WASHINGTON – The air-traffic controller who handled US Airways Flight 1549 captivated a congressional hearing yesterday in his first public account of the Hudson River ditching that he thought would amount to a “death sentence” for all aboard.
“People don’t survive landings on the Hudson River,” 10-year veteran controller Patrick Harten told a House subcommittee yesterday in his first public description of how he tried to land the jetliner that lost power in both jets when it hit Canada geese after takeoff from La Guardia Airport.
“I thought it was his own death sentence,” Harten said of the moment when US Airways pilot Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger radioed that he was going into the river.
Defying the odds, Sullenberger safely glided the Airbus A320 down and all 155 people aboard survived the Jan. 15 water landing.
The subcommittee of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee heard from the crew of Flight 1549, Harten and aviation experts to examine what safety lessons could be learned from the accident.
Harten riveted the hearing with his account of the 3 1/2 minutes during which he spoke with the crippled jetliner after the bird strike at an altitude of 2,750 feet.
When Sullenberger said he couldn’t make it either back to La Guardia or to Teterboro Airport in New Jersey and would ditch in the Hudson River, Harten testified:
“I asked him to repeat himself, even though I heard him just fine. I simply could not wrap my mind around those words. People don’t survive landings on the Hudson River; I thought it was his own death sentence. I believed at that moment, I was going to be the last person to talk to anyone on that plane alive.”
But Sullenberger delicately glided the jetliner into the river in one piece near ferry boats that picked the passengers off the plane’s wings.
When Harten, who has spent his entire career at the radar facility in Westbury, LI, lost radio contact with the flight, he was certain it “had gone down.”
Afterward, Harten said he told his wife, “I felt like I had been hit by a bus.”
Meanwhile, airline safety advocates filed a lawsuit yesterday to force the US Department of Transportation to adopt long-standing safety recommendations in the wake of the deadly plane crash outside Buffalo earlier this month.
The complaint, brought by Gail Dunham, executive director of the National Air Disaster Alliance/Foundation, was filed in Washington federal court.