What was perhaps the most riveting story in New York on Thursday afternoon had almost nothing to do with finance: a US Airways plane that plunged into the Hudson River on the West Side of Manhattan.
But there was still a banking angle to the story. Among the roughly 150 people on the plane, which was bound for Charlotte, N.C., were employees from both Bank of America and Wells Fargo. Authorities said everyone was safely escorted off the plane.
Bank of America, the troubled Charlotte-based bank, said 23 employees were aboard the plane. Wells Fargo, which acquired Charlotte-based Wachovia, had three employees on board.
A Wells Fargo spokeswoman told Dow Jones Newswires that “all three are safe.”
Bankers figured prominently in another aircraft crash that ended in a New York river. As DealBook’s Andrew Ross Sorkin reported in 2005, a helicopter carrying top executives from MBNA, the credit card giant, fell into the East River.
No one was seriously hurt. But days later, the deal that the MBNA executives had come to negotiate in secret was, as the company failed to sell itself to Wachovia. MBNA quickly sold itself to Bank of America for $35 billion.
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