"Thank you and thank God," Tess
Sosa, the young mother of Damien, the nine-month-old littlest survivor of the Miracle on the Hudson, said in an interview
on the "Today" show. Picture included
A Charlotte man helped convince
a woman to take action to save herself and her young son after the US Airways flight went down Thursday.
The joyous mother called the pilot "brilliant" and expressed gratitude
to the "very calm, collected gentleman" who sat next to her and helped her get her loved ones to safety after the engine cut
out on U.S. Airways Flight 1549 from New York to Charlotte and it made a remarkable emergency landing on the icy Hudson River.
"It's good to be alive today,"
Damien's father, Martin Sosa, told "Today." "It's hard to believe we just survived that."
Because of a seating glitch,
Tess sat next to a stranger with little Damien, while Martin sat with their three-year-old girl, Sophia.
The stranger next to Tess,
who had clocked his fair share of frequent flier miles, looked up from his reading to first alert the young mother that something
not right. What they couldn't have known is that it was a one-in-a-million problem: Canada geese had
taken out both engines of the Airbus A320, which was scheduled to leave LaGuardia at 3:04 p.m.
"He said 'Ooh problem with
the engine, " Tess said. "I said 'Oh are we going to be okay?' And he said 'Yes.'
I said 'Are you sure?' And he said 'Yes'... I turned and said to 'Sophia, 'We’re going to be OK.
We’re going to be OK.'"
In another row, the passenger
sitting next to Martin Sosa offered to help.
"I held Sophia and we did
the best we could to brace ourselves up, " Martin Sosa said." ''And the gentleman beside me said, 'Would
you like me to brace your son?' ... And I said okay, because he mentioned that he had been on scary flights before."
"And he did, he braced my son.
There was an impact. My son was crying. That was such a good sign to me."
One of the passengers who who
helped Tess and little Damien, David Sanderson described the scene as "controlled chaos.”
"I heard an explosion, and I saw
flames coming from the left wing and I thought, 'This isn't good,'" Sanderson told WNBC. "People started
running up the aisle. People were getting shoved out of the way."
After
the impact, Damien's dad, Martin said he was happy his family was seemingly unscathed.
"Waters flooding into the
cabin, and we've survived the impact," Martin Sosa recalled. "...A lot of people were valiant."
That's when Sanderson and others
sprang into action, trying to convince a mother to part with her child, even if for just a moment.
”My self and another
gentlemen were like “Get the baby out, get the baby, throw the baby , do something,” said the
Charlotte businessman who almost booked a different flight home. “And she did. And finally we both picked
her up and just threw her on the lifeboat.”
"She was terrified," Sanderson
told WNBC from the safety of his warm hospital bed Thursday night. "People on the lifeboat kept saying, 'Throw
us the baby; throw us the baby,' and she wouldn't do it."
Sanderson, a father of four
children of his own, said the woman eventually summoned the courage to part her beloved baby.
"She (threw the boy to safety),
and finally, we picked her up and threw her on the lifeboat," he said.
Sanderson said he didn't really
think about helping; he just reacted.
"I feel I am the last person to
leave the plane," he said. "That's what I was taught. It's the right thing to do."
