The Perfect Storm

by Sebastian Junger

  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 Airbase 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 underway, 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,ooo-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 seventy-five 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 windscreen. 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 t
he 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 anticipate 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 spotters 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 Tarn 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. Cant 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.

  Ruvola finally breaks out of the clouds at 9:28, only two hundred feet above the ocean. He goes into a hover and immediately calls for the ditching checklist, which prepares the crew to abandon the aircraft. They have practiced this dozens of times in training, but things are happening so fast that the routines start to fall apart. Jim Mioli has trouble seeing in the dim cabin lighting used with night-vision gear, so he can’t locate the handle of the nine-man life raft. By the time he finds it, he doesn’t have time to put on his Mustang survival suit. Ruvola calls three times for Mioli to read him the ditching checklist, but Mioli is too busy to answer him, so Ruvola has to go through it by memory. One of the most important things on the list is for the pilot to reach down and eject his door, but Ruvola is working too hard to remove his hands from the controls. In military terminology he has become “task-saturated,” and the door stays on.

  While Ruvola is trying to hold the aircraft in a hover, the PJs scramble to put together the survival gear. Spillane slings a canteen over his shoulder and clips a one-man life raft to the strap. Jim Mioli, who finally manages to extract the nine-man raft, pushes it to the edge of the jump door and waits for the order to deploy. Rick Smith, draped in survival gear, squats at the edge of the other jump door and looks over the side. Below is an ocean so ravaged by wind that they can’t even tell the difference between the waves and the troughs; for all they know they are jumping three hundred feet. As horrible as that is, though, the idea of staying where they are is even worse. The helicopter is going to drop into the ocean at any moment, and no one on the crew wants to be anywhere nearby when it does.

  Only Dave Ruvola will stay on board; as pilot, it is his job to make sure the aircraft doesn’t fall on the rest of his crew. The chances of his escaping with his door still in place are negligible, but that is beside the point. The ditching checklist calls for a certain procedure, a procedure that insures the survival of the greatest number of crew. That Mioli neglects to put on his survival suit is also, in some ways, suicidal, but he has no choice. His duty is to oversee a safe bailout, and if he stops to put his survival suit on, the nine-man raft won’t be ready for deployment. He jumps without his suit.

  At 9:30, the number one engine flames out; Spillane can hear the turbine wind down. They’ve been in a low hover for less than a minute. Ruvola calls out on the intercom: The number one’s out! Bail out! Bail out! The number two is running on fumes; in theory, they should flame out at the same time. This is it. They are going down.

  Mioli shoves the life raft out the right-hand door and watches it fall, in his words, “into the abyss.” They are so high up that he doesn’t even see it hit the water, and he can’t bring himself to jump in after it. Without telling anyone, he decides to take his chances in the helicopter. Ditching protocol calls for copilot Buschor to remain on board as well, but Ruvola orders him out because he decides Buschor’s chances of survival will be higher if he jumps. Buschor pulls his door-release lever but the door doesn’t pop off the fuselage, so he just holds it open with one hand and steps out onto the footboard. He looks back at the radar altimeter, which is fluctuating between ten feet and eighty, and realizes that the timing of his jump will mean the difference between life and death. Ruvola repeats his order to bail out, and Buschor unplugs the intercom wires from his flight helmet and flips his night-vision goggles down. Now he can watch the waves roll underneath him in the dim green light of enhanced vision. He spots a huge crest, takes a breath, and jumps.

  Spillane, meanwhile, is grabbing some last-minute gear. “I wasn’t terrified, I was scared,” he says. “Forty minutes before I’d been more scared, thinking about the possibilities, but at the end I was totally committed. The pilot had made the decision to ditch, and it was a great decision. How many pilots might have just used up the last twenty minutes of fuel trying to hit the drogue? Then you’d fall out of the sky and everyone would die.”

  The helicopter is strangely quiet without the number one engine. The ocean below them, in the words of another pilot, looks like a lunar landscape, cratered and gouged and deformed by wind. Spillane spots Rick Smith at the st
arboard door, poised to jump, and moves towards him. “I’m convinced he was sizing up the waves,” Spillane says. “I wanted desperately to stick together with him. I just had time to sit down, put my arm around his shoulders, and he went. We didn’t have time to say anything—you want to say goodbye, you want to do a lot of things, but there’s no time for that. Rick went, and a split second later, I did.”

  According to people who have survived long falls, the acceleration of gravity is so heart-stoppingly fast that it’s more like getting shot downward out of a cannon. A body accelerates roughly twenty miles an hour for every second it’s in the air; after one second it’s falling twenty miles an hour; after two seconds, forty miles an hour, and so on, up to a hundred and thirty. At that point the wind resistance is equal to the force of gravity, and the body is said to have reached terminal velocity. Spillane falls probably sixty or seventy feet, two and a half seconds of acceleration. He plunges through darkness without any idea where the water is or when he is going to hit. He has a dim memory of letting go of his one-man raft, and of his body losing position, and he thinks: My God, what a long way down. And then everything goes blank.

  JOHN SPILLANE has the sort of handsome, regular features that one might expect in a Hollywood actor playing a pararescueman—playing John Spillane, in fact. His eyes are stone-blue, without a trace of hardness or indifference, his hair is short and touched with grey. He comes across as friendly, unguarded, and completely sure of himself. He has a quick smile and an offhand way of talking that seems to progress from detail to detail, angle to angle, until there’s nothing more to say on a topic. His humor is delivered casually, almost as an afterthought, and seems to surprise even himself. He’s of average height, average build, and once ran forty miles for the hell of it. He seems to be a man who has long since lost the need to prove things to anyone.