Humble Hero: Former St. James student helped rescue passengers from icy Hudson
By James McEvoy
Staff Writer
WEEHAWKEN — Vincent LuCante is called a hero by all who have heard about the role he played in rescuing passengers from the wings of a plane as it was sinking into the icy Hudson River.
But if you ask him, he was just doing what he was professionally trained to do and earlier taught in the Catholic school he attended as a child.
“You go into it knowing one day you may be called to do this,” he said.
LuCante, a port captain with New York Waterway Ferry, was going about his normal work day when US Airways Flight 1549 made an emergency landing in the Hudson River, Jan. 15.
He was approaching the work barge and received an unbelievable phone call from the home offices.
“I said ‘What?’ Then I looked out and could see the people on the wings,” LuCante said.
Despite no longer captaining ferries himself, he quickly boarded an out-of-service ferry and within five minutes of the crash arrived at the plane.
“This is how you think when you’re a mariner,” he said.
LuCante described the passengers as amazingly calm as they approached the downed aircraft.
“They were perfectly quiet, there was no panic,” he said. “They saw us coming, listened and did what we said.”
Within approximately 12 minutes, they helped transfer 24 of the 155 passengers onto his ferry, first assisting those on the wing, and then followed by others in a lifeboat that included a toddler and a nine-month-old.
There was a brief moment of fear when a person, who either slipped or could not discern where the submerged wing ended, fell into the water.
“We got him into the cabin, and then moved on to the raft,” he said.
LuCante stressed the need to be calm and clear-minded during such a crisis.
“You just step back and did one person at a time, using the same method,” he said.
The passengers’ successful rescue was also a testament to the importance of consistent training, he said.
“We didn’t have a successful evacuation by accident,” LuCante said.
He said compassion and the desire to help those in need were ideals he learned from his family and his experiences at St. James School, Woodbridge.
“It’s instilled in you,” he said. “It becomes second nature.”
The example of his family and the members of the St. James community provided the human factor of concern and kindness that complimented the rescue drills and training, he said.
LuCante is no stranger to momentous rescues, including assisting people during the New York blackouts as well as evacuating approximately 10,000 people on the morning of 9/11.
“I was there and witnessed everything that happened that day,” he said.
Despite the extraordinary circumstances that occurred on the Hudson River, LuCante said he would have responded the same way if it had been two people capsized from a yacht in July.
“We’re trained to remove people out of the water,” he said.
LuCante has been with the company for 12 years. The previous two he served as port captain; prior to that, he was a ferry captain for a decade.
Joan LuCante, Vince’s mother, still belongs to St. James Parish and expressed tremendous pride regarding her son’s heroism.
“I was not surprised,” she said. “I knew he would be right there.”
She said she was impressed with the humility he expressed throughout the whole endeavor.
“He’s so humble, he won’t say he’s a hero,” she said. “He doesn’t think like that.”
She said she was especially touched when she spoke to her exhausted son at the end of the day of the Miracle on the Hudson.
“He said, ‘I am so happy that I can say every heart is beating.’”