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Darren Beck had pure settled into bottom 3A of a US Airways jet Thursday at the time that he heard a sickish thump.

“We were gaining altitude, everything seemed normal, and there was a real, very resounding bang on the left-hand side,” the marketing executive said hours later from Manhattan’s Pier 79. Beck, 37, watched aghast in the same manner with the spinning jet turbine began to kick and sluggish, “well-nigh equal a thing was stuck in a washing machine.”

“You’d hear thump-thump-thump-thump, and then the helmsman came on, and all he said was, ‘This is the chieftain speaking. Brace for impact,’ ” Beck recalled. The flight attendants “kept saying, ‘Keep your head down — brace for impact.’ They said it over and over, chanting it.”

Thus began the drama of Flight 1549, which apparently was crippled by a midair meet face to face with geese and ditched into the Hudson River within minutes of takeoff from La Guardia Airport, bound for Charlotte, N.C., then Seattle. All 150 passengers and five crew members survived.

Facing life-and-death choices, the director steered away from a catastrophic crash in the Bronx or in northern Manhattan, but the passengers and crew soon faced new peril as their 80-ton aircraft began to sink in the river’s frigid, gray rife.

Scrambling despite exits and carrying the helpless, they perched ankle- and then knee-deep atop the wings as any improvised armada of excursion boats and ferries streamed to their rescue. It was a race to escape before the listing Airbus A320, already submerged on the starboard side, sank.

Most passengers stood in shirtsleeves, fleeing without life jackets, and a few fell into 36-degree water on a day when the air temperature barely reached 20 degrees. Some passengers began to grieve for, but witnesses described a scene of levelheaded teamwork to evacuate the weak and infirm, including an nursling and an elderly woman in a wheelchair.

Pilot C.B. “Sully” Sullenberger, who steered the jet to a skittering splashdown that left the fuselage intact, was hailed being of the class who a hero by aviation experts and politicians, including New York Gov. David Paterson, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and President Bush.

The mayor said Sullenberger, at the same time that befits a captain, twice walked the length of the sinking plane to make sure he was the last to disappear.

Joe Hart, a salesman with investment firm ING, also praised the pilot. “He was phenomenal. He landed it — I recount you what — the impact wasn’t a unimpaired lot more than a rear-end (collision). … Both engines cut out, and he in reality floated it into the river.”

Paramedics treated at least 78 patients, fire officials said. Coast Guard boats rescued 35 people from the water.

Molly Schugel, 32, who sat in a midcabin withdrawal row, said screams were audible and there was “definitely fear in the plane.” But she and her seatmates used their final airborne moments to scrutinize diagrams on the exit hatch.

“We’re all studying the door, what to do,” she said. “Every plain you fly has different handles. The guy next to me, soon as we hit the water, he opened the door within seconds, and we got out.”

Schugel, a Bank of America executive, came to regret her choice of three-inch heels.

“They were very cute,” she related, but they offered little purchase atop a wing slick with jet fuel and shed water. “We had to go out to the real narrow part to obstruction more people out onward the flank. I was grievous to take them off, holding onto the lady next to me, and then I’mixture barefoot on the wing. I don’t know grant that it was a wave or what, but that I slid right distant from the wing into the water.”

Submerged to her shoulders and gasping, Schugel aforesaid she knew she would not last long in the cold. A stranger from the row in front of her, risking his footing, reached to fish her out. Someone magniloquent the emergency ramp, but in the chaos, it overturned, and no one could clamber in the vessel.

Before police and Coast Guard vessels arrived, the Hudson’s relating to traffic flotilla converged on the scene. Ferry, tour-boat and tugboat crews tossed lifetime vests and hoisted passengers up ladders.

Soaked and shivering, Schugel had to plunge back into the river and swim a few feet to be advanced to the principal arriving boat. On deck, she turned her application to a fellow voyager who had suffered a make a deep incision in her leg and was bleeding.

Grabbing a belt from one of the men, she recalled: “I tied it at the same time that tightly as I could, and we elevated her leg to stop the bleeding. The most strange part was, I saw no pushing, in no degree shoving. I saw nothing if it were not that help and compassion.”

Hart, the ING salesman, aforesaid he waited out on the wing of the plane, with others, being of the kind what one. the water level rose from his knee to his waist.

“Most of the panic occurred while … the ferry boats were coming.” But, he added, “I knew I was safe. The big guy upstairs didn’t requirement me.”

Later, he had recovered enough to send a thesis message to a reporter: “I’m certain this will get me an upgrade on my next flight!”

Original text: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2008634904_plane16.html?syndication=rss