Nearly everyone has heard and seen footage of the miraculous "landing" of an Airbus A320 (US Airways Flight 1549) on the Hudson River, off midtown Manhattan on January 15, 2009. The media quickly dubbed this water landing of a powerless jetliner with no deaths "the Miracle on the Hudson".
Very few people know that this was not the first miracle of that kind in history. 46 years earlier, a similar miraculous water landing happened in Soviet Leningrad.
On 21 August 1963, the aircraft Tupolev Tu-124 (Aeroflot Flight 366) took off from Tallinn-Ülemiste airport with 45 passengers and 7 crew on board. It was scheduled to fly to Vnukovo airport in Moscow. After takeoff the nose gear did not retract. Ground control diverted the flight to Pulkovo airport in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) because of foggy conditions at Tallinn. While the ground services at Pulkovo airport were preparing the dirt runway for the landing, the plane was circling the city in order to use fuel, reduce weight and decrease the risk of fire in the event of a crash.
On the eighth and last lap, the left engine suddenly stopped. The crew requested an emergency landing and was allowed to fly over the city center in a straight line. However, a few minutes later, when the aircraft was flying over the Admiralty at an altitude of 500 meters, the right engine also stopped. The plane flew silently by inertia, quickly losing speed and altitude. The co-pilot, who previously flew a seaplane, suggested emergency landing on water.
The problem was that there are too many bridges across the Neva river. The airplane passed the Bolsheokhtinsky bridge at 30 meters, and barely managed above the Alexander Nevsky bridge which was still under construction. At that point, the altitude was only 10 meters and frightened construction workers jumped into the water. Seconds later the plane smoothly "landed" on the water surface, glided through the waves and stopped 100 meters from the next bridge - Finland Railway Bridge.
The aircraft hull received several holes and began to slowly fill with water. Fortunately, there was a tugboat nearby. The captain of the tugboat saw the plane in distress and went to help. He and his crew broke the aircraft's windshield to tie a cable to the cockpit's control wheel and proceeded to tow the craft to the river bank. During the tow all passengers remained on board. Passengers and crew were then evacuated via an access hatch on the plane's roof and sent to Moscow.
According to our sources, there are 21 known cases of controlled forced landings of passenger airplanes on water. In 10 of those no one died during the landing, but in 3 out of these 10 some passengers died after evacuation from the plane. The Neva case is one of the seven without any casualties at all. Unsurprisingly, Aeroflot Flight 366 became known as "The Miracle on the Neva" - and long before the media reinvented the concept with "The Miracle on the Hudson".
