At the same time, F.A.A. officials in Washington were on the move. Their operations center got several notifications about Flight 1549, even before it ditched, and began communicating on the agency’s Domestic Events Network, an open telephone network forged on 9/11 that has “never been shut down since,” said Laura J. Brown, an agency spokeswoman.
At Fire Department headquarters, Chief Salvatore Cassano, left, and Lt. Mike Glander with information about Flight 1549.
On Jan. 15, the F.B.I. was connected to the line, as were other federal agencies; it can accommodate more than 100 parties, said Ms. Brown.
Unlike on Sept. 11, controllers never lost track of the plane, even though it dropped below an altitude where F.A.A. radar can detect aircraft. In fact, “the actions he took were exactly what he said he was going to do,” Ms. Brown said of the pilot, Capt. Chesley B. Sullenberger III; he said he was headed for the river and he went there.
Coast Guard Petty Officer Brian J. McClung was the local search and rescue controller on duty at the time. He heard the alert from the La Guardia tower and, moments later, fielded a call from a controller there. He said it was the first time he had “seen them call us.”
Crews on the ground had no idea where touchdown would come. John Lucia, the operational manager at the air traffic control center on Long Island, phoned the Police Department’s aviation unit and the Coast Guard. “We provided the last known location, based on aircraft information and radar,” said James Peters, an F.A.A. spokesman. “It was somewhere south of the George Washington Bridge, at 900 feet, and heading south. You could not pinpoint it any more.”
At the Transportation Security Administration center in Virginia, across from the Pentagon, officials set up a phone bridge to link the agency’s leaders with federal security directors from La Guardia, Kennedy and Newark Liberty International airports, and with federal air marshals. That line was created in 2006, and is run from an operations center near Washington Dulles International Airport, a central nervous system for 450 commercial airports in the country.
“The F.A.A. was all over it, and they were very confident of the bird-strike theory, very early,” one Transportation Security Administration official said.
Still, officials had questions. They believed one engine had been damaged, but they wondered about the second. How could birds knock out both? The Transportation Security Administration officials knew that if it had been sabotage, they would have to send word up through the Department of Homeland Security to the White House, said Christopher T. White, an agency spokesman.
“We are trying to assess if it is an isolated incident or a multiple-pronged attack,” Mr. White said, adding that terrorism was quickly ruled out.
The official recalled that “it kept coming back that ‘it does not appear to be terrorist-related.’ ”
Looking back, the official said the effort was diligent, not a product of paranoia.
“The only reason T.S.A. was created was to stop terror attacks in transportation,” the official said. “Unless you’re moving at the first instance you hear of something, it’s too late in the aviation context.”
The plane was in the Hudson when Chief Cassano of the Fire Department heard the alarm. In the seventh-floor emergency center, at 9 MetroTech Center in Brooklyn, the chief saw the crisis from several points. It was far different from standing at a makeshift command center beneath the twin towers on 9/11, staring up at buildings about to fall.
Here, images were beamed back from a camera mounted on a police helicopter. News reports streamed in. He coordinated with Assistant Chief Robert Sweeney, the operational commander, who was tracking the plane as it drifted south toward Battery Park. A police captain who is a liaison to fire officials was on hand, another assignment that came after 9/11.
Soon, reports came in from a fire marshal, Patrick Campbell, who was on the terrorism task force. He happened to have been at La Guardia with his family, about to go on vacation.
He got a list of the passengers from officials at the Port Authority. He faxed it to Chief Cassano, who gave it to workers in another room who were calling area hospitals and paramedics at the scene, checking one name at a time. Chief Cassano had the manifest faxed to the department’s field communications unit at the New York Waterway terminal where Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta and Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly were then huddled with the mayor, the governor and others.
Workers tried to match names on the manifest with those rescued from the jet. Before dusk, officials at a news conference said it appeared everyone on Flight 1549 had survived.
Pieces of the puzzle arrived in 911 calls.
The first, at 3:29 p.m., came from a man on Briggs Avenue and 199th Street in the Bronx. He said he heard a loud boom in the sky, looked up and saw the plane in flames.
At 3:31 p.m., a fire dispatcher got a 911 caller’s number from a police dispatcher, phoned the man back and explained what had occurred: “We called the airport and they said a bird flew into the plane,” the dispatcher told the man, who, at that moment, was speaking with police officers in the street.
