When Karin Hill and Chris Rooney boarded US Airways Flight 1549 together on January 15, 2009, neither of them thought they would end up in the middle of 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 a virtual Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, the fateful flight’s captain, who delivered a surprise champagne toast via video.
“He was a big reason for our getting married,” says Karin, who has since taken her husband’s last name. The couple weren’t even sure at the time of the crash that their relationship would last very much longer. “We were at a crossroads,” recalls Karin. “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 the parents to Elaina, 4, and Clark, 2. Had the crash not happened, says Karin, “We wouldn’t have our children.”
“It was this miraculous thing that happened and brought us closer,” says Chris.
Yet the seven-and-a-half 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 plane crash, “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 of 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 purchased tickets to visit friends in the Big Apple back 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,” says Chris. “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 saying to brace for impact. Though it wasn’t known at the time, a flock of birds had flown into the plane’s engines and stalled one.
Chris and Karin were in row 18, close to the aircraft’s middle exits, and were able to climb onto a wing pretty 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,” says Chris. “I remember seeing one person scrambling over the seats.” Within five minutes, boats arrived to rescue all 155 passengers and crew.
Following the crash, US Airways put the survivors up at the Crowne Plaza hotel next to La Guardia, 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,” says Chris.
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 watched 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 [crash].”
Though the two went home to their respective cities, the 100-mile distance didn’t weigh on their union so heavily. A month later, Chris was shopping for a ring, and in June he proposed, on 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 cliff walks. It was on one of those strolls, overlooking the bay, that Chris popped the question.
“I was shocked,” says Karin. “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, and 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.
“I think those first few months [after the crash] I had this survivor’s high,” says Karin. “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 friends from the crash, 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.
“I think it was bad for Karin because during [the crash], she didn’t look out the window. She didn’t know where we were crashing,” says Chris. “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. But that spring, she started going to various forms of counseling, trying talk therapy and other kinds of psychotherapies. But she finally 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 her 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 Elena 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 says. “I’m really careful about talking about the plane crash around her because I don’t want her to become afraid.” Elena, when she was an infant, did appear on Katie Couric’s “Katie” for a segment on babies born to victims of the Hudson River crash — where the little tyke got to meet Sully — 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,” says Karin. “We plan on telling our kids — we have pictures and clippings. But they are little.”
As for the new film, the couple hasn’t gotten a sneak preview, but they plan to see “Sully” when it comes to Fort Worth, where the family 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,” says Karin.
“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.”