With the aircraft taking on water, and the situation seemingly hopeless, a survivor of a plane that plunged into the Hudson River Sunday desperately called his family before dialing 911.
Passenger Christopher Smidt said at a press conference today that his 12-year-old daughter answered his wife’s cell phone, so he asked to talk to “Mom,’’ his wife Karen, to tell her plane went down.
“I said, `Don’t say anything, just listen. Tell the kids I love them, I have to go,” Smidt recalled.
Thirty minutes later, Karen Smidt learned her husband was safe.
Later, after Christopher Smidt was rescued and released from a Bronx hospital, he said that’s “probably not the call any wife wants to hear.”
The single-engine plane’s pilot, Deniece De Priester, also survived.
Smidt said he wasn’t sure he would live to tell their tale.
After he was in the icy water for 15 minutes, he knew his body was starting to shut down.
But then he heard the sound of a rescue boat.He was treated at a hospital along with De Priester, 39. Both are from New Jersey.
“He’s a survivor,” Smidt’s wife Karen said. “He always manages to make it out alive.”
Smidt thanked the police officers who rescued him during a ceremony today at Yonkers City Hall.
De Priester and Smidt were released from Jacobi Medical Center yesterday where they were treated for hypothermia.
Smidt had been taking flight lessons from De Priester for about 18 months. But this flight was a sightseeing trip, he said.