Miracle on the Hudson
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The governor was right. It was a miracle on the Hudson.
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That’s the only thing that can explain how a powerless airliner hurtling over New York City ends up not leaving a wake of death and carnage.
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When you’re hot and heavy and all of a sudden there’s no thrust, you’re a crater waiting to happen. You’re a fuel-laden missile about to splatter yourself across a highrise neighborhood.
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They’re going to print your name in the obituaries.
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But it didn’t end that way.
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US Airways flight 1549 banked hard left and took a bead on the Hudson River and two minutes later there were businessmen standing on the wings, up to their shins in water.
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And that’s a miracle.
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A genuine God-did-it miracle. One of those defy-the-odds things that can only be explained by pointing skyward with a grateful sigh.
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But like most of God’s handiwork, he used man to do it. This isn’t to deny the divine, but rather to point it out in all of us. To make the case that most angels look like you and me, and the only ones with wings tend to wear them pinned to their chest.
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On the coldest day of the year, God called some people to do their best, to be excellent. And with his support, they were.
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Like the pilot. A white haired man with an Air Force Academy ring and more seat time than most people have been alive. His entire adult life has been spent as an aviator, from a hot little fighter to a big lumbering airliner.
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If the pilot had been less prepared and less competent, if he were less decisive and commanding, this would have been a massacre, not a miracle. He had to thread a needle, to squeeze as much distance and maneuverability out of a glide ratio as he could.
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And he had to take that falling rock out of the sky over America’s largest city, steering it away from a mass of humanity stacked floor on top of floor in skyscraper after skyscraper. He had to save lives in the air, but first he had to save lives on the ground.
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And it played out like a training video.
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The silent jet arced hard left and lined up perfectly on the shipping channel, straight and steady with a nose up just before contact, settling onto the surface of the water like a duck coming in at 120 miles an hour.
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God’s miracle needed the pilot to be perfect. It was a moment he’d been preparing for for more than 30 years.
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The pilot was God’s partner. And so were the plane’s designers and builders, and the mechanics who maintained it. Their combined efforts enabled the airframe to take stresses that would have snapped a lesser craft in two.
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The miracle continued moments after the slamming splash as flight attendants and bold passengers led a steady and rapid evacuation. So many ways to do it wrong, just one way to do it right, and they nailed it.
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And across the river a ferryman swung his boat hard to take a bearing on the foundering plane and pushed his diesel engines to full-speed ahead. Here and there and elsewhere other vessels likewise swung about and steamed to the rescue. Boat passengers gathered life vests and ropes and flung them to airplane passengers slowly sinking into the Hudson.
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In firehouses and ambulance bays across Manhattan, alarms sounded and people in turnout gear headed for the piers. A police helicopter took off and shortly thereafter dropped frogmen into the water.
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It was a floating scene, the gradually sinking airliner and a gaggle of rescue boats encircling it, moving to the sea in the swollen Hudson current. Before they secured the plane, it had drifted some four miles from where it splashed down.
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The airline passengers were taken off their plane in rafts or ropes, or they stepped directly onto the fantails of the hovering ferries and water taxis. One passenger had broken legs and a flight attendant had some cuts and some others were shivering from the cold, but within minutes they walked into buildings or buses or the backs of ambulances. They wore towels or Mae Wests or the tactical PFDs of their professional rescuers. Some had little yellow airline lifevests sticking oddly from their necks.
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But they all lived.
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Every single one of them.
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Very few needed even the slightest medical care. The alerted hospitals, standing by for mass casualties, waited for patients who didn’t come.
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It was a miracle.
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And, yes, God did it. But he had a lot of partners.
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Ordinary people who in the blink of an eye yesterday afternoon responded with courage, calm and skill. Ordinary people who played their roles perfectly. Ordinary people whose preparedness and clear-headed willingness to help, empowered by unquestionable excellence, averted one of the worst air disasters of our generation.
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That was done by ordinary people who were an instrument in the hand of God.
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The governor was right. It was a miracle on the Hudson.
