The pilot who ditched his jet in the Hudson river and saved the lives of everyone on board said he had a “sickening” feeling when a flock of birds disabled both engines, crippling the plane at 3,000ft over New York.
Captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger told a TV interview with CBS's 60 Minutesthat the sound of the geese hitting the plane and the smell of burning poultry entering the cabin was "shocking".
“Oh, you could hear them,” he said. “Loud thumps. It felt like the airplane being pelted by heavy rain or hail. It sounded like the worst thunderstorm I’d ever heard growing up in Texas.”
The interview with Mr Sullenberger (58) and the other four crew members was broadcast in the US on Sunday night, their first since US Airways Flight 1549 landed in the water on January 15th.
Mr Sullenberger said that after the emergency landing, he lay awake at night second-guessing his performance, even though all 155 people aboard survived. He said he initially had trouble forgiving himself because he thought he could have done something different in that “critical situation”.
“The first few nights were the worst,” he said. “When the ‘what ifs’ started.” But he said he no longer regretted his actions that day, calling his decision to land in the river “the only viable alternative” to attempting a return to LaGuardia Airport or landing at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey.
Mr Sullenberger said he knew he had to touch down with the wings level and the nose slightly up, and “at a descent rate that was survivable”.
“Did you, at any point, pray?” CBS’s Katie Couric asked. “I would imagine somebody in back was taking care of that for me while I was flying the airplane,” he said.
The flight attendants said they did not know they were landing in the water until it happened. “When I got out of my seat and saw that water, it was the most shocked I’ve ever been in my life,” Doreen Welsh said, adding that her emotions “had gone through, within seconds, accepting death and seeing life”. She said she “went crazy” and started yelling and pushing people to get them out because the impact tore a hole in the plane’s tail and water poured into the cabin.
“And as I was getting up, I thought I might actually live,” Ms Welsh said. “Cause a second ago, I thought I was gone.”
Mr Sullenberger landed the plane near two ferry terminals, and rescue boats appeared within minutes to take the 150 passengers and five crew members to safety. When he got official confirmation that everyone had survived, “I felt like the weight of the universe had been lifted off my heart”.
The crew met some of the passengers and their relatives at a reunion in Charlotte, North Carolina, the destination of Flight 1549.
“More than one woman came up to me and said, ‘Thank you for not making me a widow’,” Mr Sullenberger said. “‘Thank you for allowing my three-year-old son to have a father’.” – (AP)