Plane Crash in Hudson River
US Airways Flight 1549 crashed in New York’s Hudson River today at 3:31 PM after suffering a “double bird strike” at 3,200 feet. The Airbus A320 was carrying 150 passengers, two pilots, and three flight attendants.
As soon as the plane hit the water, “a small flotilla of boats” arrived to rescue passengers, including the Coast Guard Cutter Ridley, and New York Police Department divers. Tom Fox, general manager, brought the New York Water Taxi to assist as well.
Mayor Bloomberg said the pilot did “a masterful job.” I agree–landing a plane dead stick over America’s densest metropolis without a single casualty is amazing. If the City of New York doesn’t award him a stipend and medal, US Airways had better write him a $1M bonus for his excellent performance. The Airforce might also be interested in someone of his talents.
Please see Latest Updates on Hudson Jet Rescue from the New York Times for more information! Gawker has also setup a Hudson Plane Crash tag.
| This entry was posted on Thursday, January 15th, 2009 at 7:19 pm and is tagged with new york water taxi, coast guard cutter, us airways flight, york police department, airbus a320, new york police, hudson jet, mayor bloomberg, new york police department, us airways, tom fox, bird strike, gawker, masterful job, plane crash, york water, new york times, flotilla, flight attendants, hudson river. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback. |
I believe this is the first ever successful ditch on water (by a passenger jet) as well?!
Good job.
Hundreds of thousands of pilots will fly for decades and never have to make a landing like this. Kind of hard to practice this sort of thing. Thank God they all made it.
Nothing–they don't have jet engines, usually they're powered by rockets, which means there's nothing to suck the bird in and break. The profile is much smaller as well…
What happens when a missle hits a bird??