NEW YORK—A cool-headed pilot averted disaster with skill and “sheer luck” by ditching his crippled US Airways jet in the frigid waters of New York City’s Hudson River yesterday after losing thrust from both engines on takeoff.

All 155 people aboard Flight 1549 were rescued, an outcome hailed by New York Gov. David Paterson as a “miracle on the Hudson.”

A successful emergency landing in water is among the rarest and most dangerous feats in commercial flying.

The pilot, identified by CNN as Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger III, set down the Airbus SAS A320 gently enough to keep it afloat, and the “sheer luck” of having ferries nearby hastened the recovery of passengers in freezing weather, aviation consultant Robert Mann said.

“It’s somewhere between remarkable and miraculous; probably more miraculous,” said Mann, of R.W. Mann & Co. in Port Washington, New York.

“If you had choreographed this, you couldn’t have done any better and couldn’t have done it as quickly.”

The icy conditions of the recovery effort “make it even more remarkable,” said Peter Goelz, former managing director of the National Transportation Safety Board, which sent federal investigators to New York for the accident probe.

Temperatures were about minus 7 Celsius at the time, meaning that passengers would have risked dying of hypothermia within minutes had they been thrown into the Hudson.

The plane was submerged up to its windows in the river by the time rescuers arrived, including Coast Guard vessels and commuter ferries that happened to be nearby. Some passengers waded in water up to their knees, standing on the wing of the plane and waiting for help.

Helen Rodriguez, a paramedic who was among the first to arrive at the scene, said she saw a woman with broken legs. Fire officials said others were evaluated for hypothermia, bruises and other minor injuries. An infant on board appeared to be fine, said Mayor Micheal Bloomberg.

The accident occurred after the A320 took off from New York’s LaGuardia airport around 3 p.m. for Charlotte, North Carolina, carrying 150 passengers and five crew members.

As the plane climbed, the pilot radioed controllers that bird strikes had robbed the engines of power, said Doug Church, a spokesman for the Air Traffic Controllers Association. The pilot reported that he couldn’t return to LaGuardia or reach New Jersey’s Teterboro airport, and brought the jet down in the river, Church said.

“You can handle hitting maybe one bird, but not three or four,” Goelz said. The Federal Aviation Administration said there were reports of a large flock in the area, while saying it wasn’t sure whether the birds caused the accident.

The Federal Aviation Administration says there were about 65,000 bird strikes to civil aircraft in the United States from 1990 to 2005, or about one for every 10,000 flights.

Bloomberg told reporters that the pilot did a “masterful job” in pulling off the river landing and walked through the partially submerged jet twice to ensure that it had been cleared of people.

The pilot “was phenomenal,” said passenger Joe Hart. “He landed it—I tell you what, the impact wasn’t a whole lot more than a a rear-end [collision]. It threw you into the seat ahead of you. Both engines cut out and he actually floated it into the river.”

The crash took place on one of the coldest days of the season. The Coast Guard said the water temperature was 36 Fahrenheit.

Dave Sanderson, who was flying home to Charlotte after a business trip, said the sound of an explosion was followed by passengers running up the aisle and people being shoved out of the way.

As the plane descended, passenger Vallie Collins tapped out a message to her husband. “My plane is crashing.” He was desperately trying to figure out whether she had been on the downed plane when the message arrived.

Another passenger, Jeff Kolodjay, said people put their heads in their laps and prayed. He said the captain instructed them to “brace for impact because we’re going down.”

“It was intense. It was intense. You’ve got to give it to the pilot. He made a hell of a landing,” Kolodjay said.

Witnesses said the pilot appeared to guide the plane down. Barbara Sambriski, a researcher at the Associated Press, watched the water landing from the news organization’s high-rise office. “I just thought, ‘Why is it so low?’ And, splash, it hit the water,” she said.

As water slowly filled the cabin, Sanderson said he and another passenger helped people out onto the wing. One woman had a three-year-old child, he said, and safely tossed the toddler onto a raft before climbing on herself.

One commuter ferry, the Thomas Jefferson of NY Waterway, arrived within minutes of the crash and some of its own riders grabbed life vests and lines of rope and tossed them to plane passengers in the water.

“They were cheering when we pulled up,” said ferry captain Vincent Lombardi. “We had to pull an elderly woman out of a raft in a sling. She was crying... People were panicking. They said ‘Hurry up, hurry up.’” AP and Bloomberg