WITHOUT A SCRATCH: Pilot Michael Campbell, 23, plays it cool yesterday as
the Swedish sightseers he saved (above) — Jyrki Valiharju, his girlfriend, Anna Soderblom, and her two teenage kids — walk away unscathed.
Pilot Michael Campbell (NY Post: G.N. Miller)
(
)
Move over, Sully.
A steely nerved young pilot kept his cool yesterday as the engine of his sightseeing helicopter cut out above the Hudson River with four tourists aboard — and he miraculously landed the disabled craft safely in the middle of the water.
Everyone aboard walked away without a scratch.
“I was just doing my job,” said 23-year-old Michael Campbell minutes after his noon splashdown off West 85th Street.
“It was just another day and everything was going good,’’ Campbell, the city’s youngest tour pilot, later recalled to The Post from his Woodbridge, NJ, home.
“It’s the exact same route I fly every day. I’ve flown it hundreds of times.”
He and four Swedish sightseers — Stockholm cop Jyrki Valiharju, 44, his girlfriend, Anna Soderblom, 45, and her 18-year-old daughter and 14-year-old son — took off from the Wall Street Heliport at Pier 6 in lower Manhattan at around 11:45 a.m.
The Bell 206 helicopter was in the air for about 12 minutes — flying at 1,500 feet, hugging the West Side’s shoreline in its scenic trip up the Hudson — when the engine gave out, fire officials said.
“All of a sudden, I heard the noises, a big boom,” said Campbell, who’s been flying for five years and has worked for New York Helicopter for about a year.
“I had about 20 seconds before I hit the ground,’’ he went on, blaming the incident on “mechanical failure.”
“I first had to confirm my biggest fear — that the engine was out. I just needed to stay calm — because if I panicked, I knew it wouldn’t be a very good ending.
“It was like an umbrella turning inside out — the blades don’t have enough force’’ against them to keep the craft afloat, he explained.
But “helicopters can glide,’’ Campbell said.
He quickly placed an emergency “Mayday’’ call to controllers at La Guardia Airport, and then feverishly worked to maneuver the helicopter down into the water near the 79th Street Boat Basin.
“I didn’t want anyone else to get hurt on land, and I knew the boats would come and get us,’’ he said.
Campbell said he deployed the craft’s emergency pontoons just before it landed to keep it upright and afloat.
He then called La Guardia again to tell the controllers that everyone on board was OK. Within 10 minutes, they were all rescued by boaters.
Sebastian Berthele, 38, who plucked Campbell from the water in a small dinghy, said he couldn’t believe his eyes when the crippled helicopter went down.
“In the beginning, we thought it was an exercise, just a helicopter trying to land in the water,” he said.
“When we saw the floaters, we thought maybe that’s just practice. But when it hit the water, it hit hard.”
Another witness Corey Menscher, 40, was also confused. “I saw the helicopter coming in and said to my wife, ‘Why is it coming in so low?’ I thought maybe it was taking pictures or video,” he recalled. “Then, at about 100 feet, I said, ‘Oh, he’s going to land in the water!’ ”
Berthele said he told the pilot afterward, “Nice landing,” and was astonished at Campbell’s response.
“He said, ‘It could have been smoother,’ ” Berthele recalled. “I said, ‘Well, it could have been worse.’ He said, ‘I’m just happy everyone’s alive.’ ”
As the craft went down, the tourists were “very calm, in very good spirits about everything,” Campbell said.
“They were just very grateful to walk away,’’ he said.
They were briefly evaluated at St. Luke’s Hospital and released.
The family was staying at the Crowne Plaza in Times Square and declined to comment last night.
They left the hotel at one point for dinner — eating sushi at a nearby restaurant — and were markedly somber.
The harrowing drama evoked comparisons to the 2009 “Miracle on the Hudson” landing of US Airways pilot Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger who tweeted his congratulations to Campbell.
Congrats to pilot #MichaelCampbell for safely landing helicopter on the #Hudson. Admirable job! http://t.co/syI4npLJJS
— Sully Sullenberger (@Captsully) July 1, 2013
“They didn’t even get wet,” marveled NYPD spokesman Paul Browne of Campbell and the tourists.
But Campbell brushed off talk that he was a hero — and admitted he spent last night merely catching up on his housework, including doing laundry.
“To me, it’s not a big deal,” Campbell said. “A lot of guys can go their whole career without this happening, but every once in awhile, it does.
“Life goes on . . . It was just another normal day, pretty much.’’
As for being compared to Sullenberger, Campbell said, “Granted, we saved lives. But any other pilot would have done the same thing at the end of the day.’’
FDNY Deputy Chief Thomas McKavanagh begged to differ.
“The pilot did a terrific job,’’ he said at the scene.
Asked if the city had just experienced another Sully-style Hudson miracle, McKavanagh was emphatic.
“I would say so,” he said. “A smaller version. Absolutely.”
Campbell said the first personal phone call he made afterward was to his boss.
“I told him, ‘We’re floating in the Hudson.’ He thought I was kidding at first. Then he knew people don’t joke about that,” the pilot said.
The ’copter was eventually hauled back to Pier 6, where Campbell went aboard and reviewed the incident for NYPD investigators.
Campbell said he was already scheduled to be off today — but would be back up in the air “in a day or two.”
“I love my job — even after today,’’ he said.
He added he might spend the day today with his family, including his grandmother, in Buffalo.
Grandma Mary Ann Campbell, who raised him, told The Post that Campbell broke her heart when he dropped out of college to fly helicopters.
The young pilot caught the chopper bug after a trip up with his helicopter-pilot uncle in Baltimore at age 17, but went to SUNY Buffalo to study architectural engineering. He later enrolled in flight school in Florida.
He wound up teaching flying on Long Island before making the move to the tour-helicopter business.
Grandma is now convinced the hero chopper pilot made the right move.
“I guess somebody had a bigger plan for him,” she said.
“I wanted a surgeon, and would have settled for an architectural engineer. But that wasn’t the field that was going to make him happy.”
“God bless him. He’s a real good kid. Of course, he’s my grandson, but he truly is.”
Additional reporting by Kevin Sheehan, Matt McNulty, Larry Celona and Amber Sutherland