IN official terms the attempt to help Tomizawa was categorized as an “increased risk” mission, meaning the weather conditions were extreme and the survivor was in danger of perishing. The rescuers, therefore, were willing to accept a higher level of risk in order to save him. Among the actual crews these missions are referred to as “sporty,” as in, “Boy, it sure was sporty out there last night.” In general, sporty is good; it’s what rescue is all about. An Air National Guard pararescue jumper—the military equivalent of Coast Guard rescue swimmers—might get half a dozen sporty rescues in a lifetime. These rescues are talked about, studied, and sometimes envied for years.
Wartime, of course, is about as sporty as it gets, but it’s a rare and horrible circumstance that most pararescue jumpers don’t experience. (The Air National Guard is considered a state militia—meaning it’s state funded—but it’s also a branch of the Air Force. As such, Guard jumpers are interchangeable with Air Force jumpers.) Between wars the Air National Guard occupies itself rescuing civilians on the “high seas,” which means anything beyond the fuel range of a Coast Guard H-3 helicopter. That, depending on the weather, is around two hundred miles offshore. The wartime mission of the Air National Guard is “to save the life of an American fighting man,” which generally means jumping behind enemy lines to extract downed pilots. When the pilots go down at sea, the PJs, as they’re known, jump with scuba gear. When they go down on glaciers, they jump with crampons and ice axes. When they go down in the jungle, they jump with two hundred feet of tree-rappelling line. There is, literally, nowhere on earth a PJ can’t go. “I could climb Everest with the equipment in my locker,” one of them said.
All of the armed forces have some version of the pararescue jumper, but the Air National Guard jumpers—and their Air Force equivalents—are the only ones with an ongoing peacetime mission. Every time the space shuttle launches, an Air Guard C-130 from Westhampton Beach flies down to Florida to oversee the procedure. An Air Force rescue crew also flies to Africa to cover the rest of the shuttle’s trajectory. Whenever a ship—of any nationality—finds itself in distress off North America, the Air National Guard can be called out. A Greek crewman, say, on a Liberian-flagged freighter, who has just fallen into a cargo hold, could have Guard jumpers parachute in to help him seven hundred miles out at sea. An Air Guard base in Alaska that recovers a lot of Air Force trainees is permanently on alert—“fully cocked and ready to go”—and the two other bases, in California and on Long Island, are on standby. If a crisis develops offshore, a crew is put together from the men on-base and whoever can be rounded up by telephone; typically, a helicopter crew can be airborne in under an hour.
It takes eighteen months of full-time training to become a PJ, after which you owe the government four years of active service, which you’re strongly encouraged to extend. (There are about 350 PJs around the country, but developing them is such a lengthy and expensive process that the government is hard put to replace the ones who are lost every year.) During the first three months of training, candidates are weeded out through sheer, raw abuse. The dropout rate is often over ninety percent. In one drill, the team swims their normal 4,000-yard workout, and then the instructor tosses his whistle into the pool. Ten guys fight for it, and whoever manages to blow it at the surface gets to leave the pool. His workout is over for the day. The instructor throws the whistle in again, and the nine remaining guys fight for it. This goes on until there’s only one man left, and he’s kicked out of PJ school. In a variation called “water harassment,” two swimmers share a snorkel while instructors basically try to drown them. If either man breaks the surface and takes a breath, he’s out of school. “There were times we cried,” admits one PJ. But “they’ve got to thin the ranks somehow.”
After pretraining, as it’s called, the survivors enter a period known as “the pipeline”—scuba school, jump school, freefall school, dunker-training school, survival school. The PJs learn how to parachute, climb mountains, survive in deserts, resist enemy interrogation, evade pursuit, navigate underwater at night. The schools are ruthless in their quest to weed people out; in dunker training, for example, the candidates are strapped into a simulated helicopter and plunged underwater. If they manage to escape, they’re plunged in upside-down. If they still manage to escape, they’re plunged in upside-down and blindfolded. The guys who escape that get to be PJs; the rest are rescued by divers waiting by the sides of the pool.
These schools are for all branches of the military, and PJ candidates might find themselves training alongside Navy SEALS and Green Berets who are simply trying to add, say, water survival to their repertoire of skills. If the Navy SEAL fails one of the courses, he just goes back to being a Navy SEAL; if a PJ fails, he’s out of the entire program. For a period of three or four months, a PJ runs the risk, daily, of failing out of school. And if he manages to make it through the pipeline, he still has almost another full year ahead of him: paramedic training, hospital rotations, mountain climbing, desert survival, tree landings, more scuba school, tactical maneuvers, air operations. And because they have a wartime mission, the PJs also practice military maneuvers. They parachute into the ocean at night with inflatable speedboats. They parachute into the ocean at night with scuba gear and go straight into a dive. They deploy from a submarine by air-lock and swim to a deserted coast. They train with shotguns, grenade launchers, M-16s, and six-barreled “mini-guns.” (Mini-guns fire 6,000 rounds a minute and can cut down trees.) And finally—once they’ve mastered every conceivable battle scenario—they learn something called HALO jumping.
HALO stands for High Altitude Low Opening; it’s used to drop PJs into hot areas where a more leisurely deployment would get them all killed. In terms of violating the constraints of the physical world, HALO jumping is one of the more outlandish things human beings have ever done. The PJs jump from so high up—as high as 40,000 feet—that they need bottled oxygen to breathe. They leave the aircraft with two oxygen bottles strapped to their sides, a parachute on their back, a reserve ’chute on their chest, a full medical pack on their thighs, and an M-16 on their harness. They’re at the top of the troposphere—the layer where weather happens—and all they can hear is the scream of their own velocity. They’re so high up that they freefall for two or three minutes and pull their ’chutes at a thousand feet or less. That way, they’re almost impossible to kill.
THE H-60 flies through relative calm for the first half-hour, and then Ruvola radios the tanker plane and says he’s coming in for a refueling. A hundred and forty pounds of pressure are needed to trigger the coupling mechanism in the feeder hose—called the “drogue”—so the helicopter has to close on the tanker plane at a fairly good rate of speed. Ruvola hits the drogue on the first shot, takes on 700 pounds of fuel and continues on toward the southeast. Far below, the waves are getting smeared forward by the wind into an endless series of scalloped white crests. The crew is heading into the worst weather of their lives.
The rules governing H-60 deployments state that “intentional flight into known or forecast severe turbulence is prohibited.” The weather report faxed by McGuire Air Force Base earlier that day called for moderate to severe turbulence, which was just enough semantic protection to allow Ruvola to launch. They were trained to save lives, and this is the kind of day that lives would need saving. An hour into the flight Dave Ruvola comes in for the second refueling and pegs the drogue after four attempts, taking on 900 pounds of fuel. The two aircraft break apart and continue hammering toward Tomizawa.
They are on-scene ten minutes later, in almost complete dark. Spillane has spent the flight slowly putting his wetsuit on, trying not to sweat too much, trying not to dehydrate himself. Now he sits by the spotter’s window looking out at the storm. A Coast Guard C-130 circles at five hundred feet and the Air National Guard tanker circles several hundred feet above that. Their lights poke feebly into the swarming darkness. Ruvola establishes a low hover aft of the sailboat and flips on his floods, which throw down a cone of light from the
belly of the aircraft. Spillane can’t believe what he sees: massive foam-laced swells rising and falling in the circle of light, some barely missing the belly of the helicopter. Twice he has to shout for altitude to keep the helicopter from getting slapped out of the sky.
The wind is blowing so hard that the rotor wash, which normally falls directly below the helicopter, is forty feet behind it; it lags the way it normally does when the helicopter is flying ahead at eighty knots. Despite the conditions, Spillane still assumes he and Rick Smith are going to deploy by sliding down a three-inch-thick “fastrope” into the sea. The question is, what will they do then? The boat looks like it’s moving too fast for a swimmer to catch, which means Tomizawa will have to be extracted from the water, like the Satori crew was. But that would put him at a whole other level of risk; there’s a point at which sporty rescues become more dangerous than sinking boats. While Spillane considers Tomizawa’s chances, flight engineer Jim Mioli gets on the intercom and says he has doubts about retrieving anyone from the water. The waves are rising too fast for the hoist controls to keep up, so there’ll be too much slack around the basket at the crests of the waves. If a man were caught in a loop of cable and the wave dropped out from under him, he’d be cut in half.
For the next twenty minutes Ruvola keeps the helicopter in a hover over the sailboat while the crew peers out the jump door, discussing what to do. They finally agree that the boat looks pretty good in the water—she’s riding high, relatively stable—and that any kind of rescue attempt will put Tomizawa in more danger than he is already in. He should stay with his boat. We’re out of our league, boys, Ruvola finally says over the intercom. We’re not going to do this. Ruvola gets the C-130 pilot on the radio and tells him their decision, and the C-130 pilot relays it to the sailboat. Tomizawa, desperate, radios back that they don’t have to deploy their swimmers at all—just swing the basket over and he’ll rescue himself. No, that’s not the problem, Buschor answers. We don’t mind going in the water; we just don’t think a rescue is possible.
Ruvola backs away and the tanker plane drops two life rafts connected by eight hundred feet of line, in case Tomizawa’s boat starts to founder, and then the two aircraft head back to base. (Tomizawa was eventually picked up by a Romanian freighter.) Ten minutes into the return flight Ruvola lines up on the tanker for the third time, hits the drogue immediately and takes on 1,560 pounds of fuel. They’ll need one more refueling in order to make shore. Spillane settles into the portside spotter’s seat and stares down at the ocean a thousand feet below. If Mioli hadn’t spoken up, he and Rick Smith might be swimming around down there, trying to get back into the rescue basket. They’d have died. In conditions like these, so much water gets loaded into the air that swimmers drown simply trying to breathe.
MONTHS later, after the Air National Guard has put the pieces together, it will determine that gaps had developed in the web of resources designed to support an increased-risk mission over water. At any given moment someone had the necessary information for keeping Ruvola’s helicopter airborne, but that information wasn’t disseminated correctly during the last hour of Ruvola’s flight. Several times a day, mission or no mission, McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey faxes weather bulletins to Suffolk Air Base for their use in route planning. If Suffolk is planning a difficult mission, they might also call McGuire for a verbal update on flight routes, satellite information, etc. Once the mission is under way, one person—usually the tanker pilot—is responsible for obtaining and relaying weather information to all the pilots involved in the rescue. If he needs more information, he calls Suffolk and tells them to get it; without the call, Suffolk doesn’t actively pursue weather information. They are, in the words of the accident investigators, “reactive” rather than “proactive” in carrying out their duties.
In Ruvola’s case, McGuire Air Force Base has real-time satellite information showing a massive rain band developing off Long Island between 7:30 and 8:00 PM—just as he is starting back for Suffolk. Suffolk never calls McGuire for an update, though, because the tanker pilot never asks for one; and McGuire never volunteers the information because they don’t know there is an Air Guard helicopter out there in the first place. Were Suffolk to call McGuire for an update, they’d learn that Ruvola’s route is blocked by severe weather, but that he can avoid it by flying fifteen minutes to westward. As it is, the tanker pilot calls Suffolk for a weather update and gets a report of an 8,000-foot ceiling, fifteen-mile visibility, and low-level wind shear. He passes that information on to Ruvola, who—having left the worst of the storm behind him—reasonably assumes that conditions will only improve as he flies westward. All he has to do is refuel before hitting the wind shear that is being recorded around the air field. Ruvola—they all—are wrong.
The rain band is a swath of clouds fifty miles wide, eighty miles long, and 10,000 feet thick. It is getting dragged into the low across the northwest quadrant of the storm; winds are 75 knots and the visibility is zero. Satellite imagery shows the rain band swinging across Ruvola’s flight path like a door slamming shut. At 7:55, Ruvola radios the tanker pilot to confirm a fourth refueling, and the pilot rogers it. The refueling is scheduled for five minutes later, at precisely eight o’clock. At 7:56, turbulence picks up a little, and at 7:58 it reaches moderate levels. Let’s get this thing done, Ruvola radios the tanker pilot. At 7:59 he pulls the probe release, extends it forward, and moves into position for contact. And then it hits.
Headwinds along the leading edge of the rain band are so strong that it feels as if the helicopter has been blown to a stop. Ruvola has no idea what he’s run into; all he knows is that he can barely control the aircraft. Flying has become as much a question of physical strength as of finesse; he grips the collective with one hand, the joystick with the other, and leans forward to peer through the rain rattling off the wind-screen. Flight manuals bounce around the cockpit and his copilot starts throwing up in the seat next to him. Ruvola lines up on the tanker and tries to hit the drogue, but the aircraft are moving around so wildly that it’s like throwing darts down a gun barrel; hitting the target is pure dumb luck. In technical terms, Ruvola’s aircraft is doing things “without inputs from the controls”; in human terms, it’s getting batted around the sky. Ruvola tries as low as three hundred feet—“along the ragged edges of the clouds,” as he says—and as high as 4,500 feet, but he can’t find clean air. The visibility is so bad that even with night-vision goggles on, he can barely make out the wing lights of the tanker plane in front of him. And they are right—right—on top of it; several times they overshoot the drogue and Spillane thinks they are going to take the plane’s rudder off.
Ruvola has made twenty or thirty attempts on the drogue—a monstrous feat of concentration—when the tanker pilot radios that he has to shut down his number one engine. The oil pressure gauge is fluctuating wildly and they are risking a burnout. The pilot starts in on the shutdown procedure, and suddenly the left-hand fuel hose retracts; shutting off the engine has disrupted the air flow around the wing, and the reel-in mechanism has mistaken that for too much slack. It performs what is known as an “uncommanded retraction.” The pilot finishes shutting down the engine, brings Ruvola back in, and then reextends the hose. Ruvola lines up on it and immediately sees that something is wrong. The drogue is shaped like a small parachute, and ordinarily it fills with air and holds the hose steady; now it is just convulsing behind the tanker plane. It has been destroyed by forty-five minutes of desperate refueling attempts.
Ruvola tells the tanker pilot that the left-hand drogue is shot and that they have to switch over to the other side. In these conditions refueling from the right-hand drogue is a nightmarish, white-knuckle business because the helicopter probe also extends from the right-hand side of the cockpit, so the pilot has to come even tighter into the fuselage of the tanker to make contact. Ruvola makes a run at the right-hand drogue, misses, comes in again, and misses again. The usual technique is to watch the tanker’s wing flaps and anti
cipate where the drogue’s going to go, but the visibility is so low that Ruvola can’t even see that far; he can barely see past the nose of his own helicopter. Ruvola makes a couple more runs at the drogue, and on his last attempt he comes in too fast, overshoots the wing, and by the time he’s realigned himself the tanker has disappeared. They’ve lost an entire C-130 in the clouds. They are at 4,000 feet in zero visibility with roughly twenty minutes of fuel left; after that they will just fall out of the sky. Ruvola can either keep trying to hit the drogue, or he can try to make it down to sea level while they still have fuel.
We’re going to set up for a planned ditching, he tells his crew. We’re going to ditch while we still can. And then Dave Ruvola drops the nose of the helicopter and starts racing his fuel gauge down to the sea.
John Spillane, watching silently from the spotter’s seat, is sure he’s just heard his death sentence. “Throughout my career I’ve always managed—just barely—to keep things in control,” says Spillane. “But now, suddenly, the risk is becoming totally uncontrollable. We can’t get fuel, we’re going to end up in that roaring ocean, and we’re not gonna be in control anymore. And I know the chances of being rescued are practically zero. I’ve been on a lot of rescue missions, and I know they can hardly even find someone in these conditions, let alone recover them. We’re some of the best in the business—best equipped, best trained. We couldn’t do a rescue a little while earlier, and now we’re in the same situation. It looks real bleak. It’s not going to happen.”
While Ruvola is flying blindly downward through the clouds, copilot Buschor issues a mayday on an Air National Guard emergency frequency and then contacts the Tamaroa, fifteen miles to the northeast. He tells them they are out of fuel and about to set up for a planned ditching. Captain Brudnicki orders the Tam’s searchlights turned up into the sky so the helicopter can give them a bearing, but Buschor says he can’t see a thing. Okay, just start heading towards us, the radio dispatcher on the Tam says. We don’t have time, we’re going down right now, Buschor replies. Jim McDougall, handling the radios at the ODC in Suffolk, receives—simultaneously—the ditching alert and a phone call from Spillane’s wife, who wants to know where her husband is. She’d had no idea there was a problem and just happened to call at the wrong moment; McDougall is so panicked by the timing that he hangs up on her. At 9:08, a dispatcher at Coast Guard headquarters in Boston takes a call that an Air National Guard helicopter is going down and scrawls frantically in the incident log: “Helo [helicopter] & 130 enroute Suffolk. Can’t refuel helo due visibility. May have to ditch. Stay airborne how long? 20–25 min. LAUNCH!” He then notifies Cape Cod Air Base, where Karen Stimpson is chatting with one of her rescue crews. The five airmen get up without a word, file into the bathroom, and then report for duty out on the tarmac.
The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea Page 19
