Downed jet lifted from icy Hudson River

NEW YORK — The airliner that was piloted to a safe emergency landing in the Hudson River was hoisted from the ice-laden current and placed on a barge, and its two "black box" data recorders were sent to investigators in Washington.

Workers swarmed around the barge and its battered cargo — moored next to a seawall just a couple of blocks from the World Trade Center site — on Sunday morning as federal aviation investigators met.

The US Airways plane was slowly lifted from the frigid water at the southern tip of Manhattan late Saturday, exposing its shredded underbelly that dropped pieces of metal as a crane maneuvered it.

NTSB spokesman Peter Knudson said investigators hoped to move the barge and plane on Sunday. Before that could be done, he said, fuel had to be drained from the tank in the plane's right wing.

Officials refused to say where in New Jersey the plane would be taken when it is towed away, saying investigators wanted to do their work undisturbed. Any decision on whether to release the waterlogged luggage to passengers would come from the airline, they said.

Although the area was barricaded, the spectacle attracted dozens of Sunday morning strollers and tourists who snapped pictures of the wreckage in gently falling snow.

US Airways Capt. Chesley B. "Sully" Sullenberger, speaking to National Transportation Safety Board investigators Saturday for the first time, said he made a split-second decision to put the airliner down in the river rather than risk a "catastrophic" crash in a populated area of New York City or New Jersey after a collision with birds shut down both engines.

Police and Coast Guard boats patrolled the water Sunday around the barge holding the plane, its damaged right jet engine clearly visible.

Divers still have to find the plane's left engine in the river, but have an idea where to look. A sonar team has identified an object directly below the crash site, upstream between mid-Manhattan and New Jersey, the NTSB said. Investigators initially thought both engines had been shorn off, but divers realized Saturday one was still attached and they had missed it.

The NTSB said radar data confirmed that the aircraft crossed the path of a group of "primary targets," almost certainly birds, as Flight 1549 climbed over the Bronx after taking off from LaGuardia Airport. Those targets had not been on the radar screen of the air traffic controller who approved the departure to Charlotte, N.C., NTSB board member Kitty Higgins said.

Sullenberger recounted seeing his windshield filled with big, dark-brown birds.

"His instinct was to duck," Higgins said, recounting their interview. Then there was a thump, the smell of burning birds, and silence as both aircraft engines cut out. It all happened so fast, the crew never threw the aircraft's "ditch switch," which seals off vents in the fuselage to make it more seaworthy.