Flickr user Greg L.

Following the weekend's scary yet ultimately uplifting news of another plane crashing into the Hudson without killing anyone, we revisited the infamous Flight 1549 crash.

Maryann Bruce, a passenger on the plane that Captain "Sully" Sullenberger successfully ditched in the river back in 2009, told us about what it's like when the plane you're on falls into the Hudson River.

What did it feel like when your flight was going down, and when it hit the water?

I'm kind of an interesting person to ask, because my response will be very different from everyone else's. There were 150 passengers, so if you speak to 150 passengers, you'll get 150 different stories. I fly so often that I realized there was a problem with the engines. I figured we hit birds and would make an emergency landing. There was an off-duty pilot sitting behind me; I looked at him and said, "Are we going to make an emergency landing at LaGuardia?" He said yes, very calmly. When he seemed to be calm, I went back to reading the newspaper. I was thinking, 'Oh, I'm going to be late getting home, what a pain in the ass.'

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Flickr user Greg L

This is happening again, albiet on a much smaller scale.

Ah, the Hudson River! It looks so damn majestic as it flows beneath the George Washington Bridge, and it maintains a nice, wide barrier between us and Jersey City. Oh yeah,
and it swallow planes whole. It's a simultaneously heart-warming and bone-chilling landmark.

In utterly terrifying news, a small plane plummeted into the Hudson yesterday near Yonkers. The Yonkers PD say only two people were on board the aircraft, which hit the
water around 5:20 p.m. Fortunately, both passengers survived the accident and were fished out of the river by local off-duty cops (New York Daily News has pictures of the rescuers here).

The two survivors, an unidentified man and woman, had to float around for 20 to 30 minutes before being rescued; both required treatment for hypothermia.

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On the way to a Sweet 16 in New Jersey, Daniel Fernandez, a 16-year-old from Sayreville, was one of 65 passengers on Designer Limo's double-decker party buses. The party-goers had just crossed the George Washington Bridge and merging onto the I-95 when something went terribly, terribly wrong. More »

Some months after the City Council grilled the New York Police Department's policy on of traffic crashes -- and ongoing criticism of its handling of the Mathieu Lefevre case -- several members want to establish a taskforce to investigate the Department's accident policy, which has long come under fire as anti-pedestrian and anti-cyclist.

Council Members David Greenfield, Letitia James, Brad Lander, Stephen Levin, Peter Vallone, and James Vacca announced this morning that they want to create a 15-member group charged with analyzing the NYPD's definition of "serious injury," as officers do not investigate accidents unless they think the hurt party is dead or likely to die. Lander, Levin, and Council Member Jessica Lapin have also proposed a law that would require the NYPD to publish crash info online. Members Melissa Mark-Viverito, Dan Garodnick, and Robert Jackson also back the package of proposals.

Transportation Alternatives, which advocates for pedestrians and cyclists, has long called for this legislation and been especially vocal in its criticism of the NYPD since the Lefevre incident.

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Associated Press

At around 3am this morning, a Mercedes Benz SUV carrying eight people was traveling fast down Atlantic Avenue near the Van Wyck Expressway. The car suddenly struck a beam for the AirTrain to JFK International Airport and spun out of control, flipping the SUV on its side. Immediately after, the vehicle burst into flames and responders who arrived soon after found the Benz on its passenger side and in flames.

Mathieu Lefevre's family and the NYPD had their day in court yesterday.

As the mother of slain cyclist Mathieu Lefevre sat stoically in the second row of the gallery, lawyers for the New York Police Department tried to explain to a judge why it has taken more than five months to comply with her Freedom of Information request information about how he died.

Questioned by Supreme Court Judge Peter Moulton, the Lefevre family's lawyer, Steve Vaccaro, laid out the history of the case. For weeks after Lefevre's death, the NYPD refused to provide the family with any information about its investigation into Lefevre's death -- in fact, it was more communicative with the truck driver who killed Lefevre, and with the press, who were told by officers soon after the crash that there was no criminality in Lefevre's death.

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Dexter Miranda

Mathieu Lefevre

Six months to the day after Mathieu Lefevre was killed by a truck driver who ran over his bicycle in an East Williamsburg intersection, his family's lawsuit against the NYPD will be argued in New York Supreme Court this afternoon.

Judge Peter Moulton has denied a motion to allow Lefevre's mother, Erika, to testify, so today's hearing will consist only of lawyers' oral arguments.

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Dexter Miranda

Will the case of Mathieu Lefevre make the NYPD reconsider how it treats fatal bike crashes?

Mathieu Lefevre was hardly the first cyclist killed on the streets of New York City, nor was the driver who ran him over the first to get a pass from the NYPD. Lefevre's family members weren't the first ones to be stonewalled as they tried to get details on how the police investigate fatal bike crashes.

But Lefevre's case is increasingly becoming a watershed moment in the long struggle of bicycle safety advocates to change how the police approach bicycle safety. The Lefevre family's lawsuit against the police department has already drawn media attention and prompted a City Council hearing. Now, an amicus brief from City Councilor Brad Lander and the advocacy group Transportation Alternatives is turning up the heat even more.

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C.S. Muncy

Occupy Wall Street roared back to life yesterday, as protesters marched and attempted to re-occupy Zuccotti Park. They were met by police who closed the park and violently arrested occupiers. Head over to the account by the Voice's Nick Pinto, who was on the scene, along with photographer C.S. Muncy. In his piece, Pinto explains that "the day would become a sort of a condensed repetition of Occupy's history, as protesters marched, set up shop in Zuccotti Park, clashed with police, were arrested in significant numbers, and were ultimately re-evicted, as police forcefully dragged them from the public plaza and re-erected the barricades blocking off the park." As of 9:07 a.m. DCPI did not have a total number of arrests. [Runnin' Scared]

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The slow trickle of evidence in Lefevre's death continues.

When Mathieu Lefevre was thrown from his bicycle and killed by a truck in Brooklyn last October, his case became Exhibit A for cycling advocates who have argued for years that bicyclists killed on the streets of New York almost never get justice from the police.

That complaint is finally reaching policy-makers. Lefevre's mother was one of many who testified at a City Council hearing on the issue last month. But from the beginning, the Lefevre family's quest has been about something even more fundamental than fair treatment of cyclists. They just want some basic transparency from the NYPD.

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