Old Hands on the River Didn’t Have to Be Told What to Do
Around 3:30 on Thursday afternoon, Capt. Carl Lucas fired up the engines on the Athenia...
Then he spotted a plane in the water.
“We just threw off the lines and went out there,” said Captain Lucas, 34.
At the same pier, Capt. John Winiarski, 52, and a deckhand, Frank Illuzzi, 62, were on board the catamaran the Admiral Richard E. Bennis. They noticed the Athenia speeding away.
“We seen them scurrying out into the river, so we turned around and saw the plane in the river,” Captain Winiarski said. “We made a beeline.”
And so it went: a flotilla of rescuers, created by people who caught glimpses of something going wrong and did not have to be told to help. The Athenia, the Admiral Bennis and 12 other boats — all operated or chartered by New York Waterway — picked 135 people out of the river. The crews stopped their work and changed the world.
“You don’t look nowhere,” said Cosmo Mezzina, 62, a deckhand on the ferry the Governor Thomas H. Kean. “You don’t look right or left. You just look right in front of you, just to save, to rescue those people.”
One of the ferry captains, Manuel Liba, ticked off the strokes of fortune: the pilot brought the plane down smoothly, the Hudson was calm, it was daylight and it was 45 minutes before the evening rush on the river.
There was more than luck. On a bitter, frigid afternoon, the plane had come down minutes from people who regularly practice helping. The first ferry to reach it was the Thomas Jefferson, which pulled out of Pier 79 on the Hudson River at 39th Street in Manhattan. “As we turned around, we noticed the plane in the water,” said Vincent Lombardi, captain of the Thomas Jefferson. “We thought it was an odd-looking vessel.”
He radioed the Coast Guard, then headed for the plane. The arrival of the Thomas Jefferson can be seen on a Coast Guard video at 3:34 p.m., about four or five minutes after the plane hit the water. Other videos show more ferries nestled around the jet, drifting alongside as it was pulled south by the current.
“I’ve been on the water since I was 2 years old,” said Brittany Catanzaro, 20, the captain of the Thomas Kean and a ferry pilot for five months.
“I pulled out of Pier 79, I looked for any kind of southbound traffic, and I saw the plane there,” Captain Catanzaro said. “It was hard to stay next to it, but you practice that by throwing life rings in the water and trying to stay alongside them.
“One of the people got on board, turned around and hugged my deckhand. We’re just working as if we’re training and drilling.”
Each of the captains hailed the ferry deckhands — as well a ticket agent and bus driver — for hoisting people from the water.
The last person to leave a life raft was Chesley B. Sullenberger III, the captain of the US Airways flight. He climbed aboard the Athenia after everyone else had been lifted to safety. “Very calm,” Captain Lucas reported. “He had a metal clipboard with the passenger manifest. He came up into the wheelhouse, and we tried to organize a count of who was recovered from the water. I asked him if he thought there was anyone left on the plane. He said no, that he had checked twice himself.”...
“You train so much, you don’t have to think about it,” Captain Lucas said. “I didn’t have to give any orders to the crew.” ...
“We were getting the boat ready, and we saw the plane going down,” said Captain Liba, 52, who pilots the ferry Moira Smith. “We called management, we said, ‘We got to go.’ We just took off for the airplane. Right away, the doors flew out from the plane, and people came out...
Thank you Carl Lucas, John Winiarski, Frank Illuzzi, Cosmo Mezzina, Manuel Liba, Vincent Lombardi, Brittany Catanzaro and all the others whose names we do not have.