Monthly Archive for January, 2009

My photo from the 21st floor of the New York Times Building, in midtown.

From City Room:

A USAir­ways plane that took off at 3:26 p.m. from La Guardia Air­port landed in the Hudson River five min­utes later, where it remains mostly sub­merged. Fer­ries and other boats con­verged to help with a rescue effort, as the plane drifted south. There was no imme­di­ate infor­ma­tion about the 151 people on board.

Accord­ing to Chan­nel 4 tele­vi­sion news, the plane, USAir­ways flight 1549, took off from LaGuardia Air­port at 3:26 p.m. was bound for Char­lotte, N.C. and had 146 pas­sen­gers and 5 crew mem­bers. The plane, accord­ing to the news report, may have hit a flock of birds. The pilot tried to return to the air­port when the plane fell into the Hudson.

Photo of the rescue, posted by Janis Krums on Twitter/Twitpic.

I watched from the 21st floor of the Times Build­ing, as the plan drifted south with the tide. I believe that the rescue oper­a­tion com­pleted before it came into view, and it has since drifted out of view.

The plane did not break up on impact; divers, com­muter fer­ries and a lot of emer­gency per­son­nel are assist­ing with rescue oper­a­tions. Every­one is reported to have sur­vived the crash and rescue, as of this moment, but there are injuries. CNN is cur­rently inter­view­ing pas­sen­gers, live on-​air.

UPDATE: I don’t know how the Graph­ics team put this together so quickly and so ele­gantly, but NYTimes.com has an inter­ac­tive piece today, that tracks the plane’s path.

Also, CNN has been run­ning a Google Earth ani­ma­tion of the flight, which is less pretty, but kind of cool.