Miracle on the Hudson: The Salvage of Flight 1549 | The Power of Images

hi i'm stephen mallett welcome to the power of images today i'm going to be talking about my photo essay the salvage of flight 1549 it is january 15 2009 captain sullenberger made the decision that he had to bring the aircraft down into the hudson river because he did not have enough time to get back to a runway and i had heard that this aircraft had crashed in the hudson river the news was coming back that everyone survived and we're seeing the pictures of people out on the wing and just everyone is feeling great so yeah so we were sitting in the bar and my wife said i wonder how they're going to get the airplane out of the water and i realized i knew who was going to do this because weeks marine has this giant rotating crane and i had photographed it a few months before when they had picked up and moved the concorde back to the top of the intrepid so i called my contacted weeks and he called me back and said listen i think we have the job so i jumped into my car went out with the original crane and the tugboat one of the first photographs on this project is titled whale it just has always looked like this wounded animal to me people are going down like putting a little bit of like water on the on the blowhole said it's okay you're gonna fly again don't worry so i spent the day shooting stayed all day and all night and photographed everything that i could everything that was going on that caught my attention there's a moment where the engineers from airbus who had flown in from france had literally landed in laguardia went to the toy store and found an airbus 320 as a model to talk about where the center of gravity was if we were to put the sling underneath the aircraft so they could pick it up without it falling apart one of the first photographs the next morning as the image wing it was this cold cold morning one of the coldest weekends in new york the coast guard had tied off the aircraft to the pier and i just loved this image of the light hitting the aircraft and the jersey skyline in the background the steam coming up off of the refineries and all the ice that had now floated down from upstream one of the other favorite images is the diver in the water taking a look at the structure and the skin to make sure that there was no sharp edges protruding that was gonna possibly cut the straps it's just this wash of aqueous and green with the diver's yellow helmet and the red overalls that they have to stay warm one of the ways that they do this is they have a wetsuit on and then over that they wear overalls and then they literally take a pressure washer that is heating the water to compensate for how cold the water is in the hudson they were able to pull it out that evening there's this image that i shot directly underneath the boom of the crane and again there's just there's this sense of this wounded animal you know being lifted up like on crutches out of the water they put it up onto a barge and they began to prep it for transportation it was the first photographer into the aircraft after it had crashed and was able to photograph the aircraft while they were prepping it there's a number of images from the inside of the aircraft one of which is the image of the throttle control and it's just this color and all of the dials and like the dirt stains from the hudson river with the fact that this thing was submerged they took off the one engine that was still attached and took it back to general electric in ohio to take a look at it they were pretty confident already that it was a bird strike but they just hadn't made the public announcement yet they moved the fuselage from where it was in bayonne to this other hangar where they had put up this pop-up tent that they were going to do the final investigation on the aircraft on and because of the way and the height of the aircraft and the bridges what would have been like a 45-minute journey ended up having to be an eight-hour journey because they had to go all the way north up to like peterborough airport before there was a bridge that was high enough to allow the aircraft to get under and then come all the way back down south and then i did one other trip they located the engine that had separated it was too deep at the center of the hudson for the salvage divers to feel comfortable doing it so they brought weeks back out so i went with the dive team got a great portrait of the dive master and the crane is in the background and everyone that's looked at this photograph just says they've never seen him so happy and then that second engine was coming out of the water and again it's titled bug because it just looks like this wounded creature to me you know it's this wounded animal the water dripping out of it and the front is all bashed up a bunch of the passengers they meet every single year for dinner sully has come to a couple of them it's actually his birthday january 15th so he doesn't always show up in person but does dial in and so yeah there's a nice community and they stayed in touch and a couple people actually got married i have a lot of attachment to this aircraft as it saved everybody's lives and changed mine it's been a wonderful experience just knowing that i have these photographs of this historic occasion [Music] you

Channel: Artrepreneur

Views: 30,008

Keywords: Sullenberger, Sully, Miracle on the Hudson, Stephen Mallon, Artrepreneur, Photo Essay, Canon, Weeks Marine, NTSB, Visual Storytelling, Documentary, Fine Art Photography

Id: DlPNGjaXa5Y

Length: 6min 23sec (383 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 11 2020