A couple of minutes after US Airways Flight 1549 took off from New York’s LaGuardia Airport toward Charlotte on Jan. 15, David Graham heard a loud bang on the left side of plane. A seasoned air commuter, Graham turned to his brother-in-law and said, “We’ve had a bird strike. We’re not going to make our connecting flight.”
After their crippled Airbus A320 was forced to ditch in the Hudson River, passengers climbed out onto the plane’s wings and inflatable emergency slides to await rescue by ferry boats.When the Airbus A320 executed back-to-back left turns, Graham, who lives in Irmo, thought the pilot was returning to LaGuardia. A few moments later, Captain Chesley Sullenberger clicked on his cockpit intercom and uttered the scant three words of advice he would offer his passengers: “Prepare for impact.”
Graham, 54, leaned forward and put his head between his legs. He said his first thought was not that he was about to die, but, “I trust you, Lord, whatever happens.” Seconds later the crippled plane set down on the frigid surface of the Hudson so smoothly that Graham recalls thinking, “That was it?”
Ten minutes later he and 154 fellow cold and wet passengers and crew (the air temperature was in the 20s and the water temperature about 35) were being plucked from their slippery perches atop the wings of the plane and from life rafts by rescuers aboard ferry boats that had converged on the scene.
People making the New Jersey-Manhattan cross-river ferry transit pulled off their coats and sweaters and wrapped them around the shivering Flight 1549 survivors. “I love the people of New York and New Jersey,” Graham said. “They would give the shirts off their backs.”
“I thank God for saving us,” said Graham, a member of Three Rivers Baptist Church in Irmo. “I thank God for the pilot and for putting him where he was, and I thank God for Airbus for making such a strong plane.
“All of this is God’s sovereignty. Ordinarily, I should not be here. I give God all the glory for the great things he has done.”
One of the first things Graham did when he was safely aboard a ferry was to borrow a telephone to call his wife. (The Hudson’s waters had come up to his waist, rendering useless the cell phone clipped to his belt.) He was able to let her know he was okay before she had even heard about the accident.
He said his wife asked him if he’d thought about grabbing his computer bag before he left the plane. He said he considered it for about “the snap of a finger” before deciding against it. He later regretted losing some family photos stored on his computer, but he realized he still had the originals – that is, the “real people” – his wife Leslie, their five children and four grandchildren.
“Things can be replaced,” he said. “Don’t sweat the small stuff.”