An Accident Goes Right

Rappaport, Glass, Greene and Levine are injury attorneys serving New York City. Since we started our practice, our priority has been helping those who have been injured due to no fault of their own receive fair and realistic compensation for their injuries. Insurance companies are more concerned with protecting their bottom lines than seeing that you are taken care of in a fair manner. It is our job to provide you with aggressive and experienced legal counsel, with the end result being that you get every penny of compensation that you are entitled to as an accident victim. If you or a loved one has been injured in an accident in the New York City area, contact Rappaport, Glass, Greene and Levine for a free legal consultation today.

“A pilot who ditched his stricken plane in New York's Hudson River following a bird strike has been hailed as a hero after all 155 people aboard survived.

Veteran flier Chesley Burnett Sullenberger III manoeuvered the US Airways Airbus A320 jet around New York's skyscrapers and pulled off an incredible landing on the water.

The plane - flight 1549 to Charlotte in North Carolina - was apparently hit by a flock of geese only minutes after take off from LaGuardia Airport.” - Bild.com

As personal injury attorneys in New York City, we often find ourselves in the position of celebrating good news only after the bad news has already happened. We celebrate when we help the victim of a Manhattan construction accident get back on his feet with a decent settlement. We celebrate when we help the victim of a car crash in the Bronx get his hospital bills handled. We celebrate when we help a woman who slipped on an unmarked wet floor in Queens get back the money she lost when she had to miss work.

Ours is a very personal niche of the legal practice, in that when you are faced with the suffering of innocent people on a daily basis, you can’t help but care about what happens to them.

Quite often, we go up against people who try to pass off accidents that occurred due to negligence or incompetence as “an act of God,” or “a random freak occurrence,” or “just one of those things that happen sometimes.” It has been our experience that the great majority of accidents don’t just “happen” as much as they are CAUSED.

So right now we are glad to say that the recent “miracle landing” of the US Airways plane in the Hudson River was the sort of outcome that we can only wish would happen all the time.

The plane did not go down because of pilot error, which is the cause of most plane accidents. It went down because a flock of geese flew into both engines. This might seem like a rather strange way for a passenger jet to go down, but it happens more often than you would think.

The pilot showed remarkable skill and bravery as he essentially glided this massive jet into a soft landing in the frigid waters of the Hudson. He then made sure that everyone was able to get out before making removing himself from the plane. His first action upon getting back onto dry land was giving a passenger manifesto to the authorities to make sure that everyone was accounted for.

Even though nobody was killed or seriously hurt, US Airways immediately sent all the passengers checks for $5000 to cover their immediate financial needs, and to top it all off they reimbursed everyone for the cost of their plane tickets.

In other words, this is the rare sort of case where everyone involved behaved perfectly. The pilot was flawless. The rescue boats were out immediately. The passengers helped one another, and the airline compensated everyone involved for their troubles.

It would be a wonderful world if every accident case out there was like this one, but unfortunately that isn’t the case. Accidents are rarely freak occurrences, the injury toll is very rarely zero, and corporations almost never simply send you a check for your troubles.

That’s where we come in.

At Rappaport, Glass, Greene and Levine, it is our job to protect the rights of the injured. We put our skill and experience to work on your behalf so you can get back on your feet and get on with your life.

If you or a loved one has been injured in an accident in New York, contact us for a free legal consultation today.