WORLD> Photo
All 155 safe after pilot ditches jet in NYC river
(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-01-16 07:46

Passengers are rescued after a US Airways plane crashed into the Hudson River in New York January 15, 2009. A US Airways jet with 155 people on board plunged into the frigid Hudson River off Manhattan after apparently hitting a flock of geese on Thursday and officials said everyone was rescued.[Agencies]

Mayor Michael Bloomberg said police divers had to rescue some passengers from underwater and said he spoke with the pilot and a passenger who claimed to be the last one off the plane.

The mayor said, "It would appear that the pilot did a masterful job of landing the plane in the river, and then making sure everybody got out."

Bloomberg said most of the rescued were picked up right away and put on police, Coast Guard and ferry boats.

Barbara Sambriski, a researcher at The Associated Press, saw the plane go down from the news organization's high-rise office. "I just thought, 'Why is it so low?' And, splash, it hit the water," she said.

The pilot reported a "double bird strike" less than a minute after taking off, said Doug Church, a spokesman for the National Air Traffic Controllers Union. The controller sent the aircraft back toward LaGuardia, but the pilot saw an airport below him and asked what it was, Church said. It was Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, and the pilot asked to land there, Church said.

The instruction to land at Teterboro was the last communication with the plane before it went down in the river, Church said.

US Airways said 150 passengers, three flight attendants and two pilots were on board the jetliner.

Joe Mazzone, a retired Delta Air Lines pilot, said it is not unusual for birds to strike planes. In fact, he said, when planes get ready to take off, if there are birds in the area, the tower will alert the crew.

In the rare cases in which birds get sucked into an engine, "they literally just choke out the engine and it quits," Mazzone said.

Twenty-seven years ago this week, an Air Florida plane bound for Tampa crashed into the Potomac River after hitting a bridge just after takeoff from Washington National Airport. The crash on Jan. 13, 1982, killed 78 people including four people in their cars on the bridge. Five people on the plane survived.

On Dec. 20, a Continental Airlines plane veered off a runway and slid into a snowy field at the Denver airport, injuring 38 people. That was the first major crash of a commercial airliner in the United States since Aug. 27, 2006, when 49 people were killed after a Comair jetliner mistakenly took off from the wrong runway in Lexington, Ky.