New York City – Giulio Farnese and Natale Pinetti went from ferry crewmen members to hero rescuers when the US Airways jet splashed down in front of them in the Hudson River.
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“I was completely shocked to see this plane going down – lower and lower and lower,” said Pinetti. “And then it hit, hard, into the water. It, like, sunk down, and then kind of bobbed back up.”
The New York Waterway vessel, called the Nora Smith, was heading to the New Jersey side of the Hudson when the captain quickly changed course and steamed for the downed aircraft.
The Nora Smith was the first to reach the plane, finding its doors open and shell-shocked passengers wearing inflatable yellow life preservers pouring out onto the wings of the partially submerged jet.
Pinetti and his fellow crew members stretched a stepladder from the ferry’s deck to one of the wings and helped frigid passengers cross to safety even as the flooding fuselage continued to drift down the river.
“People were slipping, the boat was not stable,” Pinetti said. “They came out onto the wings. Someone was crying and one was thanking God. They were in shock 100%.”
The jet, with 155 passengers and crew aboard, went down about 3:30 p.m. shortly after takeoff from LaGuardia Airport. Within minutes, a flotilla of NY Waterway, Circle Line, Coast Guard, NYPD and FDNY vessels were converging on the plane.
“They were cheering when we pulled up,” NY Waterway Capt. Vinny Lombardi said of the passengers.
Lombardi and his crew saved 56 people, fishing some out of the icy water on one of the coldest days of winter.
“We all said, ‘Is this happening?'” said Hector Rabanes, a member of Lombardi’s crew. “The captain said, ‘Hurry up, guys. Man overboard.’ People were panicked. People were saying, ‘The water is cold. Hurry up.'”
Alan Warren, director of ferry operations for NY Waterway, said at least 14 of his company’s boats bravely responded. “We don’t think – we do,” said Warren, explaining that his crews routinely train for all types of river emergencies.
Brittany Catanzaro, a captain with New York Waterway, and her crew helped save 24 people. Their boat was the second on the scene.
Catanzaro told CNN’s “Larry King Live” she was at Pier 79 waiting to making the crossing to Lincoln Harbor in Weehawken when she saw the plane in the frigid waters of the Hudson River.
“I looked north. I saw the plane in the water. I took a double take.”
She immediately notified her crew, and they prepared by grabbing life jackets, ropes and cradles to lift survivors into the vessel, and rushed to the scene.
“My crew got right to work. People started coming onboard,” she said.
NYPD Emergency Service Unit cops Michael McGuinness, John McKenna, James Coll and Sean Mulcahy sped to the West Side and jumped on a ferry that took them to the scene. Two of the cops tethered themselves with ropes to their partners aboard the ferry and went inside the plane to pull the last four passengers out.
Rescuers also arrived by air. NYPD divers Michael Delaney and Robert Rodriguez were dropped from helicopters and saved two women who had fallen into the 40-degree river.
Knowing that people can survive for only 10 minutes in such frigid water, the divers were confronted with a race against time.
Delaney said one woman was clinging to the side of a ferry, numb from the cold and frantic from the crash landing.
“I told her to relax. I asked her what her name was. She said, ‘Please don’t let me go.’ She thought the boat was going to run her over,” Delaney said.
Another woman had fallen from an inflatable life raft, and Delaney and Rodriguez reached her just as she was running out of strength to stay afloat.
As FDNY Capt. Richard Johnson, 52, piloted his 27-foot Marine One Alpha boat to the scene, he feared the worst.
“We were very concerned there would be bodies in the water,” said Johnson, among the first firefighters to reach the stranded passengers.
Johnson said he was afraid people standing on the wings of the plane would jump in the water to reach his boat. He was relieved that the passengers remained orderly and the rescue went smoothly.
“No one jumped the line,” Johnson said. “We tried to tell them women first. But we had to take who was in our reach first.”
Passenger Wendell Fox, a retired cop from Charlotte, N.C., told Gov. Paterson how thankful he was for the lightning-quick response.
“He’s participated in these types of rescues,” Paterson said. “He’s never seen anything as magnificent as coming off a plane into the water and looking up and seeing all those ferries coming to rescue them.”
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