And the ferries rocked getting there so fast...saved a lot of suffering if not lives.

It looks, to all appearances from the reports I've seen, that this is the result of the plane hitting a flock of geese and wiping out its engines.

A nice piece of piloting, as it appears the pilot made a controlled ditching - something they don't teach pilots live and something the manufacturers don't test with real planes.  

Appears to have been a nice response by all the ferries (the blocky white-over-blue boats with lots of windows), a Circle Line tour boat, the police and fire departments and the Coast Guard.

My sister was on a Southwest Airlines flight from Las Vegas to Burbank a number of years ago that overshot the runway's landing threshold, crashed through the barriers at the east end of the runway, and rolled to a stop in the middle of Hollywood Way, an otherwise-busy thoroughfare that fortunately has little traffic at the time of the incident.

BREAKING
President Bush interrupted his prepared farewell address Thursday night to warn the nation of a threat from "terrorists who hate us for our freedom to suck them into aircraft engines."  Noting the forced landing of a US Airways flight, which occurred this afternoon after a collision with what a Department of Justice spokesperson called, "suicide geese," the President praised the pilot and crew of the airliner, and expressed thanks that all persons aboard survived the crash.  "At the same time," Mr. Bush continued, "we must regard today's tragedy as an act of war.  Intelligence sources indicate that the cowardly attackers who brought down Flight 1549 had recently crossed into the United States from Canada."

Shortly after the crash, Vice President Dick Cheney made a surprise appearance on Fox News, where he claimed that the downing of the airliner should be regarded as a wake-up call by "both the incoming Administration and the civilized world at large."  Mr. Cheney noted that geese "can easily fly distances of up to 2500 miles, almost twice the range of an Iranian Shahab-2 intermediate range missile," and, "they're extremely hard to shoot down when you're drunk."

"Ironically," the Vice President added, "because the terrorists took down an Airbus, I suspect our European allies will be a lot less eager to criticize us this time.  In fact, the Obama Administration would probably be well advised to seek assistance from the EU when interrogating suspects, because who has more experience torturing geese than the French?"