Rescue Warriors

by David Helvarg

  “They’d back off and then bring the helicopter forward so that the rotors were actually hitting alder branches. I’m still clinging to the mountain, mostly face to the rock. Then I felt the cable hit the back of my helmet as it swung in. I thought, ‘This is probably my only chance.’ So I let go, spun around in the air, and grabbed the cable. I slide down it and land on the kid. I landed on top of him, and he didn’t even say anything. I sat on him and hooked back into the cable, and they started to bring us up only it [the litter] was snagging on the side of the mountain and rocking. There was this rock overhang like a nose, but the floatation [pads on the rescue litter] caught the rock and acted like a roller, and we’re hanging on as the basket tilts ninety degrees.

  “The helicopter backs off at that point. We’re now hovering at sixteen hundred feet, and we get [winched] up to the door and are pulled in. This fifteen-year-old kid—his eyes were still so big, and [pilot] Harl [Romine] looks around and says, ‘Why are you cradling your hand like that?’ I look down and realize I’ve smashed a finger but hadn’t noticed till then. So we land in this little town of Whittier right below the mountain, and the whole town is there, and his mom was crying like she didn’t know whether to kill him or hug him.

  “Later that night [back at the air station], I woke up screaming, and one of the crew in another rack says, ‘What happened?’

  “‘I fell,’ I told him. ‘Only it was in the dream. In real life I survived.’ ”

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  escue Swimmer John Green had a similar moment on a jack-up oil rig called Ocean Crusader back in the summer of 2000. An explosion and gas fire had trapped more than fifty crewmen twenty-five miles off the coast of Louisiana. His Dolphin 65 was the first responder on scene that night. After they landed, Green volunteered to stay on the burning rig so they could start to evacuate four men at a time (the 65 was notoriously underpowered at the time). After the first eight men were flown to another rig, a workboat arrived, and additional men were lowered 120 feet down to it on the rig’s crane. Working in tandem, the workboat and helicopter were able to get most of the crew off the burning platform. A second 65 arrived and, pushing its capacity, was able to take the last three men. Green waited behind for his copter to finish refueling on a nearby platform. Soon it was making its final approach toward him.

  Just then the Ocean Crusader exploded in an orange fireball that enveloped the entire platform. Knocked to his knees but partially protected by a steel shipping container converted to an office, Green grabbed a radio and called the 65, whose crew was convinced they’d just seen him incinerated. “If you guys are going to come get me, this would be a good time,” he told them.

  Green made his way back to the helicopter pad, which was now completely engulfed by thick black smoke. The 65’s crew couldn’t see him or the pad and told him he should maybe jump, but dropping over a hundred feet into a dark ocean didn’t appeal to his survival instinct.

  As the helicopter inched its way toward the rig, its rotor wash cleared some of the smoke away from the landing pad so that its mechanic was able to lean out the door and direct the pilot even closer. At that point Green decided he couldn’t wait any longer. He took a running leap off the platform’s edge and through the 65’s open door next to the startled flight mechanic, slamming hard against the opposite bulkhead. “He’s in! Up! Up! Up! Let’s go!” the mech screamed. As they lifted away, they were rocked by a second massive explosion. The heat and blast from this one actually pushed them out of the death zone of the now raging inferno.

  Martha LaGuardia-Kotite, a former Coast Guard officer whose book So Others May Live profiles fourteen swimmer rescues, titled her chapter on John Green’s cinematic escape “The Perfect Rig.”

  That was before rescue swimmers got their own Hollywood action movie, The Guardian, released in 2006 and starring Kevin Costner and Ashton Kutcher. In the previous fifty years there had been only two feature films about the Coast Guard, both highly forgettable comedies, 1958’s Onionhead, starring Andy Griffith (“The ship’s cook who has the Coast Guard in a stew!”), and Walt Disney’s 1970 The Boatniks (“Man the laffboats!”).

  Still, a number of books have been written about Coast Guard aviation rescues, including the rescue of more than five hundred passengers and crew from the cruise ship Prinsendam that caught fire and sank in the Gulf of Alaska in 1980. The mostly elderly passengers were successfully airlifted onto the deck of an oil tanker.

  Two books were written about the attempted rescue of five fishermen forced to abandon their boat, the La Conte, in mountainous seventy-foot seas in the Gulf of Alaska in 1998. Three survived the great storm and two died, including the captain, who hung on to the bottom of a rescue basket as another fisherman was being hoisted into a Jayhawk helicopter in 100 mph winds. After being repeatedly banged, unseen, against the lip of the aircraft door by two crewmen trying to pull the basket in, the boat captain made momentary eye contact with one of them before falling a hundred feet back into the raging sea below. Three HH-60s and a C-130 participated in that harrowing search and rescue effort.

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  long with its 144 helicopters, the Coast Guard depends on thirty-three muscular C-130 four-engine Hercules aircraft that can stay aloft for twelve hours at a time, as well as over a dozen agile but aging Falcon jets (gradually being replaced by two-engine Spanish CASA transport planes). It also owns two business jets, a Challenger and a Gulfstream for the admirals.

  While best known for search and rescue, HH-65 Dolphin helicopters deployed on cutters and icebreakers also carry out counterdrug, fisheries, scientific, and migrant interdiction missions. HH-60 Jayhawks are used for search and rescue, marine safety, and homeland security, Falcons and CASAs (now known as Ocean Sentries) are good for search and rescue and surveillance, and C-130s act as flying air-control platforms, do long-range fisheries and ice patrols, and provide logistical support for the full range of Coast Guard missions.

  It’s not surprising that Coast Guard Aviation, which makes up around 10 percent of the service with some 4,100 people, including 1,200 pilots and 380 rescue swimmers, plays such a significant role in the service, given that the Coast Guard was there at the birth of modern aviation.

  Flying Boats, Pelicans, and Dolphins

  The Wright brothers, Wilbur and Orville, launched the first heavier-than-air flying machine on a cold, empty Outer Banks beach near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on December 17, 1903. That first short, transforming flight of 120 feet by brother Orville lying prone on the lower wing was photographed by Surfman John T. Daniels from the nearby Kill Devil Hills Life-Saving Station.

  The station’s captain, Jesse Etheridge Ward, allowed his crew to help the brothers out when off duty. They brought mail and supplies and shared meals with the brothers and also acted as the first powered aircraft’s first aircrew, helping to assemble the “Wright Flyer” and carrying it to its launch rail. After the first flight, the surfmen helped drag the Flyer back to the rail until, on its fourth and final flight, it flew over 852 feet, staying airborne for almost a full minute.

  When a gust of wind then began to flip the aircraft, John Daniels jumped on a wing to try to hold it down. He was flipped and tumbled with the machine, falling fifteen feet to the sand, becoming the first modern aviation casualty if you count bumps and scrapes. He picked himself up, and he and the other surfmen helped the Wright brothers drag the damaged aircraft back into its hanger. That would be John T. Daniels’s last flight until, in 1953, on the fiftieth anniversary of that historic day, he agreed to ride along as a passenger in a Coast Guard helicopter.

  In 1916, the year after the modern Coast Guard was founded, two lieutenants, Elmer Stone and Charlie Sugden, began experimenting with a Curtiss flying boat thinking it might be useful for search and rescue. They won over their boss, Capt. Ben Chiswell of the cutter Onondaga, to the value of airplanes. He was eventually dubbed “the father of Coast Guard Aviation,” even though he was a boat driver, not an Airedale (an early term for fliers still favo
red by sailors).

  The Coast Guard ran a naval air station in France during World War I, although the service didn’t establish its own until 1920. That was in Morehead City, North Carolina. Today there are twenty-four Coast Guard air stations throughout the United States, including major ones in Elizabeth City, North Carolina; Clearwater, Florida; Mobile, Alabama; and Kodiak, Alaska.

  An early aircraft rescue involved a boy in a skiff who drifted thirty miles off Cape Canaveral, Florida, in January 1933. By the time the seaplane Arcturus located the small boat, the boy was fighting rough seas and trailing sharks with darkness approaching and the closest Coast Guard vessels over eighty miles away.

  Lt. Cdr. Carl Von Paulsen, the pilot of the Arcturus, decided to make a water landing in twelve-foot seas, twice what the plane was certified for. The impact crumpled the left wing. Four of the crew stood on the right wing to keep the aircraft balanced while the radioman entered the shark-infested waters to retrieve the boy and begin repairs.

  After a rough patch job and with the recovered survivor aboard, they took off again, though this time the rolling seas tore a pontoon away. Unable to keep the plane stable, they were forced to make a crash landing that damaged the flying boat’s hull. Attempts to taxi the plane or deploy a sea anchor failed, though they were able to jury-rig an antenna and signal an SOS. After that the aircraft drifted for hours until it hit surf and beached itself on a sandy shoal at about one in the morning. The crew waded ashore with the boy. They all received Gold Lifesaving Medals.

  Two years later, in 1935, Chief Warrant Officer Charles “Daddy” Thrun, the service’s third pilot and first enlisted pilot, became the Coast Guard’s first aviator to die in the line of duty after his Grumman F-2 Duck overturned on takeoff in the cold waters off Cape May, New Jersey.

  Forty-seven years later, Lt. Colleen Cain, the service’s third female pilot and first female helicopter pilot, would become the first woman aviator to die in the line of duty. She was copiloting a Sea Guardian helicopter on a rescue mission when it hit the side of a mountain on Molokai, Hawaii. Her two crewmates, Cdr. Buzz Johnson and Aviation Survivalman David Thompson, were also killed.

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  hile fixed-wing aircraft would change the nature of transportation and warfare in the twentieth century and beyond, it was a different kind of aircraft that would come to be identified with Coast Guard search and rescue.

  On December 7, 1941, as Japanese pilots launched their surprise attack on the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, Coast Guard pilot Lt. Frank “Swede” Erickson stood in the air control tower on Ford Island, watching the precision slaughter taking place around him.

  “The control tower did not prove to be a target[;] however, it could have been destroyed with one bomb,” he later wrote in a letter to the Sikorsky helicopter company. “These Japs were plenty accurate with their dive bombing and strafing. Every dive looked as if it were coming our way but evidently their plans did not include our tower. Within a radius of a mile and a half 2,000 men were killed and many thousands of others were wounded, most of whom were burned by the thick fuel oil covering the harbor. The long lines of oil covering wounded men coming ashore stand out in my memory.”

  Erickson was frustrated and angry seeing these sailors struggling and drowning in the water, knowing the Coast Guard had no easy way of saving them. He recalled an article he’d read in Aero magazine about Dr. Igor Sikorsky and the helicopter he’d invented and made a conceptual leap that day of infamy, seeing the helicopter as a future tool for maritime rescue. “It is perfectly feasible to equip these machines with a stretcher which can be lowered 25 or 30 feet in hovering flight to remove men from jungles, very high ground or the open sea where even the helicopter cannot land,” he wrote the company in that letter, which he mailed a short time later.

  Along with Erickson, a big bulldog of an extrovert, several other Coasties, including his friend Cdr. Bill Kossler, chief of aviation engineering, became advocates for rotary-wing aircraft. They saw the helicopter as having all the advantages and none of the drawbacks of large unwieldy Navy blimps. Still the service’s seaplane pilots remained skeptical.

  In 1943, Coast Guard Commandant Russell Waesche went to Bridgeport, Connecticut, to observe a Sikorsky helicopter in operation. He was so impressed he got the Navy to put the Coast Guard in charge of helicopter development for both services.

  By then Kossler had arranged Erickson’s transfer to Air Station Floyd Bennett Field, Brooklyn. As the military’s first helicopter pilot, he began training other Coast Guard pilots and working on the use of helicopters for antisubmarine warfare, including techniques for landing on and taking off from ships’ decks. By the end of 1943, all Allied helicopter pilots were training in Brooklyn. Among his many innovations, Erickson developed flight simulators and a rescue harness to winch a person into a helicopter. There’s a 1944 picture of Dr. Igor Sikorsky dangling in a harness just below the door of a copter being piloted by Erickson. Swede Erickson also developed the first Coast Guard rescue basket and flew the first actual helicopter rescue mission on January 3, 1944.

  The USS Turner, a destroyer anchored off Sandy Hook, New Jersey, exploded and sank that day in an unexplained accident that killed 100 crewmen and injured 163. The survivors were brought to a hospital, where blood plasma was soon running low. With roads and runways blocked by falling snow, a call went out to Erickson, who, along with Lt. Walter Bolton, volunteered to pick up plasma at Battery Park and fly it across the New York Bight. They made it from Brooklyn to the southern tip of Manhattan in buffeting winds and near zero visibility, at which point Bolton had to get out to keep the helicopter light enough to fly on with two cases of plasma strapped to its landing floats. Erickson lifted off, flying backward away from the trees until he was able to spin around over the water and fly on through the snow squalls to a successful landing in New Jersey, where the plasma was put to immediate use.

  In April 1945, a Royal Canadian Air Force PBY crashed in Labrador, Newfoundland. All nine men aboard survived, although two were burned. Ski-equipped planes tried to rescue them. One crashed, and the other was able to get the two injured out but got bogged down on its next attempted takeoff from the isolated crash site.

  With only eight days of food left, a new approach was needed. A helicopter was disassembled in Brooklyn and flown on board a C-54 cargo plane to Goose Bay, Labrador, where it was reassembled. U.S. Coast Guard Lt. August Kleisch then hopscotched the helicopter 184 miles to a frozen lake, where he refueled out of jerry cans of gas he’d brought along, flew on to the survivors’ camp, picked up the first of the stranded crew, and then flew on to an isolated Canadian air force base thirty-eight miles beyond. It took him nine trips over three days to get everyone safely out of the wilderness.

  Still, within the Coast Guard debate was growing more heated over which was the right aircraft for SAR, the helicopter or the seaplane. While Swede Erickson remained a staunch and unyielding defender of the rotary wing, he found a more than equally stubborn opponent in the outspokenly aggressive, cigar-chomping Capt. Donald B. MacDiarmid, a legend in his own time and, pretty obviously, in his own mind.

  “Cap’n Mac” had perfected open-ocean seaplane landing and takeoff techniques in World War II (winning a Distinguished Flying Cross in the process). He was so frustrated with his inability to get a combat transfer he once launched a mock air raid on his own station in Port Angeles, Washington, to test his men’s defense readiness. Unfortunately, his collaborators’ use of flares, gunfire, and dynamite convinced a nearby Navy ship the Japanese really were attacking. They opened fire on his plane with heavy machine guns, forcing him to detour to Canada. At the same time, a war alert about the “invasion” of Port Angeles spread up and down the West Coast. In 1943, MacDiarmid finally got his combat assignment flying antisubmarine patrols out of Greenland.

  After the war, he argued there was no need to replace PBY seaplanes or newer amphibians that could roll in and out of the water like the rugged Grumman Albatross, also
known as “the Goat.” Helicopters, he insisted, were nothing more than “mechanized Pogo sticks” that were only good for “county fairs and hauling Santa Claus.”

  Throughout the 1950s, however, the helicopter kept proving itself a great SAR asset. In 1955, Coast Guard helicopters rescued over three hundred people from flooding rivers in New England, and on Christmas Eve of that year a single HO4S Chickasaw helicopter saved 138 people from floodwaters in Yuba City, California, plucking them off rooftops and out of trees.

  Coast Guard mechanics had already adopted the policy of flying the planes they fixed and also handling the hydraulic hoists on the newer helicopters. That night one of them, Petty Officer MK2 Victor Roulund, rode a hoist down onto the roof of a mobile home that had begun to float away. Using an ax, he chopped out a ventilator and lowered himself inside the dark trailer, where he found a paralyzed, terrified old lady floating on a mattress. Meanwhile his pilot, Lt. Henry Pfeiffer, had flown off to rescue some other people. On the helicopter’s return, Roulund was able to signal with a flashlight from where he’d carried the disabled woman to a doorway. A rescue basket was lowered into the swirling floodwater, and she was placed inside it and lifted to safety.

  In 1953, recognizing that the winds of change were now shifting vertical, Capt. Donald MacDiarmid reluctantly qualified as a “helicrapper” pilot. That same year, a Coast Guard rescue seaplane crashed on takeoff in open ocean waters off the coast of China, killing twelve of the people on board. By 1961, seaplanes were no longer flying for the Coast Guard, though the amphibious Goats would hang on until 1983.

  The Coast Guard went on to fly a series of other planes including the Provider, Hercules, Samaritan, Guardian, Falcon, Condor, and Sentry fixed-wing aircraft and the Flying Banana, Seahorse, Seaguard, Chickasaw, Pelican, Jayhawk, Dolphin, and Augusta helicopters.