As Delta Flight 1086 from Atlanta skidded off a La Guardia runway, a fear more chilling than the falling snow passed through the panicked cabin: We’re going into the water.
“I thought I was going to swim,” Ishmael Lateel, 29, said of watching the plane careen toward Flushing Bay.
“We all went into survival mode,” the North Carolinian remembered of Thursday morning’s near-tragedy.
“My heart said we can’t go out there, but my head said there’s nothing you can do about it.”
Passenger Marques Zak, 31, called the white-knuckle, water’s-edge landing “terrifying.”
“I knew we were going to crash,” he remembered. “I was just scared we were going to hit the water — the nose of the plane was literally right at the water.”
The plane and its 127 passengers and five crew members skidded to a halt against a sea wall just feet from the bay, after 10 terrifying seconds of its left wing scraping along a flimsy chain-link fence.
Everyone on board — including Giants tight end Larry Donnell and reality-show star Jaime Primak Sullivan — was safely evacuated onto a wing and helped down by rescue workers onto the snow-covered tarmac.
At least 28 people suffered injuries, none life-threatening.
Within minutes, some passengers were even joking about their nearly amphibious landing.
“Look at this s–t!” Donnell, a 26-year-old Atlanta native, wrote in the caption to a video he posted on Instagram. The video showed disembarked passengers clomping across the snow-covered tarmac.
“Knew I shoulda stayed my ass at home,” the Giant quipped. Still, as the plane landed hard and began to barrel off line through nearly blinding snow, passengers were in no mood to laugh.
“It touched down, and there was a hard brake, then he tried the brakes again, and the plane started accelerating and sliding,” remembered passenger Roxanne Joffe.
“We knew the plane was crashing,” she said. “It was out of control, accelerating. And very bumpy. It was unstable. It was so fast. I said, ‘Holy s- -t.’ ”
Joffe, 60, was traveling from Sarasota, Fla., with husband Sam Stern, but they were not seated next to each other. They were heading to New York to get their teeth checked by her brother, a Manhattan dentist.
After about a half-minute of perilous sliding, “The nose of the plane stopped right before it went into the river,” she recalled.
Then, dead silence.
“Everybody looked around. Everybody was in shock,” she said. “I put my head between my knees.”
Her husband was elsewhere on the plane. But the young man beside her patted her back.
“He felt the same shock, but he was being kind,” she said.
One passenger announced that they were so lucky, they should all go to Las Vegas.
Joffe said she felt bad for the pilot. “He did a good job not going into the river,” she said. “He had no choice in whether to fly or not. It was the airline that made that decision.”
Passenger Mark Klaffer, 48, seemed to be only half-kidding when he said he blames himself — or at least his thumbs — for jinxing the flight.
“It’s a full flight, so that should help us slide off the runway,” Klaffer confessed to texting a pal right before takeoff.
“I actually sent that text this morning,” he admitted.