First came the bird strike. Then everything went dead silent.
“It was the worst, sickening, pit-of-your-stomach, falling-through-the-floor feeling I’ve ever felt in my life,” hero pilot Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger III told CBS’s “60 Minutes,” according to excerpts released yesterday.
“I knew immediately it was very bad,” he said in the interview, set to air Sunday at 7 p.m.
When asked if he wondered how he could get the crippled plane down safely, Sullenberger said he was just stunned.
“My initial reaction was one of disbelief,” he said.
But with that disbelief came a cool, calm and collected reaction that allowed him to expertly guide US Airways Flight 1549 into the Hudson River on Jan. 15, saving all 150 passengers.
There isn’t the slightest hint of panic in Sullenberger’s voice as he tells controllers the dire news about his Airbus A320 jet.
“Hit birds. We lost thrust in both engines,” he relayed to the control tower at La Guardia Airport, according to cockpit audio recordings released yesterday. “We’re turning back towards La Guardia.”
Controllers on Long Island, at La Guardia and at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey tried to help. “What do you need to land?” the Long Island controller asked.
When Sullenberger said he couldn’t go back to La Guardia but might try for Teterboro, it took just 18 seconds to set up an emergency landing.
“You can land Runway One at Teterboro,” the Long Island controller offered.
“We can’t do it . . . We’re gonna be in the Hudson,” Sullenberger said.
Throughout the recording, a cockpit alarm bell could be heard ringing intermittently.
After his last radio call, Sullenberger and co-pilot Jeff Skiles spent the next minute and 15 seconds gliding toward the icy Hudson. Two tour helicopter pilots flying nearby answered La Guardia tower controllers’ request to report on the plane’s position.
“He’s in the water,” said the pilot of a Manhattan Helicopter Tours flight.
“I got him in sight, I – right next to the USS Intrepid, mid-river,” said the pilot of a Liberty Helicopter flight.
Less than a minute later, the astonished chopper pilots reported that flight attendants were deploying life rafts.
Moments later, they saw ferryboats rushing to the rescue.
Sullenberger says he was most impressed by the quick work of rescue crews that raced to the plane and pulled everyone to safety. ” ‘Thank you’ seems totally inadequate. I have a debt of gratitude that I fear I may never be able to repay,” he told CBS.