A boom, a jolt, and ‘I … accepted that this is where I’m going to die’

Minutes before US Airways Flight 1549 took off from New York’s LaGuardia Airport, flight attendant Doreen Welsh learned she was going to the AFC Championship to watch her hometown Pittsburgh Steelers play.

“That’s all I was thinking about,” Welsh said, as the first passengers boarded the Airbus A320 flight to Charlotte, N.C., Welsh’s base. “Do I have a black and gold coat heavy enough for the weather?”

But minutes after takeoff, watching her Steelers was the last thing on her mind.

“I hear this boom, and then we were jolted,” said the 38-year veteran flight attendant who began her flying career at age 19 with Allegheny Airlines.

Welsh was aboard the US Airways plane piloted by Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger that in January 2009 was forced to make an emergency water landing on New York’s Hudson River after it encountered a flock of Canada geese on takeoff. The geese were sucked into the plane’s engines, causing the engines to fail and forcing the pilots to ditch the airplane in the river.

Welsh recounted her experience on Tuesday to hundreds of people attending the Textron Aviation Customer Conference in Wichita. The three-day annual event is for customers, operators and mechanics of its Cessna Citation, Beechcraft King Air and Hawker aircraft. It offers education and informational sessions on aircraft maintenance, safety and operations.

Welsh, who was the only flight attendant sitting in the back of the plane, said that seconds after the narrow-body jet was jolted, she smelled a burning odor, rose out of her jump seat and began feeling the overhead baggage compartments for heat, thinking something was on fire.

She checked the galley for the same thing but found nothing.

And then she noticed how quiet it was on the plane, which carried 150 passengers.

“Silence,” she said.

There was no noise coming from the engines. And “not one word from the cockpit,” which she said was unusual because enough time had passed that one of the pilots would normally be informing passengers on the intercom that the plane was turning back to the airport because of a mechanical problem.

“I became alarmed … they do not have time to tell me about this, so I better buckle in, too,” she said.

“Just as I pulled my strap in – never did I think I would hear this for real – the only words that came out of the cockpit were ‘Brace for impact.’

“The first thing I went through was denial,” she said. “This doesn’t happen to me, it happens to other people.”

Then, in her mind, she saw her “book of life”: images of memorable events from her childhood, from holding her newborn son.

“While I’m watching this book, I hear this voice saying, ‘Brace, brace, brace. Heads down.’ ”

It was Welsh’s voice.

“So I say to the US Airways training department, ‘Good job,’ ” she said.

Once the plane had come to a stop on the water, Welsh said, she was mentally prepared for a land evacuation. From where she sat, she had no windows.

“I get out of my jump seat, go over to the door … and I look out,” she said. “The biggest shock of my life: All I see is water.

“I assumed we had gone back to LaGuardia and crash landed.”

Nor did she immediately notice the deep laceration on her leg from a piece of metal that came up from the floor upon hitting the water. Five months later, when she and the other four crew members got their look at the damaged airplane, Welsh saw a hole in the floor big enough for her to fall through – it was inches away from where she had been standing after the airplane ditched.

“Now this water comes in, this water is now knee-level and I’m going back and forth from this door … telling passengers to go forward,” she said.

But getting them to move forward seemed to take forever. And a couple of passengers in her section of the airplane were frozen, seemingly unable to move. Welsh said she thought for a moment about leaving them behind.

“Then I thought, ‘I can’t do that,’ ” and she eventually convinced them to move. Meanwhile, the water was inching higher and was now at her waist.

“I stood in that spot behind the last row of seats … and accepted that this is where I’m going to die.”

But then the pace of the passengers picked up and “the water is going down as I’m going up,” she said.

Welsh made it to fellow flight attendants who were guiding passengers to the forward doors and out to waiting rafts. What struck Welsh was how neat their uniforms and hair were, while she was disheveled with torn pants, a bleeding leg and blood on her face from biting her tongue on impact.

Days later while recovering in a New York hospital, US Airways’ then-CEO – and current American Airlines CEO – Doug Parker came to visit her, bringing flowers. As Parker was getting ready to leave, he asked her whether there was anything he could get her.

“Now that you ask, I was supposed to go to the AFC Championship game,” Welsh said, noting that she was on morphine at the time. “Since I’m going to miss it, I’d kind of like to go to the Super Bowl.

“And I’d like to meet Jimmy Buffett.”

This story was originally published April 25, 2017 at 7:59 PM with the headline "A boom, a jolt, and ‘I … accepted that this is where I’m going to die’."