced to his first officer, using the standard phrasing and protocol drilled into airline crews.

“Your aircraft,” Mr. Skiles responded.

With little thrust, and with the plane’s airspeed falling sharply, Captain Sullenberger lowered the nose to keep his plane from falling out of the sky. And he set his co-pilot to work at moving through a three-page checklist of procedures for restarting both the plane’s engines.

The checklist, investigators said, is intended for planes that are in distress at much higher altitudes — like 35,000 feet. At such heights, of course, there is more time to restart.

As the co-pilot worked desperately on the checklist, the crew radioed the air traffic controller, who had just cleared them to climb to 15,000 feet, now an impossibility.

They discussed returning to La Guardia, but the plane was “too low, too slow,” and besides, there were “too many buildings, too populated an area.”

“We’re unable, we may end up in the Hudson,” one of them, probably Mr. Skiles, said to the controller, according to the safety agency.

The two veteran flight attendants who had heard the thump or thud told investigators that after the engines failed, the cabin was silent.

“It was like being in a library,” Ms. Higgins said.

The pilots saw Teterboro Airport ahead across the Hudson, and they considered going there, but Captain Sullenberger, who is also licensed as a glider pilot, had the same problem: too many miles and not enough energy, in the form of altitude or engine thrust.

The crew, the safety agency said, worried that in such a populated area, the outcome could be “catastrophic.”

One of the two pilots, probably the co-pilot, told the controller: “We can’t do it. We’re gonna end up in the Hudson.”

“That is the last communiqué of the flight,” Ms. Higgins said.

But it was not the end of the end of the crew’s task. Captain Sullenberger saw a boat on the river, and remembered from his training that if a plane has to ditch, it should be done near a vessel.

The crew lowered the flaps, movable devices on the wing that allow the plane to fly more slowly, now essential because the length of their “runway” was not an issue but force at impact would certainly be.

The flaps run on hydraulic power, and the hydraulics were supposed to be run off the now bird-stuffed engines. But the Airbus has a “ram air turbine,” essentially a little propeller, that drops down into the wind automatically in certain conditions and produces electricity; it may have provided the energy to allow the crew to lower the flaps.

Soon there was a command from the cockpit to the cabin to “brace.” To the two flight attendants in front, it felt like a hard landing; to the flight attendant in the rear, it felt much harder; items in the galley came loose and were thrown around the plane.

In the water, the electricity died. One of the pilots opened the cockpit door and ordered, “Evacuate,” but the flight attendants and passengers were already doing so.

One over-eager passenger rushed to the back of the plane and tried to open the rear door, even though it was already at least partly under water. She got it open a crack and water started flowing in, but the flight attendant got her turned around and pointed to the front.

The flight attendant in the rear — not identified on Saturday — was soon in water up to her chest. She grabbed a life preserver and pushed forward, exited the plane and got into a raft, and felt woozy. She had a gash in one leg all the way into the muscle, but the water was so cold she was too numb to feel it.

Early indications, as described by the safety agency, were that the cockpit and cabin crews got through an emergency “by the book,” but it was an event that exists almost entirely in books alone; big planes seldom come down in water in a controlled way.

Just how the plane came down in the Hudson emerged on Saturday in videos kept or obtained by local and federal authorities. They were released — complete with images of spraying water, scrambling passengers and racing rescue boats — along with recordings of the first 911 calls to the police.

Ms. Higgins, in the briefing for the news media on Saturday night, said investigators on the Hudson believed they had identified the location of the one engine that had been torn off the plane. They hoped to confirm that in the coming hours and eventually retrieve it.

On Saturday night, crews were still trying to rig the plane — now weighing an estimated one million pounds — to lift it out of the Hudson. The plan was to lift it a foot or so at a time, and let the water drain out bit by bit. If that failed, the plan was to use bilge pumps.

The “black boxes,” the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder that will serve as electronic witnesses to the event — were still in the tail of the plane, which was tied to the esplanade at Battery Park City, the right wing wedged in the muck and the pilings.