MIRACLE ON THE HUDSON(ISBN=) 英文原版

　　Product De*ion
　　In this heart-stopping, page-turning tale of fear, heroism, and
redemption, the passengers of the Hudson River crash landing tell
their remarkable stories.
　　Millions watched the aftermath on television, while others
witnessed the event actually happening from the windows of nearby
skyscrapers. But only 155 people know firsthand what really
happened on U.S. Airways Flight 1549 on January 15, 2009. Now, for
the first time, the survivors detail their astounding, terrifying,
and inspiring experiences on that freezing winter day in New York
City. Written by two esteemed journalists, Miracle on the Hudson is
the entire tale from takeoff to bird strike to touchdown to rescue,
seen through the eyes and felt in the souls of those on board the
fateful flight.
　　Revealing many new and compelling details, Miracle on the Hudson
dramatically evokes the explosion and “smell of burning flesh” as
both engines were destroyed by geese, the violent landing on the
river that felt like a “huge car wreck,” the gridlock in the aisles
as the plane filled swiftly with freezing water, and the thrill of
the passengers’ rescue from the wings and from rafts—all of it
recalled by the “cross section of America” on board.
　　Jay McDonald, a thirty-nine-year-old software developer, had
survived brain-tumor surgery just two years earlier and now faced
the unimaginable.
　　Tracey Wolsko, a nervous flier, suddenly became other people’s
rock: “Just pray. It’s going to be all right.” Jim Whitaker, a
construction executive, reassured a nervous mother of two young
children on board, only later admitting, “I was pathologically
lying the whole time.” As the plane started sinking, Lucille
Palmer, eighty-five, told her daughter to save herself: “Just leave
me!”
　　Featuring much more than what the media reported—moments of chaos
in addition to stoicism and common sense, and the fortuitous
mistakes and quick instincts that saved lives that otherwise would
have been lost—Miracle on the Hudson is the chronicle of one of the
most phenomenal feel-good stories of recent years, one that could
have been a nightmare and instead became a stirring narrative of
heroism and hope for our times.
　　Look Inside Miracle on the Hudson

　　In this heart-stopping tale, the passengers of the Hudson
River crash landing evoke in compelling detail the terrifying
explosion as both engines were destroyed, the violent landing on
the river, and the thrill of their rescue from the wings and from
rafts. Jay McDonald, a thirty-nine-year-old software developer, had
survived brain-tumor surgery just two years earlier and now faced
the unimaginable. Tracey Wolsko, a nervous flier, suddenly became
other people’s rock: “Just pray. It’s going to be all right.” As
the plane started sinking, Lucille Palmer, eighty-five, told her
daughter to save herself: “Just leave me!” Featuring moments of
chaos and stoicism, fortuitous mistakes and quick instincts,
Miracle on the Hudson is the chronicle of one of the most
phenomenal stories of recent years, one that could have been a
nightmare and instead became a stirring narrative of heroism and
hope.

　　William Prochnau and Laura Parker write collaborative articles
for Vanity Fair, where Prochnau is a contributing editor. They
interviewed 120 passengers of Flight 1549, as well as many first
responders and rescuers. Prochnau, a former national correspondent
for The Washington Post, has written three acclaimed books,
including Once Upon A Distant War . Parker covered aviation for The
Washington Post and spent 10 years as a national correspondent at
USA Today. They live in Washington, D.C.
　　From the Hardcover edition.

　  x“Stunning . . . Open this book and you will not close
it until you reach the last page.”—Buzz Bissinger, Pulitzer
Prize–winning author of Shooting Stars and Friday Night
Lights
　　“An extraordinary drama seen through the eyes of ordinary
people.”—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
　　“Absorbing, inspirational . . . a detailed, moment-by-moment
account of the accident and its aftermath . . . Anyone who
remembers the 　　dramatic . . . event will be riveted.”—Publishers
Weekly
　　“William Prochnau and Laura Parker bring to the passengers’
impassioned accounts of survival the old-fashioned values of the
finest gumshoe reporters.”—Kai Bird, Pulitzer Prize–winning author
of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert
Oppenheimer

　　Chapter One
　　Come Fly with Me
　　New York awoke that thursday morning in january to a storybook
scene— Manhattan in a snowstorm; the flakes whipping almost
sideways through the skyscraper canyons and a bright coat of white
blotting out all of mankind’s gray. Storybook, that is, if you were
hunkered down and had no intention of flying.
　　Arctic air had also brought in the winter’s coldest day, with
early- morning temperatures in the low teens and single-digit wind
chills. Ice formed around the edges of the Hudson and floes halted
ferry traffic in the northern suburbs upstream.
　　Along the Avenue of the Americas, Tripp Harris bent into the wind
as he bucked his way to get his morning coffee at Starbucks. The
one- block walk seemed like a mile. A technological adviser to
banks, he had flown up the night before from Charlotte, North
Carolina—”Wall Street South,” as his hometown, a burgeoning banking
center, had become known. For the past four months, the banking
calamity had helped keep US Airways, which had a financial calamity
of its own, flying almost at full capacity on its premier
north-south runs.
　　Harris, one of the modern “road warriors” who racked up miles
with back-to-back business flights, had scheduled a single morning
meeting at Citibank. He would make the turnaround in twenty-four
hours, less if he was lucky. Knowing the kind of mess the snow
would make of LaGuardia, New York’s ancient but conveniently
located airport, Harris had booked the five o’clock on US Air. With
a little luck and the hole card of his frequent-flier status, he’d
push for an earlier one—Flight 1549, a two-hour, home-for-dinner
flight to Douglas International.
　　Not far away, a few blocks east of the Waldorf, in a window seat
at the Café Basil on Third Avenue, Beverly Waters, another
Southerner, born and raised just south of Charlotte, drank in the
scene with pure joy. She loved the snow, “the flakes were big and
Christmas-y,” and she thrived on watching the sidewalk drama, too.
With their long, rapid strides, the native New Yorkers moved
through the storm as if it didn’t exist, and nothing else did,
either. Beverly had had a successful business trip but she was
ready for home and her family. She was a nervous flier, but she
hadn’t joined the Xanax set yet. Her boarding pass—seat 21E, Flight
1549—sat snugly in her purse.
　　All around the metropolitan area that morning, others were making
the choices that would place them on the flight of the
decade.
　　In the historic little town of Goshen, New York, an hour and a
half north of the city, the woman who would be Flight 1549’s most
senior citizen, eighty-five-year-old Lucille Palmer, took a
midmorning call from her son: “Why are you going down there today?
The weather is terrible,” he had said. Her great-grandson was down
there and it was his first birthday, that’s why. And though she
couldn’t walk very well without her walker, she’d have her
daughter, Diane Higgins, with her. In any case, a little thing like
turbulence at thirty thousand feet didn’t bother her a twit.
Neither did snow. She was Brooklyn born, and Brooklyn tough.
　　Bill Zuhowski left Mattituck, Long Island, just before 7:00 a.m.
with six inches of snow on the ground, no match for his ’03 Chevy
Silverado. His flying plans didn’t include Charlotte, though. He
was headed for an 11:30 Spirit Airways flight to Myrtle Beach,
where he planned to celebrate a buddy’s birthday. Zuhowski didn’t
fly much, sticking close to his job at a Long Island swimming-pool
company. But he intended to drive the sixty-five miles down the
Long Island Expressway to the Manhasset Station, ride the train the
last fifteen miles to LaGuardia, and be wearing his shorts in
Myrtle Beach by mid- afternoon. Best-laid plans . . .
　　The snow turned the LIE into a mire of fender benders. By the
time Zuhowski parked the Silverado, his train had left. Grabbing a
cab, he made it halfway to the airport before he discovered that
his ticket was still in the truck. When he finally showed up, his
flight had not left; it had been canceled. But the snow had let up
and his dreams of a warm weekend in Myrtle Beach remained alive
when his pal promised to pick him up in Charlotte. Zuhowski booked
a rear seat on US Airways Flight 1549, which still showed on the
reader boards as a 2:45 p.m. departure, although not many LaGuardia
veterans thought that meant much.
　　LaGuardia is an urban airport, not one of the modern exurban
jetports with long, multiple runways and a lot of give and take. It
has two stubby crisscross runways, seven thousand feet each, with
three of the endings over water. Despite its limitations, LaGuardia
remains a favorite for New Yorkers and visitors alike. The airport
was born in good New York fashion, and that is why, with luck, you
can take a cab to midtown Manhattan and get there in twenty
minutes. Back in the 1930s, the city’s legendary mayor, Fiorello
LaGuardia, flew home one day with a ticket marked: Destination New
York. The plane, as usual, put down in New Jersey. Enough is
enough, stormed the mayor of the greatest city in the world, and by
1939, New York had not only its World’s Fair but its own modern
airport, then considered the greatest advancement in aviation
design and eventually named in honor of the hell-raising
mayor.
　　Seventy years later LaGuardia has become the most congested
airport in the country, a takeoff or landing occurring every
forty-seven seconds. It also has the most flight delays. Add a
snowstorm and it not only do New York skies close down but most of
the Northeast corridor goes with it. The delays on the morning of
January 15, 2009, averaged two hours and fifty-eight minutes until
the sun broke through around noon. Flights began to open up, though
they were still running late. Early birds and latecomers leapt at
the chance for a spot on US Airways Flight 1549, the beleaguered,
twice-bankrupt airline’s mid-afternoon mainstay to one of its hub
cities, Charlotte.
　　The group joining Harris and Waters and Palmer and Zuhowski at
LaGuardia was as great a cross section of modern America as New
York could produce. It was also a group of people weighed down by
all the woes of a world teetering on the edge of economic collapse.
Twenty passengers were from the Charlotte-based Bank of America,
just a small contingent of the company’s weekly commuters to New
York, there to work on the government-driven merger with failing
Merrill Lynch, which had gone through four months to the day
earlier. “The merger from hell,” they called it in Charlotte,
forcing a square peg into a round hole.
　　Some, out of date and out of tune, thought of a flight from New
York to Charlotte as Babylon to the Bible Belt. In 2009, you
couldn’t get much further from reality. Charlotte had long since
become the second largest financial center in the country. Its
skyscrapers didn’t stretch as high as those in New York, but sixty
stories can scrape some blue and, in good times, a little green. At
the start of the financial crisis, the city’s banks counted their
assets in the trillions, not billions, although some of the zeroes
had started peeling off, along with the hopes and futures of many
of the people flying that day. More than one of the bankers on
board was carrying his résumé—out of self-defense. The layoffs in
Charlotte had been extensive. House prices were plunging, pensions
disappearing, worries soaring higher than bank stocks had ever
gone. On January 15, BoA shares dropped to a midday low of $7.35,
heading to half that price a month later and down from their
onetime high of near $55.
　　The circumstances at Charlotte’s other major bank, Wachovia,
which had just been bought out of certain bankruptcy by Wells
Fargo, were even more tenuous for the flying merger transition
teams. Three Wachovia executives were returning on the flight after
another round of trying to mesh the inner wheels of their bank with
the mysterious turns of Wells Fargo’s.
　　Charles Spiggle, an executive in leveraged buyouts and
acquisitions, was heading home. Spiggle was a top dog at Wachovia.
But, like millions of Americans at that time, he and his wife had
already had their family meeting, cut their discretionary spending,
and tried to imagine what their alternatives might be.
　　”Yes, we were worried,” Spiggle said. “Not petrified. But we
didn’t know then what was coming. We had had eighteen months of a
credit- market meltdown.”
　　But the people coming together at LaGuardia were a cross section
in many other ways, too.
　　A who’s who of Flight 1549 ranged all over the map:
　　A gangsta rap, hip-hop music producer from Miami, Raymond
Mandrell
　　A Jordanian Arabic-language specialist from the United Nations,
Heyam Kawas
　　Salespeople of everything from patio doors to newly organized
financial plans to intricately sophisticated software
　　Department-store buyers picking over a shattered New York apparel
market after a disastrous Christmas season
　　One of the country’s leading professional drag racers, Chris
Rini
　　A dreaming young singer from Australia, Emma Cowan
　　Young lovers, one a veteran of twenty-seven months in
Afghanistan
　　A Charlotte bride-to-be thirty days away from her wedding
　　Two copilots from other airlines deadheading to their own next
stations, Derek Alter of Colgan Air and Susan O’Donnell of American
Airlines
　　Several students, including a med student researching hospital
jobs in the big town, Alberto Panero
　　A NASCAR executive, Amber Wells
　　A television executive whose network had filmed the story of
September 11’s United Flight 93, the hijacked airliner brought down
in a fiery nosedive by passengers who fought back, Billy
Campbell
　　Two New York–based Japanese traders, Hiroki Takigawa and Kanau
Deguchi
　　A computer specialist born in India’s Silicon Valley, Balaji
Ganesan
　　Add in three small children—one a nine-month-old lap passenger, a
personal trainer, a Feldenkrais practitioner, a nurse, teachers, a
cartographer, a waitress, lawyers, students, reti…