D. Murali

Chennai: Standing on a pier in the Hudson River, outside Chart House, just about a week ago, I found the quietness of the waters to be quite benign. How else can you explain the reminisced spectacle of January 15, when a US Airways that had taken off from New York’s LaGuardia Airport crash-landed on the river after suffering a bird-hit and yet all the 155 people on board got out alive and safe.

The tidings, however, on the afternoon of August 8, were not happy. The mid-air collision of a chopper and a plane was the grim subject-matter of ‘breaking news’ on the TV channels in the Admirals Club of New York’s JFK Airport. It was tough to believe that my flight that noon from Washington Dulles to JFK could have crossed the accident site about an hour after the crash, perhaps at a higher altitude.

From the last row aisle seat in the United shuttle, I was trying to get glimpses through the window of things that could refresh the visuals captured during the cruise trip to the Statue of Liberty organised by Samsung on August 4. Hugging the unmistakable Manhattan skyline, we had crossed under the bridges, swept through the pleasant breeze, sailed past the leisure boats, cheered the zesty tourists in Staten Island Ferry, and watched the nimble choppers move about like dragonflies.

“This is not a river, but a sea,” someone in the group had said. Named after Henry Hudson, an Englishman sailing for the Dutch East India Company, who explored it in 1609, the river is more than 500 km long. The Mahican name of the river, Muh-he-kun-ne-tuk, means ‘the river that flows both ways,’ informs Wikipedia.

The Hudson, which is designated as one of the American Heritage Rivers, is sometimes called, in geological terms, a ‘drowned’ river, adds http://en.wikipedia.org. “The rising sea levels after the retreat of the Wisconsin glaciation, the most recent ice age, have resulted in a marine incursion that drowned the coastal plain and brought salt water well above the mouth of the river.”

Returning to the recent collision episode (‘the second biggest loss of life near New York City since the November 12, 2001, crash of American Airlines Flight 587 that killed 265’), one learns that the drowned wreckage of helicopter was found in about thirty feet of water, not very close to the wreckage fields of the plane, as reads a quick page about the accident in the Free Encyclopedia.

The collision, reportedly seen by ‘thousands of people out enjoying a clear summer day,’ appears to have eluded video photographers, but for an amateur footage. Which raises the question if busy tourist spots such as the Hudson River have no continual electronic surveillance that even small retail shops benefit from?

Another question is likely to be about VFR or ‘visual flight rules’ that both aircraft in the incident were allegedly operating on rather than being directed by an ATC (air traffic controller).

Visual flight rules on the river corridors by Manhattan have been subject to considerable debate since the 2006 New York City plane crash in which New York Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle crashed into an apartment building while flying using visual flight rules on the East River, notes Wikipedia. For starters, VFR are ‘a set of regulations which allow a pilot to operate an aircraft in weather conditions generally clear enough to allow the pilot to see where the aircraft is going.’

You cannot step into the same river twice, says Heraclitus. And, as for the Hudson River, we may well foresee a similar churn in the regulatory system surrounding it, even as ‘the Great Mohegan’ flows timelessly the same.