Clifton native Glenn Carlson was aboard Flight 1549 Story by Jordan Schwartz
Glenn Carlson made his way down the aisle of US Airways Flight 1549 and took a seat in 6B. He removed his shoes, put on his eye shades, inserted his ear plugs and waited for the bell that would allow him to unbuckle his belt and recline his seat.
That bell never rung.
Just 90 seconds after takeoff, Carlson heard a loud bang and threw his arms out, hitting the two passengers sitting next to him.
The Clifton native smelled something burning and figured the plane would just return to LaGuardia Airport. That was, until the pilot came on the loudspeaker.
“This is your captain,” he said. “Brace for impact.”
The flight attendants repeated the warning: “Brace! Brace! Head down! Stay down!”
But no matter how hard he tried, Carlson couldn’t will his body to get down. Instead, he looked out the window to his right and locked eyes for a moment with another passenger sitting in 6E.
“I saw buildings on both sides,” Carlson remembered. “I was afraid we were going into the bay.”
But the 47-year-old never considered the worst.
“I didn’t believe that was a day for me to die,” he said.
Neither did Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger.
The heroic pilot miraculously landed the Airbus A320 in the Hudson River, just minutes after it
struck a flock of Canadian geese and lost nearly all thrust from both engines.
“It was very smooth, like a regular landing,” Carlson recalled. “What scared me most was getting out of the plane. I thought we would sink.”
“The Wing was Packed”
The 150 passengers aboard Flight 1549 were quiet when the plane came to a rest in the Hudson. But the silence didn’t last for long.
“I looked to my right and the guy on the aisle was gone,” said Carlson. “The guy by the window was like, ‘Let’s go!’”
The married father of three boys headed for the exit by the wing, stopping momentarily to grab a seat cushion to use as a flotation device.
“The wing was packed,” he explained and so he searched for another way out.
Carlson noticed a man motioning to him from the front exit. Fellow passenger Douglas Shrift was notifying him of an easier way out. So, the CHS ’79 grad ran up the aisle and slid into a life raft.
“People were yelling for a knife to cut the raft loose,” he remembered.
Carlson said he never really had time to stop and consider the incredible event he was living through; he just kept thinking one step ahead.
“First was land the plane, then get off, then start looking for boats.”
A New York Waterway ferry called the Thomas Jefferson plucked Carlson and 58 other passengers from the river that day and transported them back to a pier in Manhattan.
“When we arrived, there were a bunch of cameras and microphones in our faces, but a guy in a suit pushed them away,” said Carlson. “I thought he was a police officer but he turned out to be another guy on the plane named John Howell. His brother died on September 11.”
As cops corralled the passengers to get everyone’s information, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg arrived on the scene.
Carlson shook his hand and the two got to talking about North Carolina universities. Bloomberg said his niece was headed to Duke, but the Charlotte resident told the mayor he was a UNC man.
Carlson asked Bloomberg if he could have his cufflinks to prove he met the billionaire, but the mayor gave him a Big Apple pin instead and jokingly instructed him not to sell it on eBay.
Since he dropped his Blackberry during his escape from the plane, Carlson was forced to borrow another passenger’s phone to call his wife, Ann Marie Zimmerman (CHS ’85).
Even though she was home, Ann Marie didn’t answer the call because she didn’t recognize the number.
“Muff,” Glenn called his muffin on the machine, “I think I’ll try your cell...”
Ann Marie picked up and with all the commotion going on in the background, she thought he missed his flight and was at a bar.
“I was in a plane crash,” he told her before quickly adding that he and the rest of the passengers were alright.
“If he’s fine and everybody’s fine, what kind of plane crash is this?” she remembered thinking.
Ann Marie turned on the television, saw the plane in the river and realized what was going on.
She then called the rest of the family to get them caught up.
Glenn, meanwhile, waited for his younger brother, Craig, to pick him up and drive him back to their parent’s house on Kenter Pl. in Clifton.
The next day, Carlson’s company, DemandTec, chartered him a private jet back to Charlotte, where he and his family have lived since June 2003.
The consultant was a little scared to go up in a plane again, so his mother, Geri, gave him some Clifton Merchant Magazines to read on the flight.
Carlson’s nerves weren’t eased any by the fact that he was the only passenger aboard the six-seater, and so he decided to fill the nearly two-hour flight by writing his wife a letter about all he had experienced on January 15, 2009.
Thanking Sully
Glenn Carlson wasn’t even supposed to be on Flight 1549.
In New York for business, he was scheduled to return home to Charlotte at 7 pm. But when the meeting finished early, he phoned his travel agent to book a 2:45 departure.
By the time the William Paterson graduate reached the Midtown Tunnel, his agent called him back to say the earlier flight was booked and so he got him a ticket on a 5 pm.
Already en route to LaGuardia, Carlson figured he’d get on the standby list for the 2:45 and see what would happen.
Of course, his name was called for the earliest flight, and so he texted his wife to let her know he’d be home by 5 o’clock.
Carlson didn’t meet his prediction but his entire family was overjoyed when he finally made it back the next day.
The dad was greeted at the airport by Ann Marie and their three sons: Sean, 14, Brett, 12, and Ryan, 9.
Weeks later, Glenn and his wife joined about 50 other passengers at a reunion in Charlotte. Captain Sullenberger was in attendance and Carlson thanked him for his heroic actions, jokingly adding, “I was the one knocking on the door to ask if you needed any help.”
On a recent visit to New York, the School 9 alum took his family on a boat ride to the crash site in the Hudson River.
The Michael Murphy is owned by a Rutherford man named Scott Koen, whom Carlson met on Facebook. Koen rescued six people on that fateful day and had commemorative medallions made to distribute to the passengers.
One side of the coin says “Miracle on the Hudson, On a Wing and a Prayer” and the other has a
picture of the flight path. Carlson had his name and seat number engraved on his medallion before pitching it into the river where he came so close to death earlier this year.
