“Miracle on the Hudson” hero Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger has told Metro before how he opposes Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s plan to build a waste-transfer station next to LaGuardia Airport.
Now Sully’s taking his opinions to the airwaves.
Sullenberger will be part of a radio ad campaign that criticizes the plan. The ads will hit airwaves tomorrow, Tuesday.
Critics, including Sully, say the trash station will attract birds by the thousand — just like the Canadian geese that flew into the engines of his plane in 2009 and forced him to make an emergency landing on the Hudson River.
The waste transfer station “will attract birds into the path of oncoming flights, putting thousands of lives at risk, including passengers in the sky and citizens on the ground,” Sully says in the ads.
“The birds will learn that there’s food there, and they will keep returning,” Sully told Metro earlier this year about the plan.
And it’s not just geese, he said — garbage will attract all kinds of birds, any of which could be a threat.
Construction has already started on the garbage facility, located 735 yards from one of LaGuardia’s runways.
Ken Paskar is head of the group Friends of LaGuardia, which sued the city in 2011 to prevent it from opening. The group said birds will flock to the North Shore Marine Transfer Station, drawn to the estimated 3,000 tons of garbage the facility is expected to handle every day.
“Have you ever stood on the beach and thrown a potato chip in the air? A hundred birds come,” he told Metro earlier this year. “One potato chip brings a whole flock. Three thousand tons is insane.”
