Capt. Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger was out of options at 920 metres on Thursday when he intentionally and calmly steered his crippled US Airways jetliner, fully loaded with passengers, towards the Hudson River.
A former Air Force fighter pilot with 40 years of flying experience - including gliders - Capt. Sullenberger's Airbus A320 apparently struck a flock of birds moments after take-off from New York's LaGuardia Airport, knocking out both engines.
The jet is designed to fly with one engine out. But a dual bird strike that kills both powerplants, if confirmed by federal transportation investigators, is virtually unheard of in US aviation.
Flight 1549 was running about 30 minutes late when it lifted off from LaGuardia shortly before 3.30 p.m. bound for Charlotte, North Carolina, with 150 passengers and five crew, the FAA said.
Within minutes, word came back to New York controllers from the cockpit that a bird strike had knocked out both of the A320 CMF-56 series engines.
According to details pieced together from air traffic controllers and aviation officials with knowledge of the harrowing moments above New York and New Jersey, it seemed as if the entire incident of several minutes passed in a flash, demanding that Capt. Sullenberger employ every bit of his years of experience.
According to controllers, an "eerie calm" defined controller and cockpit communications as options dwindled. Return to LaGuardia? Too far. Land at small Teterboro Airport across the river in New Jersey? The plane wouldn't make that either. An audacious river landing was the only option, an official of the controllers' union told Reuters.
"That was pretty much it," said Doug Church, a spokesman for the National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA). "It was very clear to our controllers that he was going to make an attempt at the Hudson."
Radar showed the nearly 10-year-old jet making a series of tight turns to left to head down the river, flying low over the George Washington Bridge.
As Capt. Sullenberger, from Danville, California, set the plane down in the river, it kicked up a tremendous splash.
His co-pilot was not identified. Three flight attendants aboard were credited with safely evacuating the plane and getting passengers into life vests and onto partially submerged wings and rafts, the union representing those workers said.
Snap analysis: Despite New York crash, US air travel getting safer
Despite the crash, airline travel in the US is safe and has been getting safer, aviation officials and experts said.
The accident was the second serious one involving a major airline in the past month but also the second in which no one was killed.
• In December, 112 people got out of a Continental Airlines plane that ran off a runway and caught fire in Denver.
• The last fatal US crash was in August 2006 when a Comair jet crashed and burned in a Kentucky pasture, killing all 50 people aboard. Investigators said the pilots used an unlighted runway.
• Virtually all aviation fatalities involve small private planes, statistics show.
• Aviation experts say that luck has something to do with increased survival rates but that crew training, aircraft design, cockpit advances and safety precautions in combination can prevent deaths.
• Jim Hall, the former chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), said aviation authorities and airlines have learned painful but important lessons from past crashes about technology, mechanical problems, engines and fuel-fed fires, weather, crew behaviour and training.
• US airlines fly more than 600 million people each year. While many safety incidents are minor and do not make headlines, investigators and safety advocates have grown more concerned in recent years about the potential for runway collisions due to increased congestion.
• US safety investigators expressed concern last month about some airlines discontinuing a safety programme that encouraged pilots, mechanics and dispatchers to voluntarily report safety incidents. The Federal Aviation came under fire last year for lax safety inspection procedures at several airlines.
Factbox
Some facts about the dangers birds pose to aviation.
• Damage by birds and other wildlife striking aircraft annually amounts to well over €452 million for US civil and military aviation and over 219 people have been killed worldwide as a result of wildlife strikes since 1988.
• Birds have posed a danger as long as people have been flying. The first recorded bird strike was by Oliver Wright, who wrote in his diary that his plane hit a bird, probably a red-winged blackbird, over Ohio in September 1905.
• Birds are not the only wildlife problem for aircraft but they do account for 97 per cent of wildlife strikes. Other animals that have hit planes during take-off or landing include deer, coyotes, bats and alligators.
• Waterfowl (31 per cent), gulls (26 per cent), and raptors (18 per cent) represented three quarters of the reported bird strikes causing damage to US civil aircraft, 1990-2007.
• Over 760 civil aircraft collisions with deer and 250 collisions with coyotes were reported in the US between 1990 and 2007.
• Birds are a particularly serious hazard at airports near water. New York's LaGuardia airport, where the plane in Thursday's accident took off, has tried many methods over the years to disperse birds from the area around the airport. Noise cannons are most common but birds are thought to become resistant, or even excited by the noise over time.