OUR LITTLE MIRACLES
Sully landed ded us our two angels
Karin and Chris Rooney ( left) were aboard the nearly doomed US Airways Flight 1549 on Jan. 15, 2009, and unsure of their future together when the plane suddenly went down off Manhattan. Pilot Chesley “Sully” Sullen- berger’s (inset) “Miracle on the Hudson” landing brought them so close, they married and started a family. “We wouldn’t have our children” without him, Karin says.
WHEN Karin Hill and Chris Rooney boarded US Airways Flight 1549 together on Jan. 15, 2009, neither thought they would end up in the Hudson River.
But they also never imagined that less than a year later, they would be saying, “I do” — or that their wedding would include Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, the flight’s captain, who delivered a surprise toast via video.
“He was a big reason for our getting married,” says Karin, who has taken her husband’s last name.
At the time of the crash-landing, the couple wasn’t sure their relationship would last much longer. “We were at a crossroads,” Karin recalls. “We had been together three years, and I loved Chris, and he loved me, but I didn’t know where the relationship was going.”
Now, Chris and Karin, both 31, are parents of two kids, Elaina, 4, and Clark, 2. Without Flight 1549, Karin says, “We wouldn’t have our children.”
“It was this miraculous thing that happened and brought us closer,” Chris says.
Yet the 7¹/2 years since the “Miracle on the Hudson” have held challenges for the couple, including anxiety, a fear of flying and deep depression. And with a new film about the incident, “Sully,” starring Tom Hanks as Sullenberger, opening Friday, they’re processing the experience all over again.
Chris and Karin met in 2004 as freshmen at the University of Colorado Boulder, and the fast friends started dating in 2006. But by the time they came to New York City in January 2009, the two were living in different cities: Karin had taken time off from school and was working as a caregiver in Boulder, while Chris was an engineer in Colorado Springs.
The couple had bought tickets to visit friends in the Big Apple in the summer of 2008, and by December their relationship was foundering. “I was just like, ‘ OK, we just need to get through New York, and then we can have a discussion,’ ” recalls Karin, now a foster-care recruiter.
That discussion never happened. Instead, on the last day of their vacation, Chris and Karin boarded Flight 1549, bound for Charlotte, NC, where they had a connecting flight to Boulder.
Within a few minutes of takeoff, the plane started to shake.
“It sounded like an explosion,” Chris says. “Karin and I looked at each other, and she had tears in her eyes, and I put my arm around her and lied through my teeth, saying we would be OK.”
The plane made a left turn, and Chris looked out the window and saw water. “I thought, ‘If we’re not making it back to the airport, we have one option, and it’s the river,’ ” he recalls. Thirty seconds later, the couple heard Sullenberger on the loudspeaker telling the passengers to brace for impact. The plane had hit a flock of geese, knocking out both of its engines.
Chris and Karin were in Row 18, close to the middle exits, and were able to climb out onto a wing quickly. “In the back, where people could feel the brunt of the impact more, it was chaotic, especially since the water was filling up and they couldn’t use the back exits,” Chris says. “I remember seeing one person scrambling over the seats.” Within five minutes, boats arrived to rescue all 155 passengers and crew.
FOLLOWING the water landing, US Airways put the passengers up at the Crowne Plaza hotel next to La Guardia Airport, where the couple stayed for two days. The friends Chris and Karin had been visiting came over, and Chris’ father, then a pilot for Aloha Airlines, jumped on a plane and flew all night from Hawaii to be by his son’s side the next morning. “It was a big comfort,” Chris says.
The next day, they decided to go into Manhattan to grab some pizza. “We called US Airways and asked if they could get us a cab — they got us a limo,” Chris says.
When they arrived home, they were met by family and friends cheering and holding signs. Karin relished telling their survival story and being with her family, and Chris saw his girlfriend with new eyes. “I just had this overwhelming sense of wanting to protect her,” he says. “I kept thinking I wish she didn’t have to go through that.”
Although the two went home to their respective cities, the 100-mile distance suddenly didn’t weigh so heavily on their relationship.
A month later, Chris was shopping for a ring, and in June he proposed during a vacation to Newport, RI. It was the couple’s first airplane ride since the incident in January — a huge milestone — and they spent their days sailing and going on long walks on the cliffs. It was on one of those strolls, overlooking the bay, that Chris popped the question.
“I was shocked,” Karin says. “We were sitting on this rock and I was thinking, ‘You know, it’s OK if Chris isn’t ready to get married, because we’re building memories and conquering our fears, and I’m flying again, and he’s worth waiting for.’ And then he stood up and proposed!”
The couple got married that New Year’s Eve in a Boulder church. Although they had invited Sully and his Flight 1549 copilot, Jeff Skiles, neither could make it. So instead Sully decided to surprise them, reaching out to Karin’s dad to arrange a video toast for the reception. In it, he told the happy couple, “Remember, you’re a team.”
In addition to a traditional wedding cake, Chris got a groom’s cake with a Miracle on the Hudson theme — topped with a toy plane sitting in a pool of blue icing in front of a lit-up Statue of Liberty.
Karin moved in with Chris, driving back to Boulder for social-work classes. In January, just a couple of weeks after their nuptials, the couple flew to New York City for a Flight 1549 reunion. That’s when things started to go wrong.
‘Ithink those first few months [after the crash-landing] I had this survivor’s high,” Karin says. “And it was like, ‘Well, of course we should be happy. We just survived this crazy experience.’ And we were really happy. And then went to the reunion, and by March, I was like, ‘ Something is not right.’ ”
Chris and Karin were excited to see their fellow passengers, who had gotten close through Facebook and online groups. But flying in and out of La Guardia, on that same fated flight path, proved to be too much.
That trip, Chris says, “was bad for Karin.” He chalks it up to how differently the Miracle on the
We were 24 when the reality of life hit us, and that was hard, but it’s given us this wisdom and empathy. Karin Rooney, on her and her husband's experience as passengers aboard US Airways Flight 1549
Hudson had played out for each of them. “During [the emergency], she didn’t look out the window. She didn’t know where we were crashing,” Chris says. “So I went from, ‘Crap, we’re going to die!’ to ‘Hey, we’re alive!’ where she went from, ‘Oh, we’re going back to the airport,’ to ‘Oh, my God, we went in the river and we could drown and die.’ ”
“I became obsessed with death and dying,” Karin says. That spring, she started going to counseling, trying talk therapy and other kinds of psychotherapies. She settled on a kind of counseling called EMDR, or eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing, which was developed to help patients suffering from trauma. “Within a month, I felt like I was getting a better handle on my anxiety and catastrophic thoughts,” she says. She went every week for a year.
But Karin was still anxious about flying, and when Chris asked her, in April 2011, if she wanted to accompany him on a work trip to Paris, she balked. “At first, I was like, ‘ No way. I am not flying over the ocean,’ ” she recalls. “But then I thought, ‘ Why am I letting this experience dictate my life and letting fear rule me?’ ”
In Paris, Karin got pregnant with their first child, Elaina. “It was like I conquered a fear,” she says, “and then this awesome blessing of our little girl came from that.”
KARIN no longer goes to counseling, but she admits she still gets nervous on planes, especially when flying with her kids.
“One time, we were flying somewhere, and there was a dog on the plane, and Elaina turned to me and said something about how the dog will help us if we crash in the water. I was like, ‘Wow, where did she get that?’ ” she recalls. “I’m really careful about talking about the plane crash around her because I don’t want her to become afraid.”
As an infant, Elaina appeared on Katie Couric’s talk show, “Katie,” meeting Sully during a segment on babies born to those aboard Flight 1549. But for the most part, the parents try to keep mum about the incident around their two children.
“Elaina does know that there is a movie coming out about a pilot we know whose flight we were on, but we haven’t told her it crashed in the water,” Karin says. “We plan on telling our kids — we have pictures and clippings. But they are little.”
The couple hasn’t gotten a preview of the film, but they plan to see “Sully” when it comes to Fort Worth, Texas, where they moved two months ago for Chris’ job.
“We were 24 when the reality of life hit us, and that was hard, but it’s given us this wisdom and empathy,” Karin says.
“I think it would have been a lot harder had not everyone survived,” Chris adds. “But it feels more like a celebration than anything else.”