Brought ashore on both sides of the river, the survivors were taken to hospitals in Manhattan and New Jersey, mostly for treatment of exposure to the brutal cold: 18 degrees in the air, about 35 degrees in the water that many had stood in on the wings up to their waists.

Still, most of them walked ashore, some grim with fright and shivering with cold, wrapped in borrowed coats. But others were smiling, and a few were ready to give interviews to mobs of reporters and television cameras. Some described their survival as a miracle, a sentiment repeated later by city and state officials; others gave harrowing accounts of an ordeal whose outcome few might have imagined in such a crisis.

Even the aircraft was saved for examination by investigators  towed down the Hudson and tied up at Battery Park City. In the glare of floodlights, the top of its fuselage, part of a wing and the blue-and-red tail fin jutted out of the water, but its US Airways logo and many of its windows were submerged.

Image Capt. C.B. "Sully" Sullenberger, the US Airways pilot who made an emergency landing in the Hudson River.

“We’ve had a miracle on 34th Street,” Gov. David A. Paterson said at a late-afternoon news conference in Manhattan. “I believe now we’ve had a miracle on the Hudson. This pilot, somehow, without any engines, was somehow able to land this plane, and perhaps without any injuries to the passengers. This is a potential tragedy that may have become one of the most magnificent days in the history of New York City agencies.”

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said that there had been few injuries and that the pilot had done “a masterful job.”

W. Douglas Parker, chairman and chief executive of US Airways, and officials of the Federal Aviation Administration said that Flight 1549 had taken off from La Guardia at 3:26 p.m., bound for Charlotte. It headed north, across the East River and over the Bronx on a route that would involve a sweeping left turn to head south. But both engines lost power about a minute into the flight.