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thedrifter
01-18-09, 07:39 AM
NEW YORK
Manhattan hails its Hudson miracle
For a city not easily impressed and familiar with tragedy, New York has a buzzword for last week's jetliner crash into the Hudson River: miracle.
BY MARK WASHBURN
The Charlotte Observer

NEW YORK -- This is what a miracle looks like.

It looks like a 60-foot piece of aluminum and steel sticking out of the frigid Hudson River at an odd angle. One end of the wing is attached to the sunken fuselage of a US Airways jetliner, the other claws toward the sky. The mighty Hudson is so cold that brown slush lines its banks like a bathtub ring.

Tourists gather in snowy Battery Park. They pose, one by one, sometimes two by two, as others click cellphone cameras. They press another button, and electrons fly around the world, somehow cementing forever images of what it is that happened here.

''Miracle'' is the buzzword of the city, a city not easily impressed.

And the residents of this city feel this, know this, sometimes look at each and say this: What happened here in New York -- this sudden, improvised, all-hands-on-deck rescue -- might not have happened in many other places.

`TO GOOD TO BE TRUE'

But it sure as hell happened in New York City, a place that knows calamity and knows the proper response.

''If it had been a movie, people probably wouldn't have believed it,'' Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Friday. ``It was too good to be true - the perfect landing, the phenomenal response, the rescue of every single person.''

Three blocks from the sunken airliner lies a vast pit, growling with machinery, once the site of the towers of the World Trade Center. They are odd neighbors. One is a symbol of New York's darkest day; the other is a trophy for skill and good fortune.

In an era where nothing seems to be going well, the brief adventure of Flight 1549 seems to be a case of everything going perfectly. Well, not everything. But the end. The end, for sure.

''I was thinking -- no, I was positive -- we were all going to die,'' said Paul Jorgensen, 38, of Charlotte, a medical-software salesman who flies weekly and was in seat 1A.

It didn't happen, because this is how a miracle works.

BLESSED WITH TALENT

When your engines go dead, you have a guy at the yoke who happens to be an expert glider pilot.

He's also a guy capable of making an instant, once-in-a-lifetime decision: Return to LaGuardia. Or try for the landing strip he can see in the distance. Or reach the river and ditch.

A second. Maybe two, maybe three. That's how much time he has to decide. No room for error. No second chance. No turning back.

He's a guy capable of a divine choreography. Blessed with talent, years of experience and an innate sense of time and distance, lift and aerodynamics, he's able to bring the nose up and skim the river with the tail, precisely slowing the plane so it settles flat.

Too much, the jetliner will break apart. Too little, it will go in nose first and sink like a stone. Or flip.

It comes down at early rush hour when ferries are plying the river. Instantly, captains change course and in minutes are plucking passengers off that wing. Even the famed Circle Line abandons its tourist excursion and cruises in to lend aid.

Was all of that a miracle? No, but it was part of it.

NOT ALONE

Here's another part.

Mark Hood, 48, of Charlotte, grew up in Greenville, S.C.

He had a high school buddy, Billy Campbell.

They lost touch. Hood went on to the Citadel, then the Marines. He served in Operation Desert Storm and rose to the rank of major.

Then he took on a career in medical-equipment sales, one that made him a weekly flier.

He was near the front of the plane and was one of dozens huddled on a raft.

Then he saw a familiar face.

Billy Campbell's. He was also on the plane.

''Billy and I were able to talk a little bit,'' Hood says.

``I don't know if you believe in God. But that was a miracle out there.''

This is what a miracle does.

It reminds us we're not always alone when we face misfortune.

It reminds us that even in the darkest of times, compassion and kindness burn in the human spirit.

It reminds us that the fortunes of 155 souls can uplift us all.

Ellie