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After my call, Lorrie lay down on the bed in our bedroom. She wasn’t crying, but she was shaking really hard. My call had been a shock. She called a close friend and said, “Sully just crashed an airplane and I don’t know what to do.” Her friend told her, “Go get your girls.” So she got the girls out of school and brought them home.

WHILE STILL on the ferry, I began running through my mental checklist of other things I should be doing. I knew that US Airways was well aware of the incident through Air Traffic Control, but I thought I’d better give the airline a sense of the situation from my end.

Every flight has an airline dispatcher assigned to monitor it. The dispatchers work at their computers in a large, windowless room at the US Airways Operations Control Center in Pittsburgh, and they each track many flights at the same time.

I called Bob Haney, who was on duty that day as US Airways’ airline operations manager, and after a few rings he picked up.

“This is Bob,” he said. His delivery was clipped, and there was an intensity in his voice.

“This is Captain Sullenberger,” I said.

“I can’t talk now,” he told me. “There’s a plane down in the Hudson!”

“I know,” I said. “I’m the guy.” He was momentarily speechless. He couldn’t believe that the pilot from the aircraft in the Hudson, a scene he was watching on TV at that moment, was calling his desk phone. Given the gravity of the situation, we quickly began discussing the matters at hand. But I’d later smile at the memory of how he tried to cut me off at the beginning of our conversation with breaking news. “There’s a plane down in the Hudson!” Yes, I knew about that.

The Athena docked at Manhattan’s Pier 79, let us off, and then went back one more time to the plane to make sure no one was left behind. By 6:15 P.M., it would return to duty shuttling commuters back and forth across the Hudson, its seats still wet from the soaking Flight 1549 survivors.

As soon as I stepped onto the pier at the ferry terminal, I was met by US Airways captain Dan Britt, our union rep at LaGuardia. He had seen the television coverage at his home in New York, put on his uniform, and come down to be with me and Jeff.

I asked him to help me get answers and updates, and we both started making calls, verifying that the injured were being treated. I walked over to Doreen, who was on a gurney and was being treated by an EMT. She was the most seriously injured, with a gash in her leg, and would remain hospitalized for several days. I gathered together the rest of the crew, and included our two other airline pilot passengers, American Airlines first officer Susan O’Donnell and Colgan Air’s Derek Alter, who had given his shirt to a passenger in the raft.

Some passengers had been taken to the New Jersey side of the river and the rest came to New York, so it was hard to keep track. I desperately wanted a tally of all those who had been rescued, but I was still unable to get any kind of confirmation. The authorities kept asking me for the manifest. On domestic flights, the crew is not given one. US Airways would spend some time constructing one from the electronic records of the flight.

Police were everywhere, and a high-ranking police officer told me that Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly wanted me to go see them at another location. I had to decline. “I have responsibilities here,” I said. And so Mayor Bloomberg and Commissioner Kelly ended up coming to the ferry terminal to ask me a few questions. I was too concerned about the passenger issues to have a real conversation with them. I gave them a short update and that was it. “I made sure everyone was off the airplane,” I told them. “We’re trying to find out if they’re all accounted for.”

Much discussion took place about where the crew and I should go next. Eventually we were taken to the hospital to be evaluated and have our vital signs checked. All the while I kept asking and asking, “What’s the total?”

After we were examined in the emergency room and were told we were all