Abandoning the search, he begins to make his way to the left side of the aircraft, where there’s access to the flight deck.
All the way in the rear of the plane, loadmaster Chris Langston is slowly getting over the shock of realizing that they’ve crashed and he’s still alive. His concern now is his partner, Jeff Pohl, and, getting no response when he calls his name, Langston begins searching for him. “I went maybe five feet and once I got closer to him, I could see him lying there. But he wasn’t moving; he was just kind of lying there, not doing anything, not saying anything. I went up to him, and I touched him on his helmet. He started making some pretty painful moans, and I kind of shook him and said, ‘Jeff, it’s me. We can’t stay here.’ And he said, ‘Okay, okay, I’m fine, I’m fine.’ I said, ‘You’re sure?’ and he’s, like, ‘Yeah,’ and I remember him looking up at me, and there’s a little blood trickle from his helmet. And I was, like, ‘Well, it doesn’t look real bad.’ At that point, I said, ‘Follow me; I’ll dig around and try to find a way out of here.’ As I turned around to walk away, he says, ‘Hey, I can’t move.’ So I went back and I said, ‘What’s . . . ?’ He said, ‘My leg is stuck.’ He was up against a snowbank, so I started digging through the snow. Probably a quarter of the way up the airplane was full of snow already, and even when I landed, I was standing in snow. At that point, I started digging around, and I saw where his leg was on the outside of the airplane. It wasn’t mangled or anything, but I could tell it was stuck. But I knew there was no way I was just going to pull it out of there. I took one of those emergency exit lights, and I gave it to Jeff. I said, ‘Jeff, hold on to this. I’m going to get help. I’ll be back.’ ”
In the forward area of the cargo compartment, radio operator Rodney Young has reached the narrow stairwell leading to the crew entry door on the left and the ladder up to the cockpit on the right. Only he finds them blocked by a metal panel that’s come down, leaving a circular opening big enough to stick his head through, but not, as he delicately puts it, his big butt.
Up above, copilot Jason Wright is shocked by the unexpected sound of Rodney’s voice, desperately shouting from below, “Don’t leave me; I’m trapped!”
“And that woke me up as to, oh, my gosh, what about the guys in the back? ’Cause you realize everybody up front was all right, but we’re in a daze. So that was the first thing that made me think, hey, we gotta get everybody and get out of here.”
Reacting to the sound of Rodney’s voice coming from below, the pilot shouts, “Who’s hurt? Anybody hurt? What about the loads?”
Rodney responds that he’s okay, but he doesn’t know about the two loadmasters, so they ask him to go check. As he heads toward the rear of the plane, he shouts back, “Make that hole bigger. I gotta get out of here.” Actually, he uses the all-purpose, standard military adjective, adverb, and noun to underscore his desire that a clear way out be there when he returned.
Moving as far back in the fuselage as he can go, perhaps no more than twenty feet in what had been a ninety-nine-foot-long airplane, Rodney calls out the loadmasters’ names and is gratified to get a response from Chris Langston. Realizing who’s answering him, the radio operator shouts, “Hey, Chris, what’s the situation?”
“We’re both alive, one injured,” comes the response.
Rodney acknowledges that he understands, and returns to tell the pilots that both loads are alive, but that he can’t see them because everything back of the wing box is either crushed, twisted, or bent. Then he grabs the hunk of metal blocking his exit, and while shaking it realizes it is just a galley shelf that had collapsed from above. He quickly shoves it aside and scrambles up into the cockpit, discovering that navigator Don Tyler has managed to get to his feet and is turning off electrical equipment and trying to find a first-aid kit, all the while continuing to cradle his injured left arm. Meantime, the other navigator, Maj. George Akins, is already climbing the ladder that provided access to the circular escape hatch in the cockpit ceiling. Opening it, he pulls himself out of the plane and walks toward the wing while waving the mini Maglite that Tyler had given him, hoping to attract the attention of the helicopters. Next to pop out of the opening is the radio operator, carrying one of the powerful emergency lights that he’d removed from the cargo compartment. He begins walking down the spine of the broken plane, remembering the training they’d received in a survival class to wave a light back and forth rather than just pointing it skyward. They’d been told that if a light doesn’t move, rescuers tend to assume that it’s just a light on the aircraft, but if you move it from side to side, they’ll definitely know there are survivors.
Even before they see lights waving on the ground, the airborne mission commander in Chalk 1 has ordered his pilot to circle back around to the crash site to see if they can land. The answer isn’t an easy one. Chalk 1 is heavy, having taken on a full load of fuel from Ditka 03. Because the crash site is approximately 9,700 feet above sea level, it will require a significantly greater amount of power to set Chalk 1 down safely than would be needed at a lower altitude. Buss’s pilots do some quick calculations and announce that it will be close, but their aircraft will be able to produce the needed out-of-ground effect power.
While it may seem counterintuitive that bringing a helicopter to a controlled landing may require as much, if not more, power than it does to take off, it is a fact that such is the case. A pilot bringing a helicopter in for an in-ground effect landing on a hard, smooth surface knows that when his altitude is equal or less than the diameter of his spinning rotor blades, he can actually reduce power. It all has to do with what is happening to the air that’s being driven down by the rotors. But when a helicopter comes in for a landing on the sloping side of a mountain, the approach is not over a smooth, level surface; it requires enough power so the helicopter can hover out-of-ground effect, that is, with no bonus from the air compressing against the ground assisting in keeping the helo in the air.
An additional complication in landing near the crash site is the expectation of a full whiteout from the snow, reducing the pilot’s visibility to less than zero, and making it exceedingly difficult to terminate the approach happily. That this is taking place at a high altitude is another complicating factor, since the capability of the MH-47E to produce lift is significantly reduced. Boeing says the service ceiling of this model Chinook is 10,150 feet, and the crew has already ripped open that envelope more than a few times on this mission. Finally, the heavier the helicopter, the more power will be needed to effect the landing, and Chalk 1 had recently taken on approximately seven thousand pounds of fuel.
There’s not a lot of margin for error. If the power requirement for landing exceeds what’s available, the rotors will start to droop and a crash landing is the likely result. Making things even more complicated is the fact that the landing zone is snow-covered, and when a helicopter putting out about one-hundred-mile-per-hour winds lands in a snow-covered area it’s usually engulfed in swirling snow, requiring the pilot to make the last ten feet of the landing with no visual reference to the ground.
With all this in mind, Lieutenant Colonel Buss has a brief conversation with his pilot as Chalk 1 executes a 360-degree turn to the left. “He said he thought we had enough power to land, so I go ahead and instruct him to land there, which he did. As we were on a short final to the aircraft location, I saw some flashlights coming from the wreckage, so I knew there were some survivors at this point, which was amazing to me.”
They were also fortunate that the snow was fairly hard-packed and the landing wasn’t made in a classic whiteout situation; the pilot had some visual reference all the way down to the ground as he put the Chinook down about one hundred yards downhill of the aircraft crash site, on a twenty-degree slope.
On Chalk 3, the PJ team leader is monitoring the radio and immediately picks up on the fact that there are survivors. Chris Young tells his colleagues to get ready to go in, then tells the pilot he needs to put them on the ground immediately. The pilo
t radios the AMC that the PJs are asking to be inserted. The AMC denies the request. Twice more, Chalk 3’s pilot asks for permission to put the PJs in, and twice more Buss denies them permission to land, ordering them instead to go refuel first.
When the pilot passes that word to Young, the PJ team leader is in shock. For a second he can’t believe what he’s heard. Then he passes on the news to Keary Miller and Jason Cunningham, who are already jocking up to go in. “We are absolutely fuming about it. I mean, a bunch of type A personalities and in a blackened helicopter—and the thing is, I’m the only one that’s on comm, so I at least have the situational awareness to hear all the conversations going back and forth, but I’m trying to brief my guys. And they’re just, like, ‘What?!’ ” Miller is so outraged he can’t stand still. He goes storming up and back the length of the helicopter, screaming obscenities.
Young says they tried everything, including laying out the simple fact that Chalk 3 has more than enough fuel to put the PJs in the landing zone, and then go up to tank while the pararescuemen were treating patients. They get nowhere. The AMC’s final answer is, “No. Hit the tanker. When you’re done, come back down.”
At that moment a few things are crystal-clear. Buss thought the crash un-survivable, but he was wrong. Flashing lights say otherwise. Survivors mean there might be life-threatening injuries, or men trapped in the wreckage. Loadmaster Pohl qualifies on both counts. Buss knows nothing of that; yet he diverts Chalk 3 to an as-yet-unnecessary refueling effort, taking with it the very pararescuemen who were assigned to this mission to save trapped and/or injured personnel.
Lt. Col. John Buss, forty-one, is a West Point graduate, jump qualified, an aviation officer since 1983, which is when his Army career began. He served with the 101st Airborne Division, and since 1989 has worked his way up through the ranks, and through command and staff positions with the elite 160th SOAR(A), where he commanded the 2nd Battalion from 2000 to 2002, at its home base of Fort Campbell, Kentucky, and deployed to Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan.
Hold a conversation with him and it’s easy to infer that he’s accustomed to being in control, comfortable making decisions under pressure and sticking with them. He’s also accustomed to setting high standards for the pilots who serve under him—and two of them had just screwed up big-time, jeopardizing the entire mission with their inability to refuel under admittedly less than optimal conditions.
The reason the PJs are embedded with special ops units is to provide the highest level of combat search and rescue skill in the shortest amount of time. If ever a situation was created to make maximum use of their training, it was the crash of Ditka 03. It required the tools and the know-how to extract a victim from a crashed aircraft quickly, without causing further injury, and then providing medical treatment to stabilize the patient in order to keep him alive until they can get to a hospital.
Yet that entire rationale, which is the rationale for the existence of Air Force pararescue in the modern American military, was dismissed by Lieutenant Colonel Buss in favor of sending an aircraft to refuel whose pilots had just spent more than half an hour demonstrating an inability to adequately perform the task in that particular environment. Even more, those pilots had to believe that when they chopped the refueling hose, they set in motion a chain reaction that resulted in Ditka 03 slamming into a mountain a minute or two later. Certainly such knowledge would raise their stress level in an already stressful situation.
Finally, here was another potential lifesaving reason for putting Chalk 3 on the ground: Its rotor blades had just whacked something—whether it was the metal frame of the paradrogue, the hose, or the heavy metal fittings at the end of the hose, no one could say for certain. Caution dictates that if the opportunity exists to immediately land and check for damage, a prudent pilot would take advantage of it—and a prudent commander would expect no less.
Even though Buss acknowledges that Chalk 3 could have done as the PJs urged, since the helicopter had enough gas to land, none of these arguments held water for him. When questioned about the decision not to allow Chalk 3 to land and let the PJs do their job, he said, “That landing in there was difficult. And I was concerned about him [Chalk 3’s pilot]. I really wanted him to settle down before he tried to make that landing in there.” The irony is that the landing would have been easier for Chalk 3 than it was for Buss’s own aircraft, which was several thousand pounds heavier, having taken on a full load of fuel.
Buss goes on: “The decision would’ve been different if I had had life-threatening injuries or folks pinned that needed the REDS kit immediately. But very quickly, I mean, almost immediately after we landed, we had folks [survivors] walking up to the aircraft on their own. I got reports of patients—the only guy we were concerned about was that eighth crewmember who was pinned but was coherent and did not appear to have any life-threatening injuries at that point.”
He’s referring to the right loadmaster, T.Sgt. Jeff Pohl, who at the time Buss sent the PJs away was pinned facedown in jet fuel-soaked snow, becoming hypothermic in the subzero temperature, bleeding internally, with one leg broken and jammed through the crushed side of the plane. It’s important to note that to this point, Pohl had not been examined by anyone at all, much less anyone with medical training. And the REDS kit that contains the PJ version of the Jaws of Life and a special crash ax that can cut through a plane’s skin that was available in the back of Chalk 3? Buss didn’t think it was needed “immediately.”
But back to the moments before Chalk 1 lands. Radio operator Rodney Young and navigator George Akins have used the rope from the cockpit escape hatch to lower themselves to the snow-covered ground. They’re about to walk toward the back to find the loadmasters, when Rodney hears the flight engineer, Jeff Doss, saying, “I’m getting down, too.”
Rodney’s thinking, “Wait a minute. This isn’t good. Me and George are together; that’s cool, because we’re together. The buddy system; look out for each other. Then the engineer’s gonna get down by himself, so that’s not good. So I made a decision. I said, George is going to go to where the loadmasters are. I need to go find the engineer so he doesn’t wander off and fall down this mountain, ’cause it looked like the airplane was sitting on a ledge, and it could fall back down the hill at any minute.”
In the back end of Ditka 03, Chris Langston has made his way to the aft escape hatch. He pulls it down and pops his head through the opening, while at the same time waving an emergency light in the air. He sees Akins standing on the wing, and says, “Jeff is stuck, but we need help getting him out of there.” The loadmaster can hear a helicopter—probably Chalk 1, which landed moments earlier—and he can also pick out the sound of Ditka 04 overhead. Then he ducks back inside the fuselage and takes the escape rope that hangs next to the exit and tosses the free end back down toward where Pohl is trapped. The rope will make it easy for rescuers to locate him quickly.
At the same time near the front of the plane, Rodney waits for Doss to come down the rope, sees that he is wearing his survival vest, and thinks it makes sense for him to take Doss’s survival radio and call the helicopters to let them know what they are dealing with. The radio is in two Ziploc bags to keep it dry. Doss is wearing gloves and trying to peel the outer Ziploc bag apart. So Rodney yells at him, “Dude, just tear it!” Doss rips the first bag, sees that there’s a second bag, and to Rodney’s annoyance, tries to peel that one apart. Rodney yells again, “Tear that one, too. I mean, you gotta have your wits about you, c’mon!” What he didn’t know at the time is that Doss had struck his head in the impact and had suffered a concussion that was affecting his judgment as well as his motor skills.
After several seconds Rodney gets the radio operating and begins calling, “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday, this is Ditka 03 with eight survivors; seven are ambulatory and one’s trapped.” (He didn’t use the word Mayday, because that’s used only if they’re down in a friendly environment; instead he used the secret code word that meant they were down in e
nemy territory.) He makes the call, changes frequencies, and repeats the same message. He does this several times, never receiving a response.
Shortly after his last futile transmission, Chalk 1 lands about one hundred yards downhill from the wreckage, and the two men decide that they will start walking to the helicopter. The snow is up to their waist all the time, occasionally up to their armpits. They take two steps and sink, and every time that happens, Doss falls over to the side. Rodney stops, picks him up—Doss is six feet, 220 pounds, while Rodney is five-ten and 175—and says, “C’mon, let’s go,” and then they’d fall all over again. About halfway down, they meet one of the special-ops guys, who Rodney assumes is a PJ, and he yells at him, “Hey, we got eight survivors—seven are ambulatory; one’s stuck.” The two survivors continue down toward the helicopter, where they see another guy coming uphill. The same message is repeated: “We’ve got eight survivors—seven are ambulatory; one’s stuck in the airplane.”
By the time they make it to the ramp at the rear of the Chinook, both men are beat. Doss says it was the longest hundred yards of his life; he thought he was running a marathon, that he was never going to get to the helicopter, and once he got to it and discovered that the ramp was at roughly the height of his chest, he didn’t think he’d ever get inside it. The radio operator solves that problem, using his last bit of strength to boost the FE onto the ramp. But then Rodney doesn’t even have enough strength to pick up his leg. He’s a smoker, and the thin air at ten thousand feet has just not delivered enough oxygen to support the strenuous effort it took to make it down to Chalk 1.
Finally, someone drags him into the plane, and the two of them settle onto the floor. There are only two or three men inside the big helicopter, but Rodney still needs to make sure his message has gotten through, so he tells the one nearest the cockpit to go tell the pilots that there are eight survivors, seven ambulatory. Then the two men wrap themselves in parkas and sleeping bags, and huddle together on the floor, trying to get warm.
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