a miracle during dire times

An ace US Airways pilot made an astonishing controlled crash landing into the frigid Hudson River yesterday after his jet hit geese and lost power minutes after takeoff from La Guardia and missed the George Washington Bridge by just 900 feet - all 155 people aboard, including one baby, were rescued. The crash took place on a 20-degree day, one of the coldest of the season - with the water temperature 36 degrees.

What a miracle. I can't imagine how a flock of seemingly harmless geese are able to take down an entire Airbus A320 plane by disabling both jet engines in just mere minutes!

A surreal eyewitness account... I cannot imagine what would be going through the minds of the passengers during their first near-death experience:

"We were gaining altitude, everything seemed normal, and there was a very, very loud bang on the left-hand side," he said in a telephone interview, hours later, from the unexpected venue of Manhattan's Pier 79. Beck watched aghast from his window seat as the spinning jet turbine began to kick and slow down, "almost like something was stuck in a washing machine."

"You'd hear thump-thump-thump-thump, and then the pilot came on, and all he said was, 'This is the captain speaking. Brace for impact,' " Beck recalled. The flight attendants, still strapped in for the initial ascent, "kept saying, 'Keep your head down -- brace for impact.' They said it over and over, chanting it."

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