The abundance of catastrophic scenarios was clearly on the mind of the pilot, who told controllers that the jet was "too low, too slow" and near too many tall buildings to reach any airport.
"It was an amazing confluence," said Karlene Roberts, codirector of the Center for Catastrophic Risk Management at the University of California, Berkeley. "So many things could have gone wrong that didn't."
The run of good luck on the flight will be examined further by investigators as they inspect the jet wreckage for more clues about how a flock of birds managed to disable both engines and send the jet on its frightening obstacle course over a city of 8 million people. The flight data recorder shows both engines lost power simultaneously, investigators said yesterday.
The airliner was hoisted Saturday from the ice-laden current and placed on a barge, its two "black box" data recorders sent to investigators in Washington.
National Transportation Safety Board spokesman Peter Knudson said investigators hoped to move the barge and plane yesterday.
Before that could be done, he said, fuel had to be drained from the tank in the plane's right wing.
Investigators interviewed the pilots on Saturday, and what emerged was a harrowing account of the split-second decisions they made in avoiding a crash.
It started minutes after the plane left LaGuardia Airport Thursday for Charlotte, N.C. While bird strikes are common, commercial jet engines are fortified against them. They seldom disable an engine, let alone two. Archie Dickey, who teaches aviation environmental science at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, puts the chance of birds crippling both engines at less than 1 percent.
While the pilot quickly leveled the plane off after the bird strike to keep it from stalling and thought about where to land, the copilot kept trying to restart the engines. He also began working through a three-page list of procedures for an emergency landing. Normally, those procedures begin at 35,000 feet.
This time, he started at 3,000 feet - somewhere over the Bronx, a borough of more than 1 million people.
