Florence plane crash survivor returns home

A Florence attorney traveling on a U.S. Airways Jet that crashed in to the Hudson River on Thursday afternoon returned home early Friday afternoon.

Mike Nunn, a law partner at Aiken, Bridges, Nunn, Elliott and Tyler Law Firm, flew in to Florence Regional Airport, where he was greeted by family members.

“My family and I are overwhelmed by the outpouring of support,” he said. “... What I’d love to do is go home and be with my family ... I’m glad to be home.”

Nunn’s wife, Lee, said Thursday night her family feels blessed that he survived, given the circumstances and the cold conditions of the Hudson River.

Investigators brought in a giant crane, divers and a barge Friday to help pull the US Airways jetliner from the Hudson River. Aside from one person with two broken legs, there were no other reports of serious injuries to the 155 people aboard.

Nunn had been in New York for a deposition and was returning to Florence on that aircraft when it crashed, Glenn Elliott, Nunn’s law partner, said Thursday night.

Nunn told Elliott he heard a loud noise and all the passengers assumed there was something wrong with the engines.

Nunn was scheduled to be on a later flight home. But he finished his work early and decided it was in his best interest to catch an earlier flight to beat the bad weather, Elliott said.

Nunn is a shareholder in Aiken, Bridges, Nunn Elliott and Tyler, according to the firm’s Web site. He primarily handles business, corporate and complex litigation.

National Transportation Safety Board investigators are concentrating on recovering the black box from the plane and interviewing the crew about the accident — apparently caused by birds that slammed into the plane’s two engines.

The Airbus A320, built in 1999, was tethered to a pier on the tip of Lower Manhattan on Friday morning — about four miles from where it touched down. Only a gray wing tip could be seen jutting out of the water near a Lower Manhattan sea wall.

Federal Aviation Administration spokeswoman Laura Brown said there was no immediate indication the crash was “anything other than an accident.”

The plane, which was bound for Charlotte, N.C., took off from LaGuardia Airport at 3:26 p.m. Less than a minute later, the pilot reported a “double bird strike” and said he needed to return to LaGuardia, said Doug Church, a spokesman for the National Air Traffic Controllers Association.

Onshore, from streets and office windows, witnesses watched the plane steadily descend off roughly 48th Street in midtown Manhattan.

The 150 passengers and five crew members were forced to escape as the plane quickly became submerged up to its windows in 36-degree water. Dozens stood on the aircraft’s wings on a 20-degree day, one of the coldest of the winter, as commuter ferries and Coast Guard vessels converged to rescue them.

Paramedics treated at least 78 patients, many for hypothermia, bruises and other minor injuries, fire officials said.

From 1990 to 2007, there were nearly 80,000 reported incidents of birds striking nonmilitary aircraft, about one strike for every 10,000 flights, according to the Federal Aviation Administration and the Department of Agriculture.

The Hudson accident took place almost exactly 27 years after an Air Florida plane bound for Tampa crashed into the Potomac River just after takeoff from Washington National Airport, killing 78 people. Five people on that flight survived.

On Dec. 20, a Continental Airlines plane veered off a runway and slid into a snowy field at Denver International Airport, injuring 38 people. That was the first major crash of a commercial airliner in the United States since Aug. 27, 2006, when 49 people were killed after a Comair jetliner took off from a Lexington, Ky., runway that was too short.