Officials Find Flight 1549’s Black Boxes
Michael Appleton for The New York Times
The wreckage of US Airways Flight 1549 was lifted from the waters of the Hudson River in lower Manhattan late Saturday.
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By MATTHEW L. WALD and JASON GRANT
Published: January 18, 2009
Transportation officials have recovered the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder from the US Airways jetliner that landed in the Hudson River and sent them to Washington, investigators said early Sunday.
The two recorders, the so-called black boxes from the Airbus A320 jet, are expected to provide investigators with more information about what caused Flight 1549’s two engines to quit shortly after takeoff from La Guardia Airport on Thursday, and about the pilots’ actions that brought the plane down safely.
By 1:30 a.m. on Sunday, crews also had pulled the plane from the Hudson, where it had been moored at Nelson A. Rockefeller Park in Battery Park City for two days.
The ravaged jetliner — which a few hours earlier had been submerged in the murky water, surrounded by chunks of ice — was resting on a barge under floodlights. The tip of the right wing had been shorn off, and pieces were missing from it. Strands of steel and wires hung loose from the back portion of the fuselage, and the passenger hatch near the nose of the plane was gaping open, hanging off its hinges.
Crews hoisted the plane aboard the barge using a crane more than 20 stories tall and two harnesses, one around the tail, the other straddling the wings.
The operation took up most of the day on Saturday, as the workers maneuvered the jetliner away from the promenade that runs along the river. They eventually were able to pull the plane from the Hudson’s edge and point its nose cone toward the New Jersey as they pulled it farther in the river to haul it onto the barge. At the end of the operation, crews had pulled the plane parallel to the shore and hoisted it up with the two harnesses.
The left engine, which had been torn off, had not been recovered by early Sunday. In a briefing on Saturday night, Kathryn O. Higgins of the National Transportation Safety Board investigators believed they had identified its location. They hoped to confirm that in the coming hours and retrieve it.
