Episode Transcript
[00:00:10] Speaker A: Got you with the surprise recording again.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: What if, for one podcast, we just let the whole song play and then that's just the end of the podcast. It's just the intro.
[00:00:17] Speaker A: So that would make me happy.
[00:00:18] Speaker B: That'd be great.
[00:00:19] Speaker A: This is my new favorite thing, is to surprise Max with the record button, and let's just let her rip.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: It gets me spooled up. I'm trying to figure out what we're gonna talk about, and then you just get it. And then I'm all flustered.
[00:00:30] Speaker A: I know. I don't even know what to talk about. Yeah.
[00:00:32] Speaker B: Last week I talked about me getting nervous waiting for the Home Depot guy because I had too much coffee. So that's what you get every time you randomly hit the button.
[00:00:38] Speaker A: Let's talk about that. So what was the Home Depot guy dropping off?
[00:00:43] Speaker B: He just came to measure a door.
[00:00:44] Speaker A: Oh, that's right.
[00:00:44] Speaker B: Which turned out to be incorrect measurement. So be careful if you're doing that in the future.
[00:00:48] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:00:48] Speaker B: Pro tip.
[00:00:49] Speaker A: I had a Home Depot guy drop off something. Well, it wasn't Home Depot guy, but the delivery guy, you know, delivering something from Home Depot.
[00:00:55] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:00:56] Speaker A: Guess what I got today?
[00:00:57] Speaker B: We get a washer dryer set now. Dang it.
[00:00:59] Speaker A: Got one of those flamethrowers so I can burn weeds.
[00:01:02] Speaker B: This is what we're talking about.
You got that from Home Depot. So I got the same thing from Amazon.
[00:01:07] Speaker A: Oh, Bud.
[00:01:07] Speaker B: 1.2 million BTUs.
[00:01:09] Speaker A: You got the. Yeah. You got the Chinese version? Probably.
[00:01:12] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. Dude, that is the best way to eradicate weeds. On a gravel driveway.
[00:01:16] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:01:17] Speaker B: Like east of the Mason Dixon. You go west of that and you're going to start a forest fire.
[00:01:21] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. Yeah.
[00:01:22] Speaker B: You don't want to do that.
[00:01:23] Speaker A: The Cal fire is going to come after you.
[00:01:24] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:01:25] Speaker A: You're going to be in trouble.
[00:01:26] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:01:26] Speaker A: You launch the Coast Guard on you.
[00:01:27] Speaker B: I sent my dad a video, and he lives in Vegas. He's like, oh, I'm going to get one. I was like, don't do that.
[00:01:31] Speaker A: These weeds have no idea what's coming. I'm going to torch them.
[00:01:34] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:01:34] Speaker A: And then I'm going to lay down some really aggressive weed killer.
[00:01:37] Speaker B: Perfect.
[00:01:38] Speaker A: And yeah, you're going to be good. It's going to be a pristine.
[00:01:40] Speaker B: Yeah, they're going to have to travel driveway. Quarantine your driveway for a couple of weeks. But, dude, it's going to be nice, man.
[00:01:46] Speaker A: Yeah. Oh, man. What else is going on?
[00:01:49] Speaker B: I had a sweet flight, man. Took my on wing out for her day. Water three Today and she did some hoisting. It was pretty sweet. She was pumped. My favorite flight of the syllabus.
[00:01:58] Speaker A: Y. Yeah.
[00:01:58] Speaker B: Yeah. That's a good time.
[00:01:59] Speaker A: I think that's. That's probably one of the peak ones. Think about all the time you put into it and then it's like, cool, man. Yep, I'm hoisting now.
[00:02:05] Speaker B: Yep. It was pretty cool. She's pumped. She. She kept looking over at me and, like, being excited. I'm like, cool, but you gotta look at the boat.
[00:02:12] Speaker A: That's cool.
[00:02:13] Speaker B: Let's pay attention.
[00:02:14] Speaker A: Ah, man. I big, big shout out to my on wing.
[00:02:18] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:02:19] Speaker A: You know, we brought in a pilot who has never flown helicopters before and, you know, traditional fixed wing pilot in the Coast Guard, who's now a command member at a unit. And he was awesome, dude. So awesome.
[00:02:34] Speaker B: That's really cool.
[00:02:35] Speaker A: You know, it was like a little concerning bringing in somebody who had not flown a helicopter before. Like, where do you start? How do you teach Arrow? Right.
[00:02:43] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:02:43] Speaker A: And I think the whole process worked out really, really well. And what a. What a professional, Extremely talented pilot. It was cool to see.
[00:02:50] Speaker B: That's really cool, man. Yeah, I had fun kind of chatting with everybody, developing quasi syllabus to get him through. And.
[00:02:56] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:02:57] Speaker B: You know, we put him with one of our senior pilots and he did really good. And then you picked him up as an on wing. He's crushing it, man.
[00:03:03] Speaker A: Super cool.
[00:03:03] Speaker B: Like, awesome.
[00:03:04] Speaker A: Like, talk about things that are rewarding, you know, like. It's rewarding.
[00:03:07] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:03:07] Speaker A: Getting anybody through training.
[00:03:08] Speaker C: Right.
[00:03:09] Speaker A: And then watch them go out and do good things at units, you know what I mean? Operational units.
[00:03:13] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:03:14] Speaker A: Doing big SAR cases and stuff. But, man, you kind of. You kind of see their baby steps here. Right? And. And then. And then you release them to the wild.
[00:03:22] Speaker B: Oh, yeah.
[00:03:22] Speaker A: To go do the good things.
[00:03:23] Speaker B: It's cool, man.
[00:03:24] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:03:25] Speaker B: That's fun. That's awesome, man. I. I think.
I think it was a cool little program. And I don't know, maybe more are going to come over. Who knows?
[00:03:32] Speaker A: We'll see the future of the Coast Guard. Could be anything.
I'll leave it at that.
[00:03:38] Speaker B: No. We do know one thing for certain about the future in the Coast Guard, though. It's where you And I are PCSing next year.
[00:03:44] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:03:44] Speaker B: So we're going to san Diego. We're PCSing the news. Yeah.
[00:03:48] Speaker A: We're putting it out there for the world to know.
[00:03:49] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:03:51] Speaker A: Congratulations, Max and Nick and I just got authorization.
You know, I won't. I won't name drop. But they're they're letting us take a 65 there to stand up a subunit of San Diego.
[00:04:03] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:04:03] Speaker A: So it'll be two. Two airframes, you know, rotor wing 60s and 65. And they're going to let me be the CEO.
It's incredible, dude.
[00:04:14] Speaker B: I'm the FAK guy for sure.
[00:04:16] Speaker A: It would be like being a CEO of like, an 87.
[00:04:18] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:04:19] Speaker A: Oh, did you imagine we actually.
[00:04:22] Speaker B: We're going to completely derail this whole thing. But I was like, I had an idea the other week. I was like, hey, if they want us to go to staff tours and people don't want to go to staff, let me just go be a CEO of an 87 for two years, dude.
[00:04:32] Speaker A: Why not?
[00:04:32] Speaker B: And then come back in the cockpit after that.
[00:04:35] Speaker A: Did you. Did you pass your Rules of the Road test?
[00:04:37] Speaker B: No.
[00:04:39] Speaker A: Makes two of us.
[00:04:40] Speaker B: I got an 88, though. So you passed. No. You needed a 90.
[00:04:44] Speaker A: No, but 80. 80 or greater is passing. But I think you need a 90 to go to a boat.
[00:04:49] Speaker B: That's what it was.
[00:04:50] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:04:51] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:04:51] Speaker D: I think you need an 87 to go to an 87.
[00:04:53] Speaker A: Oh, Fahrenheit, heck.
[00:04:54] Speaker B: Yeah, it's smaller.
[00:04:55] Speaker A: So what happens if you get a 74?
[00:04:57] Speaker B: Dude, I'm. Did you. You didn't. You failed.
[00:05:00] Speaker A: Yeah, I didn't pass that test.
[00:05:01] Speaker C: Oh.
[00:05:01] Speaker D: What.
[00:05:01] Speaker B: What happened?
[00:05:02] Speaker A: Nothing.
[00:05:03] Speaker B: Oh.
[00:05:03] Speaker A: Because I didn't have to go to a cutter.
[00:05:04] Speaker D: I got.
[00:05:07] Speaker A: I. I got orders to flight school.
[00:05:09] Speaker B: Oh, man.
[00:05:10] Speaker A: I. I actually tried, too. I tried to pass that test.
[00:05:12] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:05:13] Speaker A: But I. But deep down, I. I didn't really care, I'll admit.
[00:05:15] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:05:16] Speaker A: Like, why. Why would do I care about Rules of the Road? I will not be red.
[00:05:19] Speaker B: Right. Returning.
[00:05:20] Speaker A: That's why, um, my plan has always been I have no backup plan.
That's actually.
[00:05:25] Speaker B: Yeah, that's fair. I don't know. Yeah.
[00:05:27] Speaker A: Anyways, speaking of great operational things, man, we've been hitting on some solid SAR cases.
[00:05:34] Speaker B: Dude. What do we call it? High Altitude August or whatever.
[00:05:37] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:05:37] Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, it's happening.
[00:05:39] Speaker A: It's weird.
[00:05:40] Speaker B: I think it's a really interesting time. I. Maybe. Maybe it's because we are doing the podcast and you maybe don't hear of it very often, but I feel like I've heard more high altitude cases happening around the country in the past couple of months or years or whatever. So. Yeah, maybe that's a plug for putting more folks through our aviation C schools. Ahars hats, you name it. I don't know.
[00:06:04] Speaker A: Yeah. So last. The last episode with the crew, the other crew. From San Francisco we're talking about. It was that really cool case rescued the injured hiker. Right. Somewhere near the Big Sur. Like, I think, I think it was that, that episode we're talking about like training.
[00:06:22] Speaker B: Right.
[00:06:22] Speaker A: And like, and some of them had just gotten back from a horse and I think one of them maybe had done hats.
[00:06:28] Speaker B: Yeah. Joey did ahars. And hats.
[00:06:30] Speaker A: And hats. Okay. And the thing that like resonated with me was that they were like, that was the best training that I've ever had. And sometimes you forget about that and you don't might not understand the benefit of it.
[00:06:42] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:06:42] Speaker A: But then you realize that's some good stuff.
[00:06:45] Speaker B: Oh yeah.
[00:06:45] Speaker A: And there's. And there's some benefit to it.
[00:06:47] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:06:47] Speaker A: So. Yeah. Maybe we shouldn't cut. Cut that stuff.
[00:06:50] Speaker B: Nope.
[00:06:51] Speaker A: Like maybe think about other things.
[00:06:53] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:06:54] Speaker A: Maybe RW has got to go.
[00:06:55] Speaker B: Oh, CO1, CO1. Get rid of it.
[00:06:59] Speaker A: Yeah. What's COA2C?
[00:07:00] Speaker B: COA1 and COA3T sixes. Oh, dude, that's what it is right there.
[00:07:04] Speaker A: I love that.
[00:07:05] Speaker B: Yeah. We're making policy. This one's. This podcast is going to get us in trouble.
[00:07:09] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:07:10] Speaker B: Cool. Yeah, I'm all right with that.
[00:07:11] Speaker A: Yeah. But good operational stuff going on out there.
[00:07:16] Speaker B: Oh, it's. It's exciting, man. And we'll say this again after the podcast. Please keep reaching out.
You know, we. As much legwork as we don't do most of these episodes are because of folks reach out and tell us about cool cases.
[00:07:28] Speaker A: So yeah, majority of these things, the shout outs too. They. We would not have any shout outs if we got zero emails or if you didn't drop into the DMS, IMs, into the Instagrams.
[00:07:41] Speaker B: Yeah, I don't even know.
[00:07:43] Speaker A: I recently deleted my Instagram account.
[00:07:45] Speaker B: Congrats.
[00:07:45] Speaker A: Well, I didn't delete it. Like, you know, delete it, delete it. Yeah, but brother, I was spending like two hours doom scrolling. That is not good for your mental health, dude. Nick, all I want is. All I wanted was Boston Whaler boats, awesome dirt bikes and you know.
[00:08:00] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:08:00] Speaker A: There's other things.
[00:08:01] Speaker B: You can only look at Baja 1000 videos for so long.
[00:08:03] Speaker A: Oh, Boat zone. That was getting me.
[00:08:06] Speaker B: Lord, Boat zone.
[00:08:07] Speaker A: If you haven't heard the term getting stuffed, Google getting stuffed. Just don't do it on your coast guard computer.
All right?
[00:08:16] Speaker B: So speaking of.
[00:08:17] Speaker A: Speaking of.
[00:08:18] Speaker B: Yeah. Dude. San Fran Part two Different crew.
Gentlemen, good morning. Good morning.
[00:08:33] Speaker D: Greetings, greetings.
[00:08:34] Speaker B: Hello.
[00:08:35] Speaker D: It is four. I. I have a computer in front of me so I can tell what is it.
[00:08:38] Speaker B: What time is it back? It's still probably afternoon, San Francisco. So.
Yeah, thanks for coming on, Tommy.
[00:08:44] Speaker D: Thanks for having us.
[00:08:44] Speaker B: Big shout out to you for reaching out and put this together, man. I think we started talking about this when I was out there for the stand visit. So, yeah, we finally rolled around, man. I'm pumped to have you guys on. This is a sweet case bunch. You guys introduce yourself, tell us a bit about yourself, your story. I got in the Coast Guard. Previous tours, possible future tours. I don't know. Favorite color.
[00:09:05] Speaker C: Go ahead.
[00:09:05] Speaker D: Yeah. Cool. Jake Conrad. San Fran is my third tour. Before that I was Corpus and Brinkin was. Was number one at a. Had a great time at all three super different tours, obviously, but had a great time, learned a lot. Super awesome people and pilots along the way. Before flight school, I was on a boat in Alaska. Didn't apply to flight school. Out of the academy. Wanted to see the boat side of things. Couldn't imagine joining a seagoing service and not see the sea for at least part of it.
[00:09:32] Speaker B: So now I feel bad for I've seen the sea.
[00:09:35] Speaker A: Talking trash about from the helicopter.
[00:09:37] Speaker D: Yeah. You know, every time I say that, I was like, this gets less and less relevant because you've spent more time over the water in the helicopter than you ever did on the boat. So it's. Anyway, anyway, Alaska was fun. I enjoyed it. But yeah, academy before that, after this, San Fran. I'm probably looking to start a staff tour.
Forced out D to C from a desk. Yes.
[00:09:57] Speaker A: Are we thinking a headquarters staff tour or a cool, exotic location?
[00:10:02] Speaker B: If you say the job you want on the podcast, it happens.
[00:10:05] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:10:05] Speaker C: Is that true?
[00:10:06] Speaker D: Is that true?
[00:10:07] Speaker B: Nick and I are going to see.
[00:10:08] Speaker C: Oh, yes. Congratulations on that command.
[00:10:10] Speaker A: Thank you.
[00:10:12] Speaker D: No, I'm looking at pack jobs. Stay in the area. Yeah. Keep the kids stable for a little bit and it'll be fun.
[00:10:18] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:10:18] Speaker D: That's cool. My wife promised me a trailer if I had to go camping if I stay, so. Okay, here we go.
[00:10:23] Speaker C: The deep promises.
[00:10:24] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:10:25] Speaker D: It's on the podcast now. So it's happening.
[00:10:29] Speaker B: Fun story. I tell this story all the time. So you go to a stand visit, you brief everybody. You have to brief the arrow topic for your stand check. And he brings the lift equation and completely dissects the lift equation for this. Yeah. And I'm just sitting there.
[00:10:44] Speaker C: That is a classic.
[00:10:46] Speaker B: As a mobile atcip nodding with. I'm like, yes, yes.
[00:10:49] Speaker D: That's the technique. Only if you want to put your instructor to sleep. Just bring lift equation.
[00:10:53] Speaker B: No. Or just Terrify them because I don't. I. Yes. Yes. That's the lift equation. I don't know, dude. So that was. That was impressive.
[00:11:00] Speaker D: No, thanks. Yeah, that's my one move.
[00:11:03] Speaker B: Yeah. So I immediately went home and studied live equation.
[00:11:05] Speaker A: It's incredibly incredible. He passed the entire stand check and didn't even have to fly.
[00:11:09] Speaker B: No, he did not. It was great. He's intimidated his IP right away.
[00:11:14] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:11:14] Speaker B: Thanks for coming on, man. Excited to have you here. These gentlemen are here for a P course, by the way. They are live in the studio.
[00:11:20] Speaker A: It's nice.
[00:11:20] Speaker B: It's good to be here.
[00:11:21] Speaker A: I love seeing faces.
[00:11:22] Speaker B: Yeah, it's nice.
[00:11:23] Speaker C: I'm Thomas Smith.
I first tour in San Francisco, so first air station, first coast guard place ever. Because before this, I was in flight school. Did the whole rigmarole in Pensacola. And then before that, I was the COVID class of OCS.
[00:11:37] Speaker B: Oh, the first one.
[00:11:38] Speaker C: So I kicked off OCS in January of 2020.
[00:11:41] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:11:42] Speaker C: I got on the eagle in April of 2020.
[00:11:44] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:11:45] Speaker C: And then I waved at the port of Charleston.
[00:11:47] Speaker B: Oh.
[00:11:48] Speaker C: As Covid sunk our little port car.
[00:11:51] Speaker B: That's sad.
[00:11:52] Speaker C: So we were the COVID class. So we didn't do 17 weeks. We did 13.
[00:11:56] Speaker B: Oh, my gosh.
[00:11:57] Speaker C: Yeah. So everyone was a little bit frustrated.
[00:11:59] Speaker A: With us, but, yeah. I mean, let's face it. Those extra four weeks were not beneficial.
[00:12:03] Speaker B: No. I think that's what it is now.
[00:12:05] Speaker C: Yeah. They changed. I think it's 12 now.
[00:12:07] Speaker D: It's 12 weeks.
[00:12:08] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:12:08] Speaker D: Oh, man.
[00:12:08] Speaker B: Yep. Instead of what was ours?
[00:12:11] Speaker A: 17. 17. Yep.
[00:12:12] Speaker C: It's a long time.
[00:12:13] Speaker B: It's a long time for anything.
[00:12:14] Speaker A: Way too long.
[00:12:15] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:12:17] Speaker C: Before that, I did data analytics at a hospital, and I bartended at night.
[00:12:21] Speaker B: Nice.
[00:12:22] Speaker C: And looking to join the service. I was trying to join the Air Force, but they wouldn't let me fly. I saw two BMs at a bar in Milwaukee.
[00:12:29] Speaker B: Hell, yeah.
[00:12:30] Speaker C: And after a couple of highlights of.
[00:12:31] Speaker B: Liquid courage, champagne, and beers, I walked.
[00:12:34] Speaker C: Up and said, why are you wearing those funny getups? Can you tell me about what you do? And then I called the recruiter and tried to enlist to be a B, maybe a week later.
[00:12:43] Speaker B: Nice, dude.
[00:12:44] Speaker C: And here I am.
[00:12:44] Speaker B: And look where you are right now.
[00:12:46] Speaker A: And you became a bm.
[00:12:48] Speaker C: No, she. She put in an OCS packet for me.
[00:12:52] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:12:52] Speaker C: And steered me in the direction.
[00:12:54] Speaker A: Oh, straight to ocs.
[00:12:55] Speaker C: So I went straight to ocs.
[00:12:57] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:12:57] Speaker C: On the street. And then straight to flight school. I just fell into luck.
[00:13:01] Speaker B: Dang. And then to San Francisco, man.
[00:13:04] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:13:05] Speaker A: So wife's Thrill. So where do you want to go next?
[00:13:08] Speaker C: Yeah, you know, I'm just trying to get through FP right now.
[00:13:11] Speaker B: That's the. That's the political answer.
[00:13:13] Speaker A: Awesome, man.
[00:13:13] Speaker B: Nice.
[00:13:13] Speaker A: Hawaii, probably. Yeah. You know, they need second tour pilots.
[00:13:16] Speaker C: So I'm coming from, like, the Midwest, and anything is better or different is good.
[00:13:21] Speaker A: Okay, so you don't want to go to Detroit?
[00:13:23] Speaker C: I would take Detroit, actually. I don't know if my wife would be stoked, but I would definitely do it.
[00:13:27] Speaker A: It would be cool. That's a cool unit, man. Yeah, really, really cool up there.
[00:13:29] Speaker B: We could use a second tour in San Diego, though. Second tour.65 pilot in San Diego.
[00:13:34] Speaker A: Yeah. Come on down.
[00:13:35] Speaker D: Give me the third member. You're in.
[00:13:37] Speaker B: You're in.
[00:13:38] Speaker A: We only need, like, four pilots.
[00:13:39] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:13:39] Speaker D: Our units up to.
[00:13:42] Speaker A: Small, Little. Little sub agency of.
[00:13:45] Speaker B: You know, we get stuff done.
[00:13:46] Speaker A: And you know what? Maybe. Maybe we're not Coast Guard pilots. Maybe we're Red Bull athletes.
[00:13:51] Speaker B: That's what it is. Sponsorships, get things paid for. You're going down the right path.
[00:13:55] Speaker A: Getting outrageous.
[00:13:56] Speaker B: Yeah. Sweet.
[00:13:57] Speaker A: Good Lord.
[00:13:58] Speaker B: You guys aren't here just to talk about us going down to San Diego, though. You guys had a pretty gnarly SAR case that we're really excited to hear about, so.
Yeah, Jake's got his laptop up, so I don't know if you have, like, notes or something, but, I mean, it.
[00:14:11] Speaker D: Happened at the end of December, so Tommy, Tom, and I email each other a week before, like, hey, do you remember what happened?
[00:14:18] Speaker A: Nine months.
[00:14:20] Speaker B: They have the lift equation there, so they're gonna talk to us about that.
[00:14:22] Speaker A: Dude, what if they reverse uno? Hey, brother, let's talk arrow.
Yeah.
[00:14:28] Speaker B: The podcast would suddenly end.
[00:14:29] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:14:30] Speaker A: Before we get into this juicy story, can we. Can we talk about what's sitting in front of us right now?
[00:14:35] Speaker B: Yeah.
The hospitality. They hit the reverse card on the hospitality on us. Yeah. What do you guys got?
[00:14:42] Speaker C: So we thought of you two specifically. Oh, boy. We were like, well, one of them looks like they're river aged, and the other one looks like they're ocean aged.
[00:14:52] Speaker D: So we'll let you decide which is which.
[00:14:54] Speaker C: You can pick which one you are.
[00:14:55] Speaker A: I feel like I'm the river aged one.
[00:14:57] Speaker B: I feel like I want to be the river aged one.
[00:14:59] Speaker A: Actually, you know what? So, I mean, let's break that down. River age, dude. Smooth stones. You have smooth skin.
[00:15:05] Speaker B: Yeah. You do too, though. You have a shaved head.
[00:15:07] Speaker D: I was going to say it's kind of right there on top, but, like.
[00:15:09] Speaker A: I look like I might have gotten beat up by a really big wave.
[00:15:14] Speaker B: I got beat up by a salmon.
[00:15:15] Speaker C: Well, I got. I got this. Beautiful. Oh, Ingram. It's already open, so I feel like we should start with that. Yeah, let's do it.
[00:15:21] Speaker B: Bring it out.
Got whiskey, too. I know these people obviously don't have to drive home tonight. Oh, that was a good sound effect.
[00:15:29] Speaker C: I've played this game before.
[00:15:30] Speaker A: Yeah, it hits different than a little beer cracking.
[00:15:33] Speaker B: Yeah, it really does. This is such a treat. All right. Can you hear the whiskey pouring?
[00:15:39] Speaker A: Dude, I want. I want to go to Kentucky and do the bourbon trail.
[00:15:45] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:15:46] Speaker A: That would be awesome.
[00:15:47] Speaker B: Oh, this is delicious.
[00:15:55] Speaker A: Well, cheers, gents.
[00:15:56] Speaker B: Cheers.
[00:15:57] Speaker D: Yeah, let's do this.
[00:15:57] Speaker A: Thank you.
[00:15:58] Speaker C: Cheers.
[00:16:02] Speaker B: What a treat.
[00:16:03] Speaker D: Cheers. Right over all the equipment. So when the glasses shatter.
[00:16:06] Speaker B: Yeah, please.
[00:16:07] Speaker D: The outro.
[00:16:08] Speaker B: It helps. All right, take us back nine months ago.
[00:16:12] Speaker C: Oh, that's good.
[00:16:12] Speaker B: Rock us through it.
[00:16:13] Speaker A: That is good.
[00:16:14] Speaker D: It started different than most night cases start. We were all in the wardroom, and by all of us, I mean the whole duty crew. I think even the mechan. Yeah, the mechan swimmer were in there as well. Line crew, the od, the line crew, the watch cabinet, and then several other folks who were just hanging around the air station.
[00:16:30] Speaker B: Nice. Those are my favorite nights. Yeah, yeah.
[00:16:33] Speaker D: No, it was cool. I'm usually antisocial and in my room doing grad school work or whatever, but I happen to be in the wardroom. The call came in. Sam Whaley, our YN2 fantastic OD, but she got the call. This is back before we had the EIC phones, I guess, and the call was for an agency assist. At the time, I think the initial information was that two people had fallen off a cliff. And we quickly learned that it was just one person, but they'd fallen like a hundred feet.
And that started probably almost a two hour long process of discussion and approvals that went all the way up to district.
Long conversations with OPS and CEO on the phone.
The discussions ended with us judging the case high risk, high gain, which is certainly the first. Absolutely. The first time in my career I'd ever judged a case high risk.
[00:17:22] Speaker A: So real quick, what was the main discussion about? Because any normal SAR case, you're going to pretty much pick up and launch. Even for agency assists, I feel like you can kind of spool it pretty quick.
[00:17:30] Speaker D: Yes.
[00:17:31] Speaker A: So was it poor weather, something?
[00:17:33] Speaker D: Yeah, a lot of different factors going on. I had just made it my personal preference to talk to the incident commander of whatever case we were going to do. If that was an Option. And we had a couple of cases a few months before where I was able to make that happen. It was a Cal Fire incident commander or something like that. And I was able to talk to them on scene, you know, tell sector, no, I want their cell phone number.
[00:17:54] Speaker B: I'm a big fan of that, by the way.
[00:17:55] Speaker D: Yeah. And so I was actually able to talk to. I don't think it was a Cal fire. I'm. I think it was the shameful sheriff. That's who it was. Yeah. YOLO County Sheriff was, was running the yolo. Yolo. YOLO County Sheriff make it up.
But I talked to him and was able to get all the rest of the information. They were, you know, they were on the top of a hillside or a mountainside. They had fallen down. The mountainside at the base of the. Of this cliff, for lack of a better term was a river. So it wasn't, you know, a super easy option. Just cross the river and then climb up. The river was moving quickly.
In addition, it was San Fran and we had convective activity.
[00:18:35] Speaker C: Yeah. Almost unheard of.
[00:18:37] Speaker B: Was it, was it widespread or was it like it was across wall?
[00:18:41] Speaker D: It was, it was widespread in the sense that it was north to south. It was significant. So I would say it was 70, 80, 90 miles long in terms north to south. It basically covered our AOR from the Bay area north and then it was moving west to east at the time that we launched. We, we. I thought that it was moving west to east.
[00:18:59] Speaker A: That seems really strange to you, Especially in December.
[00:19:01] Speaker D: It was odd. Everything about it was odd. The weather was odd.
[00:19:03] Speaker B: Does that have anything to do with the atmospheric river? This is.
[00:19:06] Speaker C: After that it was quite a bit. Right?
[00:19:08] Speaker D: Yeah.
But it was also in combination with our standard marine layer because we had low level ground fog and we'll get to that. But. So it was fog in combination with convective activity. Icing conditions certainly. I think the lowest icing level was 4 or 5. 5,000.
Yeah, that's.
[00:19:27] Speaker B: That's low. Especially for the things that you have to cross. Yeah.
[00:19:30] Speaker C: December convective activity with a ton of visible moisture and 4,000 foot icing.
[00:19:34] Speaker A: That is wild, dude. I do not understand that at all.
[00:19:37] Speaker B: So that's presumably why this conversations last two hours.
[00:19:41] Speaker D: Yeah. So the weather was a major factor. It was also the nature of where the individuals were. So, you know, finally getting the incident commander, he initially only had half the picture as well. So that was half the delay. It was him getting on scene initially when we called him, he was just receiving ports from his on. On scene, folks, he finally got word that, okay, These individuals are 700ft up the wall and the mountain itself is what, 1100ft or something like that?
So not. Not trivial. We knew it was going to. We knew very quickly it was going to be vert service. We knew it was going to be high AGL and high MSL hoists.
[00:20:14] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:20:15] Speaker D: And that combined with the weather was the thing that very quickly got us to high risk.
[00:20:20] Speaker B: And of course it was nighttime because. Why not?
[00:20:22] Speaker C: Yeah, we had a lot of mixed reports on the ext of the injuries. I think initially they had said it was like a bleeding chest wound.
[00:20:28] Speaker D: Oh, yes.
[00:20:28] Speaker C: And it was kind of dire. And as more information came in that kept changing over time.
[00:20:34] Speaker B: What was when, you guys, at the time of launching, what was the presumed condition of the survivor?
[00:20:42] Speaker D: So there were. So there were two survivors. The second one was stuck above the one who had fallen. And he was able to initially talk on the phone. I think he. His battery ran out quickly or it got wet or something like that, and he couldn't. He stopped being able to talk.
But I think we heard how. Approximately how far he had fallen and then made assumptions from there because I think the only thing the friend was able. I think the. The guy who had fallen yelled out for his friend a few times and then just started, you know, moaning or, you know, whatever. Just the friend could tell him he was in bad shape. He couldn't tell the full extent of his injuries. Okay. We didn't learn that until the next day.
[00:21:17] Speaker C: The next day. Yeah.
[00:21:18] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:21:18] Speaker B: Holy cow. So that's. Wow.
Geez. That is a crazy amount of information and like just a crazy puzzle piece to fit in as you guys are launching.
[00:21:30] Speaker C: I haven't even started the plane yet.
[00:21:31] Speaker B: Right, so. So obviously, aircraft commander IP Fe. Right.
[00:21:36] Speaker D: Yes.
[00:21:37] Speaker B: For you, you're a copilot going through IP or your FP syllabus at this point.
[00:21:42] Speaker C: At the time, I was not even. Right seat skills. I was just co pilot.
[00:21:45] Speaker B: Yeah. So what are you. How you. How you helping the ac?
[00:21:48] Speaker C: Honestly, I was pulling up every terrain map I could think of. We pulled up hiking guides, watershed maps, the GAIA app, the 3D Trail app. We pulled that up to get like an actual visualization of it. We pulled up for flight, the 3D mapping of your flight plan.
[00:22:03] Speaker D: Did you say all trails already?
[00:22:05] Speaker C: Oh, yeah.
[00:22:06] Speaker D: As well. And like mapped all the terrain around the area because we. I mean, wow. This was 80 miles northeast of the air station where we never go.
[00:22:14] Speaker A: How did you guys know to do all of that, that, that, that sounds so foreign to me because it's so flat out here.
[00:22:20] Speaker B: I know I'm not stationed with them, but when I went to do their stand visit, man, the, the robustness of the, like, training and extracurriculars that you guys do to understand your aor, I was massively impressed with. Yeah, they just, they know. And I don't know if it's a training plan that you guys talk about or word of mouth, but you guys do such a good job of training your folks. And that's something that I was so impressed with.
[00:22:41] Speaker D: Like, it was definitely some of that. But I also want to highlight the importance of having 10 people in a room.
[00:22:46] Speaker C: I was going to say.
[00:22:47] Speaker D: I mean, there is.
I think it boils down to that, that level of. I mean, I don't want to be reductive, but like, I think 10 brains in the room and everybody was throwing out ideas. Like, everybody felt empowered. Yeah. And again, I've never had that on a SAR case before. There's 10 people in a room and hey, what about this? Have you thought about this? Well, if we bring a litter, you know, this is going to happen. We would have thought of 5% of the things that we eventually discussed had there been just, you know, the two of us or the four of us in a room talking about.
[00:23:15] Speaker A: That's awesome.
[00:23:15] Speaker D: No, it was, it was definitely the way to plan.
[00:23:19] Speaker C: The watch captain being a flight mech himself was, you know, I don't even.
[00:23:22] Speaker D: Think of some awesome. I don't even think all the people in the room were flyers. I don't even think. I think some of the people were like, hey, I just know the area. I'm from around here. I'm, you know, this watch stander's significant other or whatever. And I know that area. Hey, have you thought about this? Or whatever it was, it was great.
[00:23:39] Speaker B: Yeah. And yeah, like, I mean, a lot of outdoor activities in. Around that area. And obviously the folks take advantage of that and all those opinions, like, oh, I've actually hiked over there, or I've hiked near there. It's. It's all valuable information at that point.
[00:23:51] Speaker C: Absolutely.
[00:23:52] Speaker B: Yeah. It's awesome.
[00:23:54] Speaker D: Yeah. So we, we heard that Henry One, which is. I think that is Yolo County.
[00:24:02] Speaker C: I think it's chips.
[00:24:05] Speaker D: Some. One of the sheriffs. Yeah, Henry. Henry 1 is their call sign. But Henry 1, CHP Cal Fire.
Actually, Chuck, I want to back that up because I don't know for sure that those were the agencies. I was told two of them for sure. I assume the third one. So I'll back that up. But start back here just a second ago. So I know for sure that they called a couple of agencies who turned it down. And they were. I think we were number four. We were the fourth agency that they called.
[00:24:31] Speaker B: Aviation agencies.
[00:24:32] Speaker D: Aviation agencies. I think they determined pretty quickly on that they were not, at least initially, they were not going to be able to climb the wall. So they thought this is going to be a helicopter rescue. And we were the fourth that they called. And I think that spooked.
I don't want to say spooked. I think it lended weight to the seriousness when we started talking to cohesion, especially these agencies. These are no jokes. They do rescues every day. They do vert surface. They do long line.
[00:25:03] Speaker B: That was, that was my question is, are these agencies well verse in vert surface 100%.
[00:25:10] Speaker C: Absolutely.
[00:25:10] Speaker D: More than we are. And that's what really gave me pause initially was okay, if these guys are turning down the case. This is, this is pushing the risk up for sure. Yeah.
[00:25:19] Speaker A: And do you think it was weather related for these other agencies, you think? Yeah, more. Okay, yes. Maybe that's where we excel. You know, they're like, I don't know about this low vis flying stuff and maybe for us we're a little bit more comfortable with it.
[00:25:32] Speaker C: Sure.
[00:25:32] Speaker A: Just a thought. I don't know.
[00:25:33] Speaker D: Yeah, no, I think you're probably right.
[00:25:36] Speaker B: Sweet. So this is funny, the past. We just talked about this in a little intro. We've had a couple high altitude west coast cases over the past couple of months. We've chatted about. And I guess I'm now really interested in this conversation. What did you guys discuss about the litter?
[00:25:56] Speaker C: I mean, we took it with us because we weren't sure if he was going to be ambulatory or not.
[00:25:59] Speaker B: Was it an immediate. We're taking the litter?
[00:26:03] Speaker C: You know, I'd have to ask Mike Romano, our rescue swimmer, about that because I'm pretty sure we didn't even.
[00:26:08] Speaker B: Oh, this happened last time.
[00:26:09] Speaker D: What?
[00:26:11] Speaker B: Really?
[00:26:12] Speaker C: What's a thunderstorm?
[00:26:13] Speaker B: Hold on, I'm pulling up the radar. Oh, yeah, it's over on the Eastern shore.
[00:26:20] Speaker A: What does T2 mean, Bud, you want.
[00:26:23] Speaker B: To talk about the lift equation?
There's storms.
[00:26:28] Speaker A: There's storms coming.
[00:26:29] Speaker B: Yeah. Okay. So, yeah, so the litter wasn't a conversation.
[00:26:33] Speaker D: It was a conversation. I actually remember talking about it in the wardroom with Mike.
The concern was a litter on a bird's surface, 100%. And what's the terrain look like? I honestly think we were fairly certain that we weren't going to use it, but we brought it as a. Like, you said it was like a hey, what if we need it? We don't have it sort of a thing. So, yeah, we can always ditch it.
[00:26:55] Speaker B: And I just. I just bring that up because, you know, the cases that I've had where a litter is in question, and I really think hard about it because it's heavy.
[00:27:03] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:27:04] Speaker B: It takes up a lot of space.
[00:27:05] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:27:05] Speaker B: Not that easy to use in the 65. And, like, it's pretty obvious if you need it, but the times when it's not so obvious in time, you can save the space, you can save the weight, you could take more gas. It's like, leave that thing behind. We're going to figure it out.
[00:27:16] Speaker D: So.
[00:27:17] Speaker B: Cool. All right, that was my litter question. Cool. So, obviously, high risk, high gain.
[00:27:24] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:27:24] Speaker B: Crew's ready to go. And anything else before you guys depart?
[00:27:29] Speaker C: I want to shout out Sam Whaley. I forgot my wallet and my watch and my wedding ring in my locker right before we took off.
[00:27:37] Speaker B: Nice.
[00:27:37] Speaker C: You know, every pilot, I think, is a little superstitious.
[00:27:39] Speaker D: Oh, hell, yeah.
[00:27:40] Speaker C: And she sprinted across the flight deck, went into the mail locker room.
[00:27:43] Speaker D: That was awesome.
[00:27:44] Speaker C: Pulled it out, and then sprinted back and gave it to me.
[00:27:46] Speaker B: That's awesome.
[00:27:46] Speaker D: That is fantastic.
[00:27:47] Speaker B: That is pretty cool.
[00:27:48] Speaker C: Big shout out to Sam.
[00:27:48] Speaker D: Yeah. She was. She was great.
[00:27:50] Speaker B: That's awesome.
Cool.
[00:27:52] Speaker D: And then we had to talk for a while with that. Answer your question. We had to talk for a while to ops and CEO. This wasn't a.
And I would have. I would have been very surprised had the question not been asked directly. And it was like, what are your intentions? What are your thoughts on the case?
[00:28:07] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:28:08] Speaker D: And I think on that, on the conversation, I made it clear I'm not committing to the mission. I am committing to going the next step and seeing what those variables are, going to the next decision gate, seeing what those variables are, and then continuing from there. And eventually, as you'll see, we did reach a decision gate. We were like, no, we're done. Like, this is. We're going to stop here. We're going to reevaluate, and we're going to go again later on.
[00:28:28] Speaker A: Dude, I like that. Yeah, I like that thought process.
[00:28:31] Speaker D: I think that's awesome. The timbre is very different than sticking your nose in it. Sticking your nose in it gives it the idea, like, we're going to fly by the seed where pain is figured out. This was a. I'm going to go to the next decision gate and see what's going on and then decide if this again, if this. If it's still high risk, high gain, or super high risk, high gain, you know? Yeah.
[00:28:50] Speaker A: So that's cool. That reminds me of the Kodiak case that you and Kenny did for the Coast Guard Aviation Association. The roost in San Diego, like, they flew is like low vis, really awesome episode. But they talked about decision gates, like, hey, we're going to go here and then we're going to make a decision, and then we're going to go here and then we're going to make a decision. And like, ultimately they got there, right?
[00:29:10] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:29:11] Speaker A: But it was like CRM throughout the entire sortie, which is awesome.
[00:29:13] Speaker C: Yeah, we had a bunch of those throughout the whole flight.
[00:29:15] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:29:15] Speaker D: Yep.
[00:29:16] Speaker B: So. So let me ask you a question. And I've been in this particular situation as a co pilot, I pretty much would accept anything to go fly and save lives. Like, I was pumped to launch. And looking back at that now after being an aircraft commander, you know, you line your bunk as an ac, you're like, gosh, I hope the phone doesn't ring. You know, but as a co pilot, you're sitting there like, let the phone ring. You're, like, staring at the phone. Let's go. So did you have any pause?
[00:29:39] Speaker C: I think I was pretty gung ho.
[00:29:42] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:29:42] Speaker C: For the first half. And then I think the sobering fact was when we heard the other agencies had turned it down.
[00:29:49] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:29:49] Speaker C: I think that was the minute where I was like, oh, this is. This is real. This is it. This is like, this might be the one. But, I mean, I never got my hopes up because there's so many times you. You think it's the one.
[00:29:58] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:29:59] Speaker C: Like, this is going to be it. And, you know, but I was still. I was nervous. Yeah, I was very nervous. And I'm not ashamed to admit that.
[00:30:05] Speaker B: Yeah, no, absolutely.
[00:30:06] Speaker C: I was.
[00:30:06] Speaker D: You weren't the only one.
[00:30:07] Speaker C: Yeah, I'm glad to hear. Yeah.
[00:30:09] Speaker B: Yeah. And that is funny. And I think I don't. I mean, personally, and I probably talked about on the podcast before, but I specifically remember, you know, getting my AC center letter signed, going to bed that first night as the aircraft commander and being like, wow, I don't want this phone to ring right now.
[00:30:25] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:30:26] Speaker B: Like, I.
[00:30:26] Speaker D: It's on you.
[00:30:27] Speaker B: Yeah, it is on you. And then because we, you know, in Savannah, we had some absolute legends, you know, and like, you be on duties with Russ Mathis and you're like, yeah, we're going for it. This is good. We're going to pull burning babies out of the surf at night in thunderstorms. And then it just like switches, so. Interesting. Cool. Thanks.
[00:30:45] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:30:47] Speaker B: Sweet. All right, so rotors are turning about.
[00:30:51] Speaker D: Which one did you want to talk about? The. Take us through the takeoff and everything departure. I've been talking. I need to rest my voice.
[00:30:57] Speaker C: Yeah, I see. What little I remember.
Yeah, I remember it was like a pretty. It was raining at the air station and it was already cold at that point. So by the time we were getting turning, we knew that the fog layer was low. I'm pretty sure we requested special VFR out of the tower, but I can't remember for certain.
[00:31:16] Speaker D: You know, I think it was. Is. So this was the, this was the big question.
[00:31:20] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:31:21] Speaker D: After we had decided to launch, the question was, do we go ifr? Do we go vfr?
I mean, that, that question has been asked a hundred times in this context. The thing that push pushed us over to the VFR was. It's convective.
[00:31:32] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:31:33] Speaker D: We don't know what we're going to encounter. It's not Mobile, Alabama in the middle of summer, but it's, it's convective.
[00:31:38] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:31:39] Speaker D: So I don't want to be at 5,000ft, which is what they're going to bring us to.
[00:31:42] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:31:42] Speaker D: Trying to fly through the squall line and then, you know, see a 5,000 foot per minute rated ascent. And I just. So I think we elected to go VFR for that reason. We took off the field was vfr. And I think before we even hit the Bay Bridge, which is not even. I mean, you know, it's like five, five miles away or something like that.
[00:31:58] Speaker B: It's.
[00:31:58] Speaker D: It's close.
Couldn't see anything. Oh, yeah, there was all the, all the clouds were below the surrounding terrain. You couldn't see Oakland, you couldn't see Richmond on the other side. And so we, we took off. VFR field was VFR and very quickly realized we're going to be imc.
[00:32:13] Speaker B: Did you go under the bridge?
[00:32:15] Speaker D: We did not go under the bridge.
[00:32:17] Speaker C: Sorry.
[00:32:17] Speaker D: The bridge. The bridge is the last. Was the last thing. Yeah. I think as we crossed Yerba Buena island, the middle of the bridge there, we said, all right, we're going to go, we're going to go imc. And we just committed to it. I think we, we hit go around, right? Yep. Hit go around. We went straight and we just went. When we hit go around, we were vmc.
[00:32:34] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:32:35] Speaker D: But I didn't want to risk. It's always different if you go into it on purpose and if you can go into it on accident. Sure. Advert and IMC is always better than inadvertently.
[00:32:43] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:32:43] Speaker D: Let's go for it. We're going to go. I think we had NorCal on the backup. Yep.
[00:32:48] Speaker C: We had NORCAL up and we knew like north of us was. We could keep climbing and be okay.
[00:32:52] Speaker B: Yeah, right.
[00:32:52] Speaker A: And that's approach. NorCal approach, yes. Okay.
[00:32:55] Speaker B: But still, like, you guys are pointing to the north at that point. Right. Heading towards the Bay Bridge. There's so much shit. Like, you have the city of San Francisco off to the left, you have the city of Oakland off to the right. You have Bay Bridge ahead of you. The south is pretty clear. But you have that massive Hunters Point bridge or crane or whatever the hell that thing is. Like, that is a. That is a wild place to just go up into the clouds. But at that point, like, you are. At that point, you are the probably the best chance of, you know, going advert and IMC and being clear of anything right there.
[00:33:28] Speaker D: If you're going to go IMC in the bay, that's the place to do it. Because you're clear of SFO's approach corridor, you're clear of Oakland's approach corridor, and the heavies have gotten way above you and turned by the time you reach the Bay Bridge. So it was. If you're going to go advert and imc, that was where we're going to do it. So. And we just didn't, you know, max power climb, I think, contacted NorCal.
[00:33:49] Speaker C: Kept climbing.
[00:33:50] Speaker D: Yep, kept climbing. We climbed all the way to the Bravo airspace shelf just below it. So I think 5,000 is where we leveled off at that point. Yeah, go ahead.
[00:33:59] Speaker C: At that point we started noticing there was a couple things that were starting to go wrong, specifically the temperature, adiabatic lapse rate. Looking at that and going like, man, how much higher can we climb? We had looked at icing, but we didn't know exactly where it was. We didn't have a pyre up or anything like that. So we're looking at it and then.
All right, it's coming. Yeah, we know it. The windscreens are starting to get a little frosty now.
[00:34:22] Speaker A: Oh, wow.
[00:34:23] Speaker C: Like, okay, let's turn, you know, the windscreen on. Let's heat this baby up. Yeah, mine worked.
[00:34:28] Speaker D: Yeah, mine did not.
[00:34:30] Speaker B: Oh, no, of course not.
[00:34:32] Speaker D: Yeah, we. We struggled initially when we talked to NorCal, they were helpful, but they could not give us a clearance. So we were Kind of in limbo for a minute while they switched us off to center. And this whole time we're looking at, uh, we're looking at the icing. We switched on windscreen anti ice. I started calling out OAT ratings cause it was. Or probe readings. Cause it was on my side.
[00:34:50] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:34:50] Speaker D: And you're just.
[00:34:51] Speaker B: You didn't give Tommy the left seat as a co pilot or right seat.
[00:34:53] Speaker D: Yeah, Doing it live. Yeah.
[00:34:57] Speaker C: Right seat skills.
[00:34:57] Speaker B: This is the time.
[00:34:58] Speaker D: Yeah. Gonna learn today.
[00:35:00] Speaker A: Secret swim, baby.
[00:35:01] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:35:01] Speaker A: Dumb, dumb question. But when you're getting up with approach, are you now Coast Guard rescue six six or six five, whatever. And do you get any priority handling or anything like that?
[00:35:12] Speaker D: I don't know if we got priority handling.
I think the best. No, go ahead.
[00:35:17] Speaker C: So I seem to remember Oakland, because at that point NorCal kicked off to Oakland. And they. I don't think was priority, but they were very expeditious.
[00:35:23] Speaker A: They were asked, they were more helpful.
[00:35:25] Speaker D: Then they didn't give us a dance about read the back of the mess up. They were just like, who are you? Where are you? What do you need?
[00:35:31] Speaker B: Right, okay.
[00:35:32] Speaker D: Once they heard the rescue call sign.
[00:35:33] Speaker A: Oh, awesome. Cool. Very cool.
[00:35:35] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:35:36] Speaker B: And so you checked in as like, hey, active search and rescue case. Need to go here.
[00:35:41] Speaker D: You know, the longer I do this, the more I think the plain language really works. Just tell them. And I think I literally said, we're over Richmond. We launched on a SAR case. We are now imc. We need an IFR clearance. And I'm scrolling frantically through my iPad at this point, trying to find an airport that I think will be north of the weather.
[00:35:59] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:36:00] Speaker D: There is kind of nothing north northwest of Sacramento. So I had to go northwest proper, more west than north. And I picked uk. And so just as I'm, you know, fingers mashing the button as I'm talking to them, I just said, ukiah, I want an IFR clearance to Ukiah.
And they said, you know, standby or whatever. I think we had the clearance. Once we got center, we had the clearance maybe 30 seconds.
[00:36:23] Speaker A: Dude, that's awesome.
[00:36:24] Speaker C: Nothing at all.
[00:36:24] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:36:25] Speaker A: And at least you're moving in a certain direction, right? Like, let's say you didn't show. Choose the exact right airport that you wanted to go to. Hey, man, at least you're moving the right direction at that point.
[00:36:33] Speaker D: All we wanted to do, let's just get north. Hopefully as this front moves west, you know, northwest, southeast, we'll get behind the front. Maybe we'll find a pocket of vfr. We can descend and still be useful.
[00:36:41] Speaker C: Yeah. At this point, they had given us. They give us pretty much everything we asked for, and they gave us the altitude, but we were starting to see that icing build up.
[00:36:48] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:36:48] Speaker C: And in the back of my head, I was remembering all the great lessons from ADC Mobile. The weather and the weather react on the radar. It's like we should just take a quick peek at that because we knew we were flying into something bad.
[00:37:01] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:37:01] Speaker C: And we pulled it up and put it on there, and it was bright red, like, just right in front of us. It was.
[00:37:05] Speaker A: Oh, wow.
[00:37:06] Speaker C: Screaming.
[00:37:06] Speaker D: I just want to put in a plug for. For Tommy here.
I totally blanked on the radar. My head was, like, talking to NorCal, getting a clearance, figuring out how to go. If I could have picked any brand new, just out of t course copilot, it would have been Tommy. He was like. He didn't wait for me to say, you know, hey, get up, bring up the radar.
[00:37:26] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:37:26] Speaker D: He just reached down, turned the radar, started tuning it in, set up weather react. And that is when we noticed the squall line ahead of us.
[00:37:34] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:37:34] Speaker D: I wouldn't have gotten there.
[00:37:35] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:37:35] Speaker D: I was too busy focused on other things. And that was a huge contributing factor to our eventual abort to Santa Rosa.
[00:37:41] Speaker A: But.
[00:37:42] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:37:42] Speaker A: So nice job, Tommy. Nice job.
[00:37:44] Speaker D: Appreciate that.
[00:37:45] Speaker B: Nice job, man.
[00:37:46] Speaker A: So big red blob off the nose.
[00:37:50] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:37:50] Speaker C: And I first I was trying to, like, pull up the back of my head, like, what does red mean on the radar?
[00:37:54] Speaker A: Red's not good.
[00:37:55] Speaker C: I'm pretty sure that's bad.
[00:37:56] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:37:57] Speaker C: And I was like, would you mind looking at this real quick? And he's like, immediately made the call, like, ah, can we get, like, a turn to the left, please?
[00:38:03] Speaker B: Yeah. Now.
[00:38:05] Speaker D: Yeah. We said a go, no go decision point. And that was the final approach fix for the ILS and the Santa Rosa. As you're going north, it's, you know, nos and then Petaluma, Santa Rosa, and all the way up to Ukiah. Um, and I knew that if we didn't solve the. So at this point, we kind of glazed over it, but we turned on the windscreen anti ice. His worked, mine failed. His side cleared my side. And the cabin just continued to frost over.
[00:38:29] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:38:29] Speaker D: And eventually I just. It was just frosted. He couldn't see anything. Um, and my concern was that we were never gonna leave imc. We're gonna stay VMC until the whole plane was. Was frosted over. Cause I knew it was going on with my windshield, and that was the same thing going on with the blades.
[00:38:43] Speaker B: Started to get nervous.
[00:38:45] Speaker D: And we're talking about this the whole time as a crew. Here's what's going on. My windscreen's failed. My side's frosting over. Yep. I'm seeing the same thing. And all that. Ergo, no good. As decision point was that final approach. Fix it. The ILS at Santa Rosa. And then you saw that blob and then. And that. That pushed me over the. Okay, we're. We're about to be. Go from useful to useless here. And very quickly.
[00:39:05] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:39:06] Speaker D: And just be, you know, a position where we're just up here trying to stay alive. And that was the thing that pushed me over the edge. So that's another reason I mentioned, like him just thinking to bring up the radar. That was the one data point that I needed. Just be like, this is. We've gone from high risk, high grain to very high risk, high gain, and we need to get out of here.
[00:39:22] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:39:24] Speaker D: And I think we almost immediately asked for the ILS in the Santa Rosa. Absolutely. Yep.
[00:39:28] Speaker C: So whole crew, though, it was like, are we all on the same page? And everybody was like, go for it. Send it.
[00:39:35] Speaker B: So then you got vectors to that ILS into Santa Rosa.
[00:39:39] Speaker D: Yep. And I think I told. I think I plainly English that as well. You know, we are icing over. We need to. We're going to abort right now. We'd like to ILS into Santa Rosa. And they were expeditious. They got us down immediately.
[00:39:49] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:39:49] Speaker A: Quick plug for just plain language.
[00:39:51] Speaker B: Oh, dude.
[00:39:51] Speaker A: You know what I mean?
There's like. There's like fatigue in trying to say the correct ATC verbiage sometimes. Right?
[00:39:58] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:39:59] Speaker A: And you cannot properly communicate if you are trying to be like this ATC robot.
[00:40:04] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:40:05] Speaker A: Air traffic control. I'm talking about training center mobile. But. But like, dude, plain language. And you're having a conversation with a human being. Hey, brother, this is what's happening. I need this.
[00:40:16] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:40:16] Speaker A: Like, that is. That is very important. I think in our line of work, especially when we have to be flexible.
[00:40:21] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:40:21] Speaker A: With things. You know what I mean? We're not picking up from point A to point B on A. On a plan.
[00:40:24] Speaker D: I think they appreciate it too. Yeah. I think they appreciate when you don't try and sound cool. I'm not this, you know, badass guy up here. I just. Just send it. Tell me what you need so I can get it for you.
[00:40:33] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:40:33] Speaker C: Start getting empathy from their side, too. They're like, oh, they actually.
[00:40:36] Speaker D: Oh, yes.
[00:40:36] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:40:37] Speaker B: I think, I think that cuts through to the noise when you go plain language like, hey, shit, serious right now. We're going to get these guys what they want done.
[00:40:44] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:40:45] Speaker C: So the ils.
[00:40:47] Speaker B: Oh boy.
[00:40:47] Speaker C: Yeah, we are on goggles at this point.
[00:40:50] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:40:50] Speaker C: And it was absolutely just nothing. Couldn't see anything. I had the HUD on which was pretty helpful. So I kind of knew where we were like altitude wise. But I remember just staring out the chin bubble and just being like nothing. Oh, I got a blink like I see a light of a house or something like that.
[00:41:06] Speaker D: Yeah. I think I pass you controls, set it up. Spent some time with my knee board which I. That's right, yeah. Spent some time with my knee board and the wee max trying to deflect. We turned the heat on, turned it on, override and I was there with my knee board trying to deflect.
[00:41:24] Speaker B: That's awesome.
[00:41:25] Speaker D: Towards my windshield. So I had at least a hole to see the ground.
[00:41:27] Speaker C: All weather aircraft adaptability, flexibility.
[00:41:30] Speaker B: Yeah, Heck yeah, dude.
[00:41:31] Speaker D: It didn't work at all.
Luckily I carry around one of those stupid microfiber towels for my glasses because I'm blind. So I had one of those up there and was like frantically wiping the window.
[00:41:42] Speaker B: Yeah, that's wild. So do you use the standard call outs at the bottom of the approach?
[00:41:48] Speaker C: Luckily we saw the lights so we were good.
[00:41:50] Speaker D: Everything was non standard about the weather. One of us thought to use pilot controlled lighting. I don't know who, but we never would have seen anything on the ground because it was, I don't want to say heavy fog. It was moderate fog. I don't know that we would have seen any part of the airport environment if we hadn't seen the ALRs. Sure, yeah, absolutely. So we, yeah, I think about 500, 400, 500ft. We engage pilot controlled lighting. Didn't see anything until we were 2 or 300.
[00:42:15] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:42:15] Speaker D: Almost a decision height. Yeah, yeah, sure. And then about a. We continued down, we got nice and slow, we continued down. Once we saw the als, we made the decision to continue.
Tommy, Tommy was in the left seat. We were facing north, terminals off the right side to the east. And that's the only reason I, I think I ended up taking controls and taking the landing because even though my side was iced over, I had lights on my side.
[00:42:40] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:42:41] Speaker D: He was on goggles but it was foggy, there was nothing.
[00:42:44] Speaker B: And you were unaided on your side.
[00:42:46] Speaker D: I was unable on my side.
[00:42:48] Speaker B: Cool.
[00:42:48] Speaker D: Yep. I think the, I think we had both landing Hover lights off because it was just hitting the fog and just blooming everything. So I went unaided. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
[00:42:58] Speaker B: Sweet. So.
[00:42:59] Speaker D: So I looked through my. My little hole that I wiped in the windshield.
It reminded me of shipboard operations, honestly, like, you're not looking at the swaying ship up in front, and I was just looking forward and down through my little hole and. Yeah.
[00:43:11] Speaker B: And then. So you guys land, get gas.
[00:43:17] Speaker C: Yeah. So. So like at this point, it's like what, 1am yeah. So we called a late night gas guy. Some 16 year old comes out.
[00:43:26] Speaker D: He was so stoked.
[00:43:27] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:43:27] Speaker C: He was like, I'm getting paid overtime to spend the night. This is sick.
[00:43:31] Speaker A: Oh, that's cool.
[00:43:32] Speaker D: He was so excited, like, oh, sorry, sirs. He comes like running up. No way through the field just like one in the morning. He's driving the field truck at like 60 miles an hour over this on the ramp. He was awesome.
[00:43:42] Speaker B: I just did. I mean, it wasn't a cool sarcase, but I just had to do this recently at an unnamed airport and then I had to call somebody in it. I thought I was going to get physically assaulted for having.
Oh, my God.
[00:43:53] Speaker C: This kid was stoked. And so we gassed up and at that point, I think we took a peek at the weather and it just got worse.
[00:43:58] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:43:59] Speaker C: Like, it just kept getting.
[00:44:00] Speaker B: So what conversations were happening at this point?
[00:44:04] Speaker D: So at this point, I was glad to be on the ground. I was also a little bit frustrated because I knew at this point, I talked to the incident commander numerous times. We're starting to build a rapport with him. He. When we told him we were coming, he was so excited.
[00:44:15] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:44:16] Speaker D: And then I had to call him back and say, we're not coming. Yeah. So I was a little bit disheartened, I guess. So I called him back. I gave him the whole. I told him everything that happened just so. Just to paint him a picture. Doing the courtesy of letting him know why we weren't coming. Um, and then just told ops, like, we're gonna hold here. Like we're not gonna try and come home. That's just wasting flight hours and commission time and everything else. So we'll just hold here. By the time the guy showed up with a fuel, we'd been on deck for almost 45 minutes. An hour or something like that.
If we were gonna go down in any fbo, Santa Rosa was the best one to go down.
[00:44:48] Speaker C: Blessing, seriously.
[00:44:49] Speaker D: Food and drinks and. And coffee, couches, recliners for everybody.
[00:44:54] Speaker B: Awesome. So sorry. I just want to so at this point, both the survivors did they. Were the rescue personnel able to access them at all?
[00:45:04] Speaker D: No, at this point, nobody had gone up the wall or tried to go up the wall. They were up there by themselves.
[00:45:09] Speaker C: They were communicating by shouting at that point because they had no cell service, and that was it.
[00:45:14] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:45:14] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:45:15] Speaker A: To people below them or above them.
[00:45:16] Speaker C: I think they had, like, a megaphone on the ground.
[00:45:18] Speaker D: They had a megaphone from the road adjacent to the river at the bottom of the cliff.
[00:45:22] Speaker B: How hard was that in the back of your head, knowing that?
[00:45:28] Speaker D: I. Like I said, I was disheartened. For the incident commander's sake, for the survivors. I knew we did our best. Like, we actually did our best. We. This was a max effort. Yeah. We went up to the point where, okay, this is. We're legitimately endangering ourselves in the aircraft. We need to get on the ground. So I felt confident in that, in that regard, but I also wasn't done. I wasn't done yet. Like, I wanted to keep going, so.
So, yeah, we stayed there the night. I'll never forget Mike Romano's mouth breathing for six hours, trying to go sleep. I think he was asleep in, like, four minutes.
[00:46:01] Speaker C: Yeah, he didn't even. I don't even think he unzipped his dry suit.
[00:46:03] Speaker D: He just. No, he just sat down and was done.
[00:46:05] Speaker A: Just farting in his dry suit all night.
[00:46:07] Speaker C: Just living.
Just living in. What an absolute legend, too.
[00:46:11] Speaker D: He's a unit.
[00:46:13] Speaker C: They had, like, my blessing for that whole thing, though, is they had complimentary toothbrushes in the bathroom.
[00:46:18] Speaker B: Oh.
[00:46:18] Speaker C: So when we woke up, we raided it.
[00:46:20] Speaker B: That's awesome.
[00:46:21] Speaker C: Amazing.
[00:46:22] Speaker B: Okay, so. So you land, you go to bed at what time in that? FBO about.
[00:46:26] Speaker D: I think I live put. I called ops. Last called Ops is at one or something like that. And we were probably asleep by 2 2. So. Yeah.
[00:46:33] Speaker B: And the plan at that point was get some rest.
[00:46:36] Speaker D: Yeah, we're gonna reevaluate weather. We were at that point, we still thought the front was moving. We learned up in the morning that the front was basically stationary. Um, but at that point, it was. Let's just hang out for a while. Let's wait for the front to go through, and we'll reevaluate in a couple hours. Um, so I set my alarm for. For six, I think, in the morning.
[00:46:55] Speaker B: Okay. So you were like, hey, I need. Like, the weather was bad enough where it's going to be four hours till we can reassess.
[00:47:01] Speaker D: I. I was up, you know, every half an hour or something. Like that rechecking weather, it got worse. For three hours, it got worse until the point where everything from, like, San Jose and the south end of the bay all the way up to Ukiah was. Was pink. Was low ifr. Cow convective or. No, it was still convective. It was convective east of the bay now, but it was still convective in the area we wanted to go. So. And that made me feel good. Like, I was like, okay, we were.
[00:47:26] Speaker C: Made the right decision.
[00:47:27] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:47:27] Speaker B: Because you. Even if you got through that stuff.
[00:47:29] Speaker D: Yeah. What were we going to do when we got there? Yeah.
[00:47:32] Speaker B: Cool. All right. So alarm goes off.
[00:47:34] Speaker D: At six in the morning, my alarm goes off. I immediately text the IC and learned that seven people had climbed the wall in the night. And one of the firefighters who climbed had also gotten injured.
[00:47:46] Speaker A: Stop it.
[00:47:47] Speaker D: Yeah. I don't know the. I still don't know the nature of their injuries, but they were injured enough for them to mention that he could not. There was no way they were getting off the wall.
[00:47:56] Speaker B: So there's three injured people on the wall right now.
[00:47:59] Speaker D: Three.
[00:48:00] Speaker C: There were nine total.
[00:48:01] Speaker D: Nine total people. Two of them were injured.
[00:48:03] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:48:03] Speaker D: One survivor and one rescuer were now injured.
And they weren't coming down because of rock slides. So it started. There was enough rain that night with a convective activity that actually there were rock slides around the site.
[00:48:15] Speaker B: So did they get one of the other survivors down?
[00:48:17] Speaker C: No, but they had made it up to him. So they were able to get him, like, hands on. Gotcha. Start taking care of them.
[00:48:22] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:48:22] Speaker C: But correct me wrong, but they did not know that they're going to be there overnight.
[00:48:26] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:48:26] Speaker C: So they didn't bring any foul weather gear.
[00:48:29] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:48:29] Speaker D: They had a tarp.
[00:48:30] Speaker C: They were in jeans and hoodies.
[00:48:31] Speaker B: Holy cow.
[00:48:32] Speaker C: In a rainstorm with, like, rock slides around them.
[00:48:34] Speaker B: Holy cow.
[00:48:35] Speaker C: Poor guys.
[00:48:35] Speaker D: Wow.
[00:48:36] Speaker B: Oh, man.
[00:48:37] Speaker C: That was the first thing I heard. Jake woke me up and go, there's nine now.
I was like, okay, okay.
[00:48:45] Speaker D: I called. I called the ic, like, got the full picture. And I still remember it saying. So just to be clear, there's nine people that need to come off the wall now. And he was like, that is correct.
Okay.
Yeah. I think we woke everybody up at like 7 or something like that. Started talking through a plan called ops. CEO decided to launch only because we thought we could find a hole east of the rescue site. So now our plan was, okay, we're way west of the rescue site. Let's try and go way east where we can shoot an ILS Yeah. So there was. And just get closer, get closer, but also get to a low lying area that would allow us to get under the layer and then access the rescue site.
[00:49:27] Speaker B: And this was your other decision gate. Like this is like you're just going from decision gate to decision.
[00:49:31] Speaker D: Yeah. And what I really didn't want to have happen was us launch and end up in the exact same scenario where we were before, where, hey, we're up here, we're icing and we don't have a plan.
[00:49:39] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:49:40] Speaker D: So the plan was we're going to go do an ils, we're going to get under the layer and then we're going to reevaluate from there.
[00:49:45] Speaker B: This is really interesting to me because let's say you're going to a case offshore. Our bread and butter. Right. We trained to do this. You're just going to shoot a catch IVs let down, TF capture. That's how you're going to get underneath the layer. But like when you go inland, mountainous terrain, getting under the layer via an instrument approach is. An instrument approach to an airport, right?
[00:50:06] Speaker D: Yes.
[00:50:07] Speaker B: Yeah, I, you know, I never really thought about that as like, hey, you just need a lily pad to these airports and get under the layer via the instrument approach. And then that's. That's your point of entry.
[00:50:16] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:50:16] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:50:17] Speaker C: It's your safety margin.
[00:50:17] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:50:18] Speaker B: Very interesting.
[00:50:18] Speaker D: And that certainly had never occurred to me before this case.
[00:50:20] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:50:20] Speaker D: Us just talking about how are we going to make this work? Do we want to go all the way back to the north again and then wind through the valleys and we ended up with, we know, instruments.
[00:50:29] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:50:30] Speaker D: Let's go do the approach. Let's get under the layer that you know that low level like that was a central valley of California. It was a super low level. It's super flat. There's no terrain out there.
[00:50:40] Speaker B: Nice.
[00:50:40] Speaker D: But it leads to the valley entrance where the rescue site.
[00:50:43] Speaker B: Was that the also the closest or is that just the best option because of terrain?
[00:50:48] Speaker D: Both. It was the close.
[00:50:49] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:50:49] Speaker D: I think it was the closest airport. Even though it was. I think I've written down it's like 17 miles away or something.
[00:50:54] Speaker C: It was, yeah, it was the closest to the incident site, but it was.
[00:50:56] Speaker B: Also the best because of the low level flying terrain. Yes.
[00:50:58] Speaker C: Had an ILS and it had fuel.
[00:51:00] Speaker B: Nice.
[00:51:01] Speaker A: Oh, that's awesome.
[00:51:01] Speaker C: So we knew that was going to be the spot.
[00:51:03] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:51:03] Speaker B: Awesome.
[00:51:03] Speaker D: So our plan at launch was we'll go there, we'll shoot the approach, we'll get gas and then we'll try and get under it and go. Go northwest.
[00:51:09] Speaker C: So little did we know.
[00:51:11] Speaker B: Oh, boy.
Again. And then.
[00:51:14] Speaker C: So. Yeah.
[00:51:15] Speaker B: All right.
[00:51:16] Speaker D: So they asked us in our IFR brief yesterday or whatever, is anybody. You know, you shoot a SID in a standard instrument departure and in the aircraft and Tommy were like, yep, we did.
As we came out of here, and I think we just asked to go to Davis, and they said, okay, cool. Fly the Charlie 8 departure.
[00:51:34] Speaker B: I love that. That is so, like, when I teach that class, I always ask, hey, does anybody shot an approach to men's in the past, you know, year?
And then, like, cases like this come up, and then the whole IFR class is just the debrief on this cage, which turns out to be like, a better IFR lecture than the slides. So that's awesome.
[00:51:52] Speaker C: Real life training.
[00:51:53] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:51:53] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:51:53] Speaker B: Okay. So you guys depart out of Santa Rosa and they give you a sid.
[00:51:57] Speaker C: Before that, we even had an LP cap failure. We couldn't get his comms to work on. He was hot miking, actually, that was an hour.
[00:52:05] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:52:05] Speaker C: And someone goes hot mic, and it's just.
[00:52:08] Speaker B: Shut up.
[00:52:09] Speaker D: We couldn't hear that. So the guy ran up.
[00:52:11] Speaker C: Oh, that's right.
[00:52:12] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:52:13] Speaker D: Some. So I didn't realize that I was hot miking on. I don't know. I hope I didn't say anything stupid. On Tower, it's recorded.
[00:52:18] Speaker C: It's on a black box.
[00:52:19] Speaker D: Yeah.
Some guy comes, like, speeding towards a helicopter in a golf court and then starts waving at us like, am I on fire? I was like, jordan, go check that out. Jordan gets out and walks up to the guy, and he comes back, and you know his Jordan voice, he's like, you're hot, Mikey. And that's when we learned. Actually had the failure. Oh, we were. I was quiet. That's why we knew I had an issue.
[00:52:41] Speaker B: Because you're quieter.
[00:52:43] Speaker D: Yeah. We couldn't figure out why it was quieter. And then we figured out when that guy came out that I was hot miking.
[00:52:47] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:52:48] Speaker D: And we pulled every circuit breaker you can pull.
[00:52:50] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:52:51] Speaker D: All the LP caps, the icu. Nothing worked.
[00:52:53] Speaker C: Nope.
[00:52:53] Speaker D: And then Tommy was like, why don't you just put your transmit selector knob on ics? And that way you're hot miking on ics.
Never would have thought of that either. Yeah. Tommy pulling it out.
[00:53:04] Speaker C: I got one job, and it's the center console. Don't ask me about anything else.
[00:53:08] Speaker B: I got the radar. I got LP.
[00:53:10] Speaker D: Yep.
[00:53:10] Speaker C: Parking brake.
[00:53:11] Speaker D: You know, my fingers on the ELT.
[00:53:13] Speaker B: I got set. Dude.
Sweet okay, sweet.
[00:53:19] Speaker C: So Charlie 8 departure.
[00:53:21] Speaker B: And then so, yeah, you guys, they towered field. You call for clearance, and they say, roger, fly the sid. And you're. And you're like, advise when ready. And you're like, we're not ready.
[00:53:32] Speaker D: Yeah, I think they. I think it was fairly simple. It was like, fly the Charlie 8 departure, then direct or something. The. The clearance was simple. So that was easy to.
[00:53:39] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:53:40] Speaker D: But once we read back the clearance, you're like, opening up the foreflight. Like, where is even the departures section on here? Luckily, I think we did find it. We found it in the.
[00:53:50] Speaker C: Oh, yeah, we got it. We're professionals.
[00:53:53] Speaker D: We do this all the time. Yeah, we found it in 4 flight. We found it really easily in the CDU. So we loaded up pretty easily.
[00:54:00] Speaker B: Nice.
[00:54:01] Speaker D: It was still low IFR there. We were IMC about 280ft or something. 300ft, and we were IMC all the way up to 6,000.
[00:54:12] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:54:13] Speaker C: Okay. Visible moisture.
[00:54:14] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:54:15] Speaker D: We engaged windscreen anti ice again. Got the same fail. I started ice up again.
[00:54:20] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:54:22] Speaker D: And then I was basically on the phone with Oakland center, like, can we get this altitude? Can we get that altitude?
[00:54:27] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:54:28] Speaker D: I've never asked for.
[00:54:29] Speaker B: Oh, what do we got?
[00:54:34] Speaker A: Thunderstorm condition one. Me, max.
[00:54:35] Speaker B: You can't take off. You can come in, though. The old thunderstorm condition one shuffle, scooching in.
[00:54:42] Speaker D: They just open the hangar doors, and you drive it right in.
[00:54:43] Speaker B: Yeah. Tokyo drifted in the man to the H.
And you tell the student you're like, I'm gonna take this landing.
[00:54:49] Speaker D: Yep.
Fantastic.
[00:54:54] Speaker C: Yeah. Asking for every altitude we can get to try to avoid ice.
[00:54:57] Speaker D: Yeah. I'd never done that before.
[00:54:58] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:54:58] Speaker D: I just figured, I'll just go for it. So we asked for 7,000, 8,000. Go back down to 6,500. I was annoying. I was annoying them.
[00:55:05] Speaker B: Were you actually. Or do you like, were they annoyed, or could you tell that you just thought you were annoying them?
[00:55:11] Speaker D: Well, going back to your plain English thing, I just told him why.
[00:55:13] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:55:13] Speaker D: I told him we are icing up. We have windscreen anti ice fail. We need to stay out of the clouds or we're gonna ice over. And I don't remember them getting Not a single.
[00:55:20] Speaker C: But they were so accommodating.
[00:55:22] Speaker D: They were. They were rapidly.
[00:55:24] Speaker B: You know what? Like, you got to think those guys are also sitting wherever they do their job, and they got to be pumped, too.
[00:55:29] Speaker D: Like, they're helping out, get some excitement, some.
[00:55:31] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:55:32] Speaker D: Fulfillment out of it.
[00:55:33] Speaker C: I think that phrase, active search and Rescue. Oh, yeah, the thing that goes like.
[00:55:36] Speaker B: Oh, okay, we're helping 1277, active search and rescue, rescue six five. Whatever. It. It helps. Yeah, sweet. So you guys found a place where you weren't getting icing and altitude.
[00:55:47] Speaker D: We found an altitude and we were stable there for a minute. And then when we started to get over the base of this. So the valley that the rescue site was in runs north to south. And we got about 17 miles south of the south end of the valley and found a.
[00:56:01] Speaker B: Found a hole at what altitude?
[00:56:04] Speaker D: 6,000, 6,500, 7,000.
[00:56:06] Speaker B: See the ground?
[00:56:07] Speaker D: We could see the ground.
[00:56:08] Speaker B: What was the valley floor was at what altitude?
[00:56:11] Speaker C: Oh, that's a good question.
[00:56:12] Speaker D: It was like 200msl.
[00:56:13] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:56:14] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:56:14] Speaker B: So you were still 6,000ft above the valley floor.
[00:56:16] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:56:17] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:56:17] Speaker D: Yep. Yeah, we just. We bombed.
[00:56:20] Speaker C: It was great.
[00:56:21] Speaker D: Bottomed out to collective and screamed.
[00:56:24] Speaker C: It felt like the T6 again.
[00:56:25] Speaker B: Yeah. Like an AI pilot.
[00:56:27] Speaker C: Yeah, it was sick.
At that point, we kind of like discussed, are we still planning on going to this airport to get gas or are we going to try to get to the site? Because we could see.
[00:56:38] Speaker D: We took a big pause at that.
[00:56:39] Speaker C: Moment because we could see the valley.
[00:56:41] Speaker B: It's a great place to take a pause, though. Like, shit is safer than it was. Let's reevaluate.
[00:56:48] Speaker C: We could see the valley. We could see the fog and the clouds in the valley. And then we knew we could get a safe into this airport. So I think you led the discussion of we can go to the airport if everyone wants to do that, or we can go just take a little look at it and be safe.
[00:57:04] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:57:04] Speaker C: And that's what we all said. Let's do it. We had the gas. We're awake. Let's go.
[00:57:09] Speaker B: We talked about this on the last case, and this is actually really interesting. This is coming up again. The case with that Joey had. They had a. Basically like, they had to abort a hoist with the swimmer down through the tree canopy initially, but then the swimmer said, he's like. That first initial view I got below the tree canopy, I saw what was going on and I made decisions while coming back up how this next one is going to go to make it so much smoother. Yeah. And he's like. He's like, honestly, it was perfect. He's like, I wish every time I could go peak, come back up, reassess, and then go back down. And it's kind of like the same thing. Like, you guys are going to go like, look, we have the gas. We have the time. Let's go take a look.
[00:57:48] Speaker D: Yeah, yeah. So we went and it took us 30 minutes or something. So we get on scene. This is. I thought this part was hysterical. We get on scene, the LP cap issue resolved. Yeah, we didn't do anything. It just. I don't know.
[00:58:06] Speaker B: It warmed me right out the hammer. And he's going, ding, ding, ding.
[00:58:16] Speaker D: We called the ice.
I can't say. Rub the hole. You definitely can say that.
Yeah, we call the IC on cal cord. Yeah, he rogered up. And then all the people on the wall rogered up. They were all on the same frequency.
[00:58:33] Speaker B: Holy shit.
[00:58:33] Speaker D: They were.
They were displeased to have been on the wall in the whole night. Yeah, we hear you.
[00:58:40] Speaker C: We see you.
[00:58:41] Speaker D: We hear you. We see you. Come closer. I mean, it was. It was a little bit chaotic on the radio because you had all these.
[00:58:47] Speaker B: People reaching out at the same time.
[00:58:48] Speaker D: Yes.
[00:58:49] Speaker B: Oh, my gosh.
[00:58:50] Speaker C: But big props to the, like, the ic.
[00:58:52] Speaker D: He laid down the law.
[00:58:53] Speaker C: Put a squash that. He's like, this is not for your communication. We are trying to help you seize all radio communications. I am in charge.
[00:59:00] Speaker D: Wow.
[00:59:01] Speaker A: Nice.
[00:59:01] Speaker D: And he did that? I would say four, four or five times. Yeah. Like, said, absolutely no communications on this channel except the incident commander and the helicopter.
[00:59:09] Speaker A: And do you recall what agency that was? I mean, not specific, but were they local sheriff? Were they fired?
[00:59:15] Speaker D: Local sheriff was. That day was running the show.
[00:59:17] Speaker C: YOLO County Sheriff.
[00:59:18] Speaker B: YOLO County.
[00:59:18] Speaker A: Okay, cool. Very cool. That's awesome to hear. Love it.
[00:59:21] Speaker D: God, that's wild. It made our jobs easier because it made us have to skip the whole part. Like, we know. We see you. We're trying all that kind of stuff. We could just do business. Like, we know, dude.
[00:59:31] Speaker B: The MH65 radio DJ on a SAR case, multiple people is an actual thing. Yeah.
That nobody tells you about. That is the hardest part of the SAR case. Yeah, absolutely. So get on that ic, man. That's awesome.
[00:59:45] Speaker C: Go. So now we're trying to figure out how to get down beneath the fog because we had flown up the whole thing looks like a. Like the number seven. So we started the bottom of the seven, and we're just creeping up. I think we came up, like, the right side, the east side of it, and just socked in. We didn't.
[00:59:58] Speaker D: Everywhere, all the way to the canyon piece on both sides, east and west.
[01:00:02] Speaker B: Okay.
[01:00:02] Speaker D: And then all the way to the ground. At one point, we ended up in someone's backyard.
[01:00:06] Speaker C: Yeah.
[01:00:06] Speaker D: Like, literally, like, level with their second story windows. Just trying to, like, creep through the fog.
[01:00:12] Speaker A: Barb was just changing her little pajamas.
[01:00:14] Speaker B: Out and she's putting out the holiday in the backyard. Holy cow.
[01:00:20] Speaker C: Sorry, Nancy.
[01:00:21] Speaker D: Yeah, we. We literally tried. Tried everything. And it was. It was also frustrating because a couple of the times that the IC had come on, it was the people yelling on the wall were like, hey, you're right above us. We can hear you. And.
[01:00:33] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:00:34] Speaker C: Yeah.
[01:00:34] Speaker D: We can't see anything.
[01:00:35] Speaker B: But that's interesting because mountainous terrain, like the. The sound refracts the helicopter. Like, you can't really tell when that's overhead.
[01:00:43] Speaker D: Yeah. And once we actually saw the terrain, I don't know that we were necessarily anywhere near them. Yeah.
[01:00:48] Speaker B: Interesting. So that's also an interesting because, like, you know, the 65 sounds like a leaf blower and you're facing somewhere, but that sounds refracting off a hangar door. And you're like, it's right there and it comes from behind you.
[01:00:57] Speaker C: Yeah.
[01:00:58] Speaker D: And when we saw that. It doesn't. It makes total sense. When we saw the wall, too, the walls were nearly vertical, and it was probably just bouncing down the gorge, you know, Holy cow.
[01:01:05] Speaker C: We ended up finding a spot, but if you do the number seven again, we are now the top left section of the 7.
[01:01:10] Speaker B: You're really good at painting this picture.
[01:01:12] Speaker D: Well done.
[01:01:12] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm following along very well.
[01:01:14] Speaker C: I've thought about it a lot.
[01:01:15] Speaker A: I know what the number seven looks like.
[01:01:16] Speaker D: Yeah.
[01:01:16] Speaker C: It's a very easy one, right? I think so. They were. If you kind of imagine.
[01:01:20] Speaker D: Shared knowledge base. Is that what it's called? Shared Knowledge base? I learned how to count to seven.
[01:01:23] Speaker C: We all went to kindergarten, so we kind of knew the survivors were in, like, the nook of the seven, if you will. And so we couldn't find an entry point until we got to the end and we found this pocket. And Jake just said, okay, like, we can do this, but if we touch a cloud, like, if we touch a cloud at all, we're done.
[01:01:41] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:01:41] Speaker C: It was like, okay. One of those, like, critical decision points.
[01:01:44] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:01:44] Speaker C: And we came down through it. Didn't touch any clouds, but we are in the valley.
[01:01:49] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:01:50] Speaker C: Like, it was like 200ft above the valley floor.
[01:01:53] Speaker D: Yeah.
[01:01:53] Speaker C: And then it was a tight turn to go back down the seven the other way.
[01:01:58] Speaker D: I was afraid that if we touched a cloud, we'd touch mountain because I didn't know how close closely.
And that hole was small. Yeah, it was. I don't want to say it's just as big as the. Yeah, I heard it.
[01:02:10] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:02:13] Speaker D: The Gap in the clouds was narrow.
[01:02:15] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:02:16] Speaker D: Yeah.
[01:02:17] Speaker B: So we.
[01:02:18] Speaker D: I just want to say another plug for Tommy. He pulled up the D. Ted. It was the first time I'd use D Ted in a while. So he pulled up D Ted warning cautions. And that's how. That's what jogged our memories from looking at the all terrain or the all trails map or whatever. Yeah. Oh, hey, there is a canyon that goes west of the rescue site. We can go past the rescue site and double back. And that was the first thing, certainly, that cued my mind into, hey, let's go past it. Look for a gap in the clouds to descend into the canyon, then come back.
[01:02:45] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:02:45] Speaker D: So that's how we found the gap to come down.
[01:02:49] Speaker B: That's awesome.
[01:02:50] Speaker D: Yep.
[01:02:51] Speaker A: Wish I lived in a place where I could use that.
[01:02:54] Speaker B: When we go to San Diego, we'll be able to use that perfect training environment. That is. That is. It's just like listening to, you know, obviously, you know, growing up as a co pilot in Savannah, we have our own challenges. But, like, I would never dream to have used the things that you have used during the SAR case as a copilot. So good on you, man.
[01:03:13] Speaker C: I appreciate it.
[01:03:13] Speaker B: That's great.
[01:03:14] Speaker D: We used everything.
[01:03:15] Speaker C: This is good instruction.
[01:03:16] Speaker B: Yeah. And. But it's, you know, pay attention and, like, there is value to being like, I'm going to put this in my toolbox, because you will pull it out of toolbox eventually. So nice job, man.
[01:03:26] Speaker C: Appreciate it.
[01:03:27] Speaker D: Yeah, we. The turnaround was kind of spooky.
[01:03:31] Speaker C: It was. It was sick. Let me be clear. It was awesome.
[01:03:34] Speaker D: Oh, you talk about.
[01:03:35] Speaker C: Because I specifically remember, it felt like I was in, you know, Top Gun Maverick, where they're doing that low level through the mountain pass.
[01:03:42] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:03:42] Speaker C: That's what it felt like. We were. I could see the whites of the person's eyes in the farm field that was in the valley. And so we're just cruising along in this really great right pedal turn back down the road we came. It's like, oh, this is. This is the stuff.
[01:03:57] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:03:58] Speaker C: Even if we don't find it, this maneuver was like.
[01:04:00] Speaker B: When you did that maneuver, what kind of weight were you looking at at that point on the helicopter? Just about, like, because you had burned down some fuel. You were pretty light, like, was the question.
[01:04:09] Speaker D: We might have been sub 9,000 at that point.
[01:04:11] Speaker B: Okay. So the question was never. The maneuver is, like, going to be, like, torque limited or anything like that. So, you know, you could jam in, like, that flat.
[01:04:17] Speaker D: I was afraid of wind. I was afraid of Wind rushing. I was afraid that the wind above the cloud layer was going to be significantly different from the wind under it. I didn't know if we were going to that because the narrow the canyon narrowed significantly. I didn't know if it was going to accelerate, so I didn't know if I was going to hit this weird pocket of wind shear right as we got below the. And so I tried, I tried to keep it quick. As we came through the I did a fairly steep angle of bank turn because I wanted to keep my speed up.
[01:04:41] Speaker B: Tommy just has his hands in the air, ride a roller coaster. He's like, yes.
[01:04:47] Speaker D: Yeah. But it was narrow. I think we came down the valve. I was worried about wires as well because we didn't know it. We actually asked a question, actually we called the IC at cal cord and said, are there any wires in the. In the valley? Because we were going to see him.
[01:04:59] Speaker B: So you steep angle being turned, you put NR to high or did you just turn?
[01:05:05] Speaker C: Yes. No, at that point we did.
[01:05:06] Speaker B: Okay.
[01:05:06] Speaker C: So I think it was after the turn. We were hovering in a weird spot and he's like. I was like, NR high, please. Because then we were like. We didn't know where they were exactly. So we were doing just like a high air taxi just searching my side, the left side of the whole wall.
[01:05:21] Speaker B: Cool.
[01:05:23] Speaker D: Yeah. We got.
[01:05:25] Speaker B: So they didn't have a lat long for you. They did, they did.
[01:05:28] Speaker D: And it was fair and it was fairly accurate in the end.
[01:05:30] Speaker B: Gotcha.
[01:05:33] Speaker D: But we didn't know we were too close at that point. I think the waypoint cycled and so we didn't know how close we were gonna be. And we also didn't know how. I mean, we heard all the reports, but we didn't know visually how high up the wall we were gonna have to look.
[01:05:44] Speaker A: Okay.
[01:05:45] Speaker D: So we were moving. We were moving slow. 40 knots or something like that.
[01:05:48] Speaker B: That's a really funny thing because we look at, you know, as lat longs as like a two dimensional thing. Like they' to be here. I'm going to look down. I don't have to look up the sheer cliff. Be like, I'm in the general area. But how far up and down are they?
[01:06:00] Speaker D: Yeah, I think you hear on the hoist cam footage, Tommy's like, oh, I got them.
[01:06:05] Speaker B: They're like 9 o'clock high and level factor, no factor. I don't know.
[01:06:10] Speaker D: When I first saw them, they were through the greenhouse.
[01:06:13] Speaker B: Oh, my gosh.
[01:06:14] Speaker A: Gosh.
[01:06:14] Speaker D: Yeah. Because they were. We were at like 150, 200 AGL. And they were at. They were high up seven, eight, hundred. Yeah.
[01:06:24] Speaker C: I just saw the flapping of their blue tarp.
[01:06:26] Speaker B: Oh, so they were signaling.
[01:06:28] Speaker C: Yeah. I was like, I don't think that's supposed to be on a mountain. I'm pretty sure that's tally. Very lucky.
[01:06:33] Speaker B: Nice.
[01:06:33] Speaker C: Very lucky.
[01:06:36] Speaker B: So then what, like, you see these guys?
[01:06:38] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, sorry. This is the meat and potatoes.
[01:06:40] Speaker D: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's classic beginning to the hoist cam video. Tommy goes, I got him 9:00 high. Oh, that's sheer.
And then there's just like 30 seconds of dead silence. We're all just processing, processing, processing, processing. Yeah, we. And I would have known this unless I had the hoist cam footage, but we came to a hover like a dead stop. And then we just started a vertical climb the whole time we were talking. So we were just straight vertical climbing in the valley.
[01:07:11] Speaker B: You had the power margins to do that and everything at this point.
[01:07:14] Speaker D: Yeah, at this point, we had zero wind. No wind at all. I thought we were going to have wind under it, and we had none.
[01:07:20] Speaker B: But honestly, it's probably great. Yeah. That's being a mountainous terrain.
[01:07:24] Speaker D: That's kind of what percent.
[01:07:25] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:07:25] Speaker D: Yep.
[01:07:27] Speaker C: This is when we started doing, like, the rescue checks.
[01:07:30] Speaker D: Yep. We talked, we talked about everything at that point. We talked. The first question was, hey, Mike, can you scramble up that? And Mike's like, no. Yeah. Um, which I'm. I. I just laughed to myself when, When Jordan asked that. Cause it was like, well, it took seven people, like seven hours to get up there. So Mike's not just gonna.
[01:07:46] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, Wolverine up that thing.
[01:07:48] Speaker D: Yeah. Even though he's Mike. I mean, I know why. Because he's Mike.
[01:07:52] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah.
[01:07:53] Speaker A: But Wolverine.
[01:07:55] Speaker C: Yeah.
[01:07:55] Speaker A: I don't know why, but that was a really good name to put to that maneuver.
[01:08:00] Speaker D: I don't know.
Hands and feet. Yeah, yeah.
[01:08:05] Speaker B: So you guys briefed us as a vertical avert surf hoist.
[01:08:09] Speaker D: We were. I don't exaggerate, but I want to say we were talking for 10 minutes before we even did anything. Yeah, yeah. We talked about the litter, we talked about the basket. We talked about how we. Then I would say the majority of the discussion was, how are we going to get in there?
[01:08:24] Speaker C: And then it became, where do we take him? Like, okay, let's get Mike down. What. Whoever we can pick up. But where are we going?
[01:08:29] Speaker D: We talked about gas. How long are you going to take?
[01:08:32] Speaker B: Who's the priority at this point?
[01:08:33] Speaker D: Also, the critically injured survivor was at this point we had learned. Okay. As a. I think he had a compound fracture of his femur. He was screwed.
[01:08:41] Speaker A: Ouch.
[01:08:43] Speaker D: That's.
[01:08:43] Speaker C: And he was a kid, too.
[01:08:45] Speaker B: He was the lower. He was the lower one.
[01:08:47] Speaker C: Right. And the other one was stuck on a perch above him about a couple hundred feet and couldn't move because it was so sheer. So he had his feet and hands pushed up against the rock wall all night in his hoodie and jeans and didn't move.
[01:09:01] Speaker B: But did they. But did he have people up at.
[01:09:03] Speaker C: No, because he was too sheer to get to him.
[01:09:05] Speaker B: But they got down to the more critically injured person.
[01:09:07] Speaker C: Right.
[01:09:07] Speaker B: But you have to go with, do you get somebody who's more critically injured, or do you have to get somebody who's in more exposed.
[01:09:14] Speaker D: We decided to take the critically injured person just because, I mean, he had a compound fracture. Yeah. I just bring this up because the majority of the conversation was, how are we going to get into the wall? And it was because the wall came to a corner. So up high on the wall, there was. The wall jutted out, and they were stuck kind of up in the. I don't know if I'm describing this seven analogy.
[01:09:36] Speaker C: Yeah. So, like, in the top of the seven, they had, like, an acute angle where this ravine and valley.
[01:09:40] Speaker B: Hold on. If you're. If you're listening to this podcast, go on our Instagram. This will be on our Instagram. This. This picture is painting a really good. This picture is painting a good picture. That's funny. Of this. So. Yes. Okay. So this is going to. We'll post this picture because you have it labeled really well.
[01:09:54] Speaker C: Yeah, they were in a rough spot, and as you creeped in, it was like literally walking into a corner.
[01:10:00] Speaker D: And this is where the no win scenario helped, because if we had had wind coming up or down that valley, you know, this direction or this direction, we wouldn't have been able to do it. Especially if it was a left. You know, a left crosswind. Obviously, if we had had wind coming west to east down that valley, we would have been in the Hurt Locker. The only option to get in there was to go nose into the wall.
[01:10:19] Speaker A: Okay.
[01:10:19] Speaker D: There was a tree off the left. That would have been. That was co altitude.
[01:10:24] Speaker B: Right.
[01:10:24] Speaker D: There was a rock wall off the right. That was co altitude. I was just looking at a sheer rock face on my right.
[01:10:29] Speaker B: Sorry. Why can't you go door two?
[01:10:31] Speaker C: There wasn't enough space.
[01:10:32] Speaker D: There wasn't enough space.
[01:10:34] Speaker B: Okay.
[01:10:35] Speaker D: Our nose would have been on the tree and our tail would have been in the rock wall.
[01:10:37] Speaker B: Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha.
[01:10:38] Speaker D: Okay. We definitely talked about it. Um, we. I think we even tried it. Like, I. I pedal turned all over.
[01:10:43] Speaker B: The place, because that's ideal if you're in the right seat. Vert serve door two.
[01:10:46] Speaker D: Yeah. But, yeah, no, that was my initial plan when there was no end. I was like, I can do anything. And then quickly learned that the only option was we had to. We had to go nose in. We were probably.
We talked about this a lot. Ops went up. I. When I took this picture about six days later, when Ops and I took a look at it, we were probably 20ft from the tree on the left and just over a rotor disc from the rock wall on the right. So there was not a lot of space. And we just nosed all the way in there.
[01:11:16] Speaker A: That was tight.
[01:11:17] Speaker D: Yeah, it was.
[01:11:18] Speaker B: Have you ever done a nose?
Was that a nose too? I don't even know what that's called. Have you ever done that before? Vert surf?
[01:11:24] Speaker D: I have.
[01:11:25] Speaker B: Okay.
[01:11:26] Speaker D: We did all kinds of crazy stuff in Corpus with the fire tower, but does tail end. That's right.
[01:11:32] Speaker B: Mechanics boxes and everything.
[01:11:33] Speaker D: Yes.
[01:11:34] Speaker B: Another plug for that, maybe. Looking like we have.
[01:11:39] Speaker D: It's not a different skill. It's a totally different sight picture when you have none of the wall that you're hoisting to in sight or whatever.
[01:11:44] Speaker B: Exactly. And the conex box is a fairly. Or a tower is a fairly, like, low risk maneuver to practice these things.
[01:11:51] Speaker D: It was great. It was great. Certainly it was not the first time I'd seen something like that because of that wall.
[01:11:56] Speaker B: Cool.
Have you. I don't know if we talked about this already. Hats. Have you been hats?
[01:12:01] Speaker D: Hats. Yes.
[01:12:02] Speaker B: Have you been Ahars?
[01:12:03] Speaker D: No.
[01:12:03] Speaker B: Interesting.
[01:12:04] Speaker D: Yeah.
[01:12:05] Speaker B: Okay.
[01:12:06] Speaker D: Still want to go?
[01:12:07] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, you say it on the podcast. Yeah.
Yeah. Very cool. Okay.
[01:12:12] Speaker A: Rub the roadcaster and make your way.
[01:12:17] Speaker D: Oh, yeah.
[01:12:18] Speaker B: Cool. All right, so you do a nose to hoist. And how long did the decision take to where you were putting down your rescue summer? Like, were you guys picking up points or is it fairly obvious where he was going?
[01:12:31] Speaker C: There was one spot the.
[01:12:34] Speaker D: We haven't talked really talked about the nature of the site yet, but it was basically vertical. Yeah, there was a. There was a rock pile where you could tell stuff had had broken long ago, not like the previous night had broken off and kind of made this rock pile at the base of the overhanging portion of the wall. Below that rock pile, there was just. Nothing just dropped off.
They had climbed up that, you know, 80 degree wall or whatever. The night before when the guy got injured and they were just sitting in the rock pile. So they were just sitting on the boulders there. And I think when we sent the basket, we lowered Mike down. We sent the basket down to Mike. He could not have taken a step in any direction towards the valley. He was basically frozen in spot when we dropped him down.
[01:13:15] Speaker B: So we talked. Yeah, we talk about the J. Right. In bird surf J or verse J.
[01:13:20] Speaker D: There was none of that.
[01:13:20] Speaker B: That was just not. So you just had a gnat's ass plop them right where they wanted to go straight down. Okay.
[01:13:26] Speaker D: Yeah. We had a very long conversation about obstacles. I think we assigned.
[01:13:30] Speaker C: I learned conning commands on that flight.
[01:13:32] Speaker D: Tommy conned me for as. For at least as much as the flight. Mech conned me the whole time because we were within a rotor disc of the tree on the left co altitude. The tree was above us and left. And Tommy was like, you got Easy Fortnite. You got five feet, you got 10ft, you got whatever.
[01:13:47] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:13:48] Speaker C: I'll share this video with you guys, but we have videos of just kind of what we were looking at.
[01:13:53] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:13:53] Speaker C: There's just a tree on the left side. Our rotor is in the fog, kind of pulling it down, wispy around.
[01:13:59] Speaker B: That is close. That's real close.
[01:14:01] Speaker D: We climbed. Climbed into the fog bank, and I was like, tommy, you're going to do front and left.
[01:14:06] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:14:06] Speaker D: Jordan, you're going to do right and back. And we broke it up into quadrants and said, these are the obstacles you're going to identify.
[01:14:15] Speaker B: Yeah. You guys are best friends forever after this.
[01:14:18] Speaker D: Yeah.
[01:14:18] Speaker C: Trauma bonding.
[01:14:19] Speaker B: Yeah, that's awesome. Trauma bonding.
[01:14:22] Speaker D: I still don't have that video.
[01:14:23] Speaker C: Oh, you don't?
[01:14:24] Speaker D: No.
[01:14:24] Speaker C: Let me airdrop into you.
[01:14:26] Speaker B: Cool. Okay. So the plan is to get the rescue swimmer down with a rescue device or just get him. You're just getting him down, and you're gonna deliver whatever he needs.
[01:14:36] Speaker D: We just got him down. There was. This was another time the IC came on and told everybody on the wall to be quiet because they started yelling, we need a litter. Nothing but a litter above. You know, they. They started yelling, basically yelling at us what we needed because we asked the question over the radio, go. And eventually I just said, we're just going to get Mike down. He'll take a look. He'll make a determination. We'll go from there.
[01:14:55] Speaker B: Did he clip in to anything when he's on the wall, or did you just. Did he just stay connected the helicopter the whole time?
[01:15:01] Speaker C: He disconnected.
[01:15:02] Speaker D: Disconnected.
[01:15:03] Speaker B: Okay.
[01:15:03] Speaker D: He stayed on the. One of the boulders in the rock pile. He just kind of sat on harness.
[01:15:09] Speaker A: Deployment to the boulder, basically.
[01:15:10] Speaker D: Yeah, exactly.
[01:15:11] Speaker B: Right.
Holy shit.
[01:15:13] Speaker C: So at that point, we're looking at.
[01:15:15] Speaker D: It was a suit. We don't train for this. It was a weird combination of surface. He can't go anywhere.
[01:15:19] Speaker B: But I'm trying to.
[01:15:20] Speaker D: But he has to come off.
[01:15:21] Speaker B: But. But you're also in a precarious situation. Like, I mean, Nick, you are a rescue swimmer. At that point, you probably want to just disconnect from the helicopter because you know how hard they're working up top.
[01:15:30] Speaker A: Well, yeah, Especially if they can't maneuver.
[01:15:32] Speaker B: Yeah. And you want. You want to get down in a safe place, disconnect and let them go. Maneuver.
[01:15:36] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Sort it out. You know, what do they call that? Sizing up the scene. Right. Trying to get an eye on the survivor and figure out what do I need to do? Do they actually need a litter? Is that the best option?
[01:15:47] Speaker B: And so this critically injured patient had people at him or no.
[01:15:50] Speaker D: Yes.
[01:15:51] Speaker B: Did they have.
[01:15:52] Speaker D: One of them carried a med kit up? I think someone had given him.
[01:15:55] Speaker C: There was.
[01:15:56] Speaker D: EMT something.
[01:15:57] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[01:15:57] Speaker C: There's. One of the rescuers was an EMT and they had dressed his wound. I think they had given him morphine or some type of painkiller.
[01:16:04] Speaker D: Yeah.
[01:16:04] Speaker C: And they had, like, just got him prepped and ready to go, covered him with the tarp and all that stuff.
And then at that point, Mike got down and there was discussion quickly about the litter and there was like, there's no place to put the litter.
[01:16:16] Speaker B: Yeah. Because.
[01:16:17] Speaker D: Yeah, it would've been. They would've been like balancing it on the top of the boulder to try.
[01:16:20] Speaker A: And that sounds absolutely insane, too. You would never have anything other than a flat surface to package a patient in a litter.
[01:16:27] Speaker D: Yeah.
[01:16:27] Speaker B: And the patient will be uncomfortable coming up in anything less than a litter, but at that point, it just doesn't matter because it's impossible.
[01:16:36] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah.
[01:16:37] Speaker D: We did ask. We did 190 foot hoist on the first one.
[01:16:42] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:16:43] Speaker C: Yep.
[01:16:43] Speaker D: And Jordan just crushed it. We. We had almost no swing and we dropped him within two feet of where.
[01:16:51] Speaker C: The survivor the whole time. Jordan's radio voice.
[01:16:55] Speaker D: The dude sounds like he's sitting in front in a Lazy Boy in front of a fire with a glass of Lagavulin, just telling a story to his grandkids.
[01:17:02] Speaker C: It was nothing to stress about. And honestly, I did a lot for me too, because I didn't know what the hell I was doing.
[01:17:07] Speaker B: Jordan's a seasoned flight mech, a new flight man.
[01:17:10] Speaker C: He's going to Alaska now. Right?
[01:17:11] Speaker D: He's. He was. No, he was relatively new. He was.
He's gonna kill me now. Amt3 yeah. He was fairly junior, so that's something that man like, not junior in his capability.
[01:17:23] Speaker B: You know. You know, I think we've all had, you know, flight mechs who are fairly new and like, you know, you know, it's, it's terrifying because they're flying the helicopter back there.
[01:17:31] Speaker D: Yeah.
[01:17:31] Speaker B: And you can hear it in their voice if they're stressed out. Yeah.
[01:17:35] Speaker D: And he never showed that that is.
[01:17:37] Speaker B: Such a valuable, like lesson learned in season. Flight mechs. You can tell. But the fact that he was just. Yeah. Lazy boy flying the helicopter, putting the hoist down and apparently pretty junior, like, good for him, man.
[01:17:48] Speaker D: Yeah. Crushed it.
[01:17:50] Speaker B: That's awesome.
[01:17:51] Speaker A: Can you talk about what hover modes maybe you used or did you just decide to hand fly the maneuver or the hoist?
[01:17:57] Speaker D: I hand flew it. There was, there was a. If nothing else, I had a ton of references.
[01:18:03] Speaker A: Okay.
[01:18:04] Speaker D: I had a ton of references at my altitude. So, you know, we've all heard of the rifle site method or whatever. You line up two things outside. I had like, I think I had three or four of those going at once. Okay.
I didn't want to, you know, just look out the front and then start my front to back drift. I didn't just want to look out the right and then start my right to left. So I picked a couple in a vertical line off the 45 and that was my way to try and hold as absolutely stone still of the hoist as I could.
[01:18:32] Speaker A: That's awesome.
[01:18:32] Speaker D: Yeah.
[01:18:33] Speaker B: Any, any discussion of, of modes or. No.
[01:18:38] Speaker D: I had used. What do we call it? Balt hog.
[01:18:41] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:18:41] Speaker D: You know, whatever combination of, you know. Yeah. Several times in a vert surface. Okay. On vertical surface training before, it did not work. It worked to hold altitude, but the refresh rate or however you want to think of that, of the system, you know, was giving me these long periods of altitude hold and that just absolutely was not going to work.
[01:19:01] Speaker B: That's great.
[01:19:01] Speaker D: Like I needed quick, quick refresh. We needed to stay where, where we were.
[01:19:05] Speaker A: I feel like you're always more in tune too. And you like hand fly hoists. Like you feel, you feel the aircraft drop a little bit more. Just.
[01:19:13] Speaker B: We're also used to as helicopter pilots making one control input than having to make two more to balance that one.
[01:19:19] Speaker D: And you also never know if you're fighting the aircraft or the environmentals on A mode.
[01:19:23] Speaker B: Yes.
[01:19:23] Speaker D: And if I. It. You know, if I can just feel the aircraft, I can feel when the wind gust hits, I can make a quick input. So between that and the two of them at the same time, giving me conning commands. No, no, further left. Come right. You know, Love that. It was awesome.
[01:19:38] Speaker B: Sweet. So swimmers gets down.
[01:19:40] Speaker C: Yeah. He calls for the basket. At this point, knowing we can't get a litter down to him.
[01:19:44] Speaker B: Okay.
[01:19:44] Speaker C: Mike's got a swimmer radio down there. So we get the basket down. He's able to just pick up the kid and put it in the basket.
[01:19:53] Speaker B: But he's like, there's a little adrenaline involved in that one maybe. Holy cow.
[01:19:57] Speaker C: The kid had a blanket wrapped around him to cover his wounds, and it was just going haywire.
[01:20:02] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:20:02] Speaker C: I can just see it on the hoist cam, and it's looking like the flag blowing in 30 pounds of wind.
[01:20:06] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:20:07] Speaker C: Jake just goes, lose the blanket. And Mike just grabs it and throws it away.
[01:20:12] Speaker D: Well, Jordan. Jordan saw it first, and he said, like, tell Mike to rip off the blanket. I didn't know what he was talking about. I, like, quickly glanced over the hoist camp him and saw a blanket on there.
[01:20:22] Speaker B: Oh, so you use the hoist key, the hoist camera.
[01:20:24] Speaker D: Oh, yeah.
[01:20:24] Speaker B: Yeah. Big fan. Yeah, big fan.
[01:20:26] Speaker D: Huge. Yeah.
[01:20:27] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:20:28] Speaker D: So, yeah, I think I just said, lose a blanket. Mike just rips it off and. Yeah. It was awesome.
[01:20:33] Speaker B: Sweet.
[01:20:34] Speaker D: Unfortunately, the guy was not wearing anything underneath.
[01:20:36] Speaker C: Yeah.
[01:20:36] Speaker D: So that's why Mike had the blanket on.
[01:20:38] Speaker C: Yeah. They all stripped him because of his wounds.
[01:20:40] Speaker A: Okay.
[01:20:40] Speaker C: And they had nothing else to put him on.
[01:20:42] Speaker B: You know, man, at that point, like.
[01:20:44] Speaker D: What you got to do? You get him off the wall.
[01:20:45] Speaker B: Yep.
[01:20:46] Speaker C: If I was in that situation, I wouldn't have cared.
[01:20:47] Speaker B: Yeah. I would be like, yep, let's go.
[01:20:49] Speaker C: Let's send it.
[01:20:50] Speaker D: Yeah.
[01:20:50] Speaker B: I'm about to go on a helicopter flight.
[01:20:51] Speaker D: My dignity is reduced at this stage. Anyway, let's just get me down.
[01:20:55] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:20:55] Speaker A: Especially with that type of injury. Right. The compound fracture of the femur, you said?
[01:21:00] Speaker D: Yes. Yeah.
[01:21:01] Speaker A: So femur break is already painful.
[01:21:03] Speaker D: Yeah.
[01:21:03] Speaker A: And then you have the compound portion of it.
[01:21:05] Speaker D: Yeah.
[01:21:05] Speaker A: Yeah, dude. Not having a good time.
[01:21:07] Speaker B: Yeah. And that. And that's.
[01:21:08] Speaker A: Was he. Was he screaming, crying, anything like that? Or was he. Was he pretty knocked out?
[01:21:13] Speaker D: He was pretty pain. He was conscious, but he was not. Not okay with it.
[01:21:16] Speaker B: Yeah, obviously.
[01:21:18] Speaker A: I mean, that's a long time to be in that much pain, dude. That is a extremely long time.
[01:21:22] Speaker B: What a. What an animal. What a Beast.
[01:21:24] Speaker A: Yeah, sure.
[01:21:25] Speaker B: Sweet. Recover the patient in the back of the helicopter, Right?
[01:21:28] Speaker D: Yeah.
[01:21:29] Speaker C: Okay.
[01:21:29] Speaker B: Cool. Trail line.
[01:21:31] Speaker C: No, that was direct.
[01:21:32] Speaker B: Cool.
[01:21:33] Speaker C: I believe it was direct of the basket. Yeah. Did we put the trail on?
[01:21:38] Speaker D: Oh, no, you're absolutely. No, it was totally a direct.
[01:21:40] Speaker C: Yeah.
[01:21:41] Speaker D: We had 200ft of cable out. We didn't tie anything together and do that all.
[01:21:44] Speaker B: So that obviously went pretty quick. Patience. Back in the cabin. Then what?
[01:21:48] Speaker D: At this point, we were super concerned about fuel.
[01:21:52] Speaker B: Where were we at at this point?
[01:21:53] Speaker D: We started the. I have it written in here.
[01:21:56] Speaker B: I mean, just.
[01:21:56] Speaker D: I think we started the hoist with like seven or eight minutes to 400 pound. Bingo. Okay.
[01:22:02] Speaker B: And you were not lowering that.
[01:22:05] Speaker D: We did lower it.
[01:22:06] Speaker B: Okay.
[01:22:06] Speaker D: We, we. That was part of our discussion before we started the hoist.
[01:22:10] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:22:10] Speaker D: At one point in the hoist cam, I said, we gotta go now. Like, we started going from we gotta make this safe to we gotta make it safe and fast.
[01:22:18] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:22:19] Speaker D: So, yeah, I think when we got. I think when he finally recovered the patient to the cabin, as he was coming up, I started moving aft.
[01:22:25] Speaker B: Yep.
[01:22:26] Speaker D: He wasn't even in the cabin yet. I started moving aft, pedal turn right towards the landing zone.
[01:22:30] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:22:30] Speaker D: I think. I asked Jordan, can you see the landing site over your right shoulder? Because at this point, we knew there was a landing zone. We didn't know where it was. We hadn't put eyes on it yet.
[01:22:37] Speaker B: Gotcha.
[01:22:38] Speaker D: So as a patient was coming up, I asked Jordan, do you see the landing zone? He said, yeah, I gotta. Got it. You know, 7:00 or no, 4:00 or whatever. Yeah.
[01:22:45] Speaker B: And that was in that little. Well, again, we posted it on the social. The social media that we have.
[01:22:50] Speaker D: Yes.
[01:22:50] Speaker B: And you have that. I remember seeing that landing.
[01:22:52] Speaker C: It's a parking lot. It's like a dirt gravel parking lot.
[01:22:55] Speaker B: The only convenient thing about this whole.
[01:22:57] Speaker C: Entire case, it sounds like no wires, no telephone wires.
[01:23:00] Speaker B: Right there.
[01:23:00] Speaker D: Yeah.
[01:23:01] Speaker B: Perfect.
[01:23:01] Speaker D: It was awesome.
[01:23:02] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:23:02] Speaker D: So there was ambulance fire, everybody posted up on the roadway blocking the road. We landed in the parking lot lot asap. I think they picked in. I told them, don't even bother, like giving us back the basket. We don't have time.
[01:23:14] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:23:15] Speaker D: So we sat down. They immediately came in. Luckily, they picked at the back basket, and the second they cleared the rotor arc, we were gone.
[01:23:22] Speaker B: Nice.
[01:23:23] Speaker C: I want to bring up before we forget, we left our rescue swimmer on scene.
[01:23:26] Speaker B: Yes, I was about to ask that.
[01:23:27] Speaker C: Yeah. And which was the only call?
[01:23:29] Speaker B: Did you play the DMB.
[01:23:32] Speaker C: Mark and.
[01:23:33] Speaker A: Records into some rock?
[01:23:35] Speaker B: It Just bounces off.
That's a very inside joke if you're not part of the Coast Guard. And listen to this. Like the orbit would have been a.
[01:23:42] Speaker C: Little tough on that one, but yeah, dude.
[01:23:44] Speaker D: Yeah.
[01:23:45] Speaker B: Okay, cool. So obviously did he. Did Mike, right? Did Mike know, like he's probably pretty. Like did you hit him up on the whatever radio.
[01:23:54] Speaker D: I don't know that we explicitly said we are going to leave you until it occurred to me as we cleared the landing zone. Hey, Mike doesn't know yet for sure that we're leaving him. And I think I made like a Hail Mary call. He probably didn't hear us.
[01:24:06] Speaker C: I think I shot him a text too, knowing he would never look at it, but I did it anyway.
[01:24:10] Speaker D: Yeah. I mean, just said we're out of here.
[01:24:12] Speaker B: He probably realized that.
[01:24:13] Speaker D: Yeah.
[01:24:14] Speaker A: If you're a 65 rescue swimmer, you always kind of assume that the helicopter is going to leave you.
[01:24:20] Speaker B: That's spoken from a 65 rescue swimmer.
[01:24:22] Speaker A: People get left behind all the time.
[01:24:24] Speaker B: I just hope it's on a cruise ship and not on the side of a cliff.
[01:24:27] Speaker A: You just hope it's on a cruise ship outbound to Mexico.
[01:24:29] Speaker B: Yeah. And they're not turning around and you get a three free day cruise.
[01:24:34] Speaker C: Exactly. Luckily, Mike was so professional and he's done it all, seeing it all. So there was no. At least for me as very junior, I had no worry, no question. It's. Does he know what he's doing? Are we going to work twice at that? Like no, dude.
[01:24:46] Speaker A: He's in his element at this point. He's up in the mountains hanging out with the boys.
[01:24:50] Speaker C: Big Wolverine guy.
[01:24:53] Speaker B: Yeah.
So obviously you bingo back to that field and any drama getting back to that VFR far.
[01:25:03] Speaker C: Low level clouds.
[01:25:04] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:25:05] Speaker D: So we left the valley and we just said we're just going to punch through and that's what we did.
We cleared the landing zone, we cleared the trees and I basically put us. I think we were at bucket airspeed at like 9.8 because I didn't know it was on the other side of the clouds. And we just max take off power climb until we were above that layer.
[01:25:25] Speaker B: Radar usage at that point I think.
[01:25:27] Speaker C: We had it all secured.
[01:25:28] Speaker D: We had it secured and I don't think we had it. I don't think we reactivated that whole.
[01:25:31] Speaker C: Sorting because we knew where we were going at just getting out of the valley. But I think it was pretty.
[01:25:35] Speaker D: This is skipping the whole discussion about where we ended up bingoing to.
[01:25:39] Speaker C: Right.
[01:25:40] Speaker D: Because we had a whole. We engaged the IC and asked for a fuel truck. He was trying to work something with Cal Fire. Were they going to drive a field truck into the landing zone to refuel us there? They couldn't make it there, so they tried another airport. He was like, you can go here. At that point, we didn't know that airport. We didn't. I mean, we could pull it up, but we didn't have any information. We. Yeah, we ended up going. Just planning on going back to Davis where we had originally planned.
[01:26:03] Speaker C: Also point a note that we didn't have GAR with sector. We had no comms. So we were actually talking to Air station Sacramento.
[01:26:09] Speaker B: Probably the best thing.
[01:26:10] Speaker C: The C27 guys assumed our guard.
[01:26:12] Speaker D: Oh, on the second sortie.
[01:26:14] Speaker C: On the second sortie. So, like, they were there for us.
[01:26:17] Speaker B: Oh, yeah.
[01:26:17] Speaker C: Awesome.
[01:26:18] Speaker B: That's awesome.
[01:26:19] Speaker A: So were they just.
[01:26:20] Speaker C: No, no, no. They were at their unit.
[01:26:22] Speaker A: Oh, they were just. It was like the watch stander.
[01:26:24] Speaker C: Yeah.
[01:26:24] Speaker D: Yeah. We were probably 20, 30 miles from McClellan Field Field where they were. And it was just the watch floor at McClellan.
[01:26:30] Speaker A: I mean.
[01:26:30] Speaker D: Yeah, we got you.
[01:26:31] Speaker A: Let's face it. That's probably so much less distracting than.
Especially because, I mean, you know, the IC has assumed the role of what sector would normally be.
[01:26:40] Speaker D: Right.
[01:26:40] Speaker C: Yeah.
[01:26:40] Speaker A: So you have them, but. And I'm assuming that's probably a legit radio guard too, but.
[01:26:45] Speaker C: And speaking to another aviator, they didn't try to go like, oh, could you be more specific? Where you're located, how much fuel? And like, what's your GAR Score? They were like, gotcha. Got it located. Good.
[01:26:54] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:26:54] Speaker B: Sweet.
[01:26:54] Speaker C: See ya.
[01:26:55] Speaker A: That's awesome, man.
[01:26:55] Speaker C: Yeah.
[01:26:56] Speaker B: So where'd you go for gas?
[01:26:58] Speaker C: Davis.
[01:26:59] Speaker D: We ended up at Yolo County. Davis. Yolo County, I love that.
[01:27:02] Speaker A: Is that where Davis is? Yolo County. I have a cousin that lives there. Oh, shout out to cousin Todd.
[01:27:07] Speaker B: Hey, cousin Todd.
[01:27:08] Speaker C: Yeah, dude got on deck with, I think, no problems, if I can remember correctly.
[01:27:13] Speaker D: No, we found a. So we were above the layer for a while. Found a hole. Once we got out of the valley, dive down out of that. We're at like 100, 120ft or whatever. And that all the way. Yeah. Down to Davis.
Another great refueling guy. Yeah, he came out. I don't think he knew we were even coming. Just like we landed literally 20ft from the FBO and he said, you guys need gas? And I think we were filled up. Fifteen minutes later, I had enough time.
[01:27:40] Speaker C: To get a coffee, drink it, wash my hands and wash my face, and then go back out to the aircraft before. Ready?
[01:27:45] Speaker B: Yeah. That is the quickest FBO turn in the history of the Coast Guard right there.
[01:27:48] Speaker C: But at this point, we also decided.
Litter gone.
[01:27:52] Speaker D: Yeah, A lot of stuff happened at that. At that fbo. We lost the litter. Sorry, did you have. No, we lost the litter. And I made the mistake of calling sector and they.
They didn't know where we'd been because we had lost our guard because they didn't talk to us. So once we got past that whole debacle, we got the whole, you will go back to the wall. You will pick up your rescue swimmer and from sector. Yep. Yeah, yeah. Not naming names or anything, but they said, you will go back, get your rescue swimmer, return to the coast. We do not have a B0 on the coast. This is an agency assist case and they can find someone else.
[01:28:30] Speaker A: Interesting.
[01:28:31] Speaker D: It was odd.
[01:28:32] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:28:33] Speaker D: I don't say anything more on that, but it was very odd.
[01:28:36] Speaker A: But. But in the back of your mind, you're like, dude, we are committed to this. Yes, we are fully committed.
[01:28:40] Speaker D: My rescue swimmer is on the wall. So even if I don't pick up else, I'm going back to the wall anyway to pick up my swimmer. And I'm not just going to pick them up and leave.
[01:28:47] Speaker A: But you are absolutely letting a whole lot of folks down if you do not complete your mission.
[01:28:51] Speaker C: Absolutely.
[01:28:52] Speaker A: That is crazy.
[01:28:53] Speaker D: A relationship with the rescuers at this point. We weren't just going to say, all right, we're out.
[01:28:56] Speaker A: And, you know, outside outsiders view looking in. I get it. Sector doesn't have the full picture.
[01:29:00] Speaker D: No.
[01:29:01] Speaker A: They have no idea.
[01:29:01] Speaker D: In their credit, they have zero, zero idea of what's happening.
[01:29:05] Speaker B: And their swath of responsibility is the coastline.
[01:29:07] Speaker A: Yeah, fair enough. It sounds fair.
[01:29:09] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:29:09] Speaker D: Yeah.
[01:29:10] Speaker C: But it was very frustrating in the moment.
[01:29:11] Speaker A: Oh, for sure.
[01:29:12] Speaker D: Yeah.
[01:29:12] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:29:13] Speaker D: I think. I don't think I actually hung up on them, but I certainly was like, okay, Roger. And then hung up. Called ops, gave him this.
[01:29:19] Speaker B: Is this Commander Ramos, by the way?
[01:29:20] Speaker D: Yeah. Told him this is what our plan is. And he said, cool. And that was the end of that discussion. At this point, I texted the ic. He sent me a picture from the rescue site, and the fog had started to lift. So there's holes in the fog.
[01:29:33] Speaker B: And then you guys are sitting there like, let's go.
[01:29:35] Speaker D: Yeah, yeah. We learned that CHP has.
[01:29:39] Speaker B: Chp.
[01:29:39] Speaker D: California Highway Patrol. A star had joined the rescue initially they had when we first landed.
[01:29:45] Speaker B: Player two has entered the games.
[01:29:49] Speaker D: When we. When we first landed, I had learned that they were on scene but wouldn't come below the clouds.
[01:29:54] Speaker B: Okay.
[01:29:55] Speaker D: And then he texted to say the clouds are dissipating and then sees VFR on top. He's VFR just circling.
[01:30:01] Speaker C: Single pilot.
[01:30:01] Speaker D: Single pilot.
[01:30:02] Speaker C: They have their videos on their Instagram and they have like 360 GoPro footage and he's single pilot with just a hoist operator.
[01:30:07] Speaker A: Holy cow, dude. Cowboys.
[01:30:09] Speaker D: Oh, yeah.
[01:30:10] Speaker B: Seriously, those guys.
[01:30:11] Speaker A: Irene. Yeah, dude.
[01:30:12] Speaker B: That's fun.
[01:30:13] Speaker D: They're badass.
[01:30:13] Speaker C: Yeah, they're awesome.
[01:30:15] Speaker D: They didn't. They obviously didn't have a rescue swimmer, so when they could get below the clouds, they eventually got below the clouds. They had a screamer suit, which is basically a. I don't know what that is.
[01:30:24] Speaker B: That sounds like the coolest thing I've ever heard.
[01:30:26] Speaker D: Exactly what it is. It's a. It's like a tarp at the bottom of a rope. And you get in it and pull this little thing down to tighten the tarp around you and you scream all the way up and all the way down. Yeah.
[01:30:38] Speaker B: Wait, wait, wait.
[01:30:39] Speaker A: I gotta Google this, man.
[01:30:41] Speaker D: Screamer suit is awesome.
[01:30:42] Speaker A: We need Uncle Rob to be here to do the Googles and pull the screamer. You know, he's our. He's our Joe Rogan. Jamie.
[01:30:48] Speaker D: There's no one down there, though, to tell him how to use it. So the very end of the day, before we finish the last hoist, the last thing we heard leaving the rescue site after sorting number two was the CHP guys yelling to the rescuers on deck how to get into the screamer suit. And it was. Was. It was hilarious.
[01:31:05] Speaker B: Holy cow. So did they affect any rescues after the fog lifted?
[01:31:09] Speaker D: Yeah, so the fog listed. They came in and picked up two people.
[01:31:11] Speaker B: Okay. But not survivors.
[01:31:13] Speaker D: Not the second survivor. They picked up. They could not get to the second survivor. I don't think we ever got to the bottom of why they could not. But they said they could not get to him.
[01:31:20] Speaker C: So he would. The way he was situated, he wouldn't have been able to don the suit.
[01:31:25] Speaker D: That's right.
[01:31:25] Speaker C: Because he couldn't move. I'll show you the picture and you can play. My favorite game was spot the Survivor driver.
[01:31:31] Speaker A: He's.
[01:31:31] Speaker D: He was basically on a one foot square piece of rock.
[01:31:34] Speaker A: Ew.
[01:31:35] Speaker D: And had just been there for.
[01:31:36] Speaker C: Poor kid.
[01:31:37] Speaker D: 14 hours. 15. No longer than that at this point. Yes.
[01:31:41] Speaker A: Time out.
[01:31:41] Speaker D: Yeah.
[01:31:42] Speaker A: You are in timeout.
[01:31:43] Speaker C: Yeah.
[01:31:44] Speaker A: You look at this for the next two days.
[01:31:47] Speaker C: Think about it.
[01:31:47] Speaker B: Holy cow. No screamer suit for you.
[01:31:49] Speaker D: Yeah.
[01:31:50] Speaker C: So we got.
[01:31:51] Speaker B: That's my favorite Thing in this podcast is a screamer.
[01:31:53] Speaker D: I love it.
[01:31:54] Speaker C: I'm going to title one and buy it for you on Amazon, and we're going to.
[01:31:57] Speaker B: We're going to test bet it here in the Coast Guard atc.
It's lighter than a litter.
[01:32:03] Speaker D: Oh, my gosh.
[01:32:05] Speaker B: Sweet. Okay, so we got out of YOLO. Yeah, YOLO. But you are YOLOing.
[01:32:10] Speaker C: We are YOLOing.
[01:32:11] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:32:11] Speaker C: At that point, the fog was reducing, and we had. I think I had a concern about. We didn't know where the A star was because we knew they were in the area and that valley was tight.
[01:32:20] Speaker B: Yeah, that's.
[01:32:21] Speaker D: I forgot about that.
[01:32:22] Speaker B: That's concerning.
[01:32:24] Speaker A: Is there a common helo frequency that you'd use up there or anything like that?
[01:32:28] Speaker C: There is, but we were on calcord to talk to the IC.
[01:32:31] Speaker B: 8 MHz.
[01:32:33] Speaker D: It is the frequency that all of the first responding agencies in California use.
[01:32:37] Speaker B: Bounce. That's the cell tower. 80 megahertz.
[01:32:40] Speaker A: Is that like a HF frequency or something?
[01:32:42] Speaker D: No, no, it's a VHF.
[01:32:43] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a code. It's a coded VHF that all, like, law enforcement and fire departments use. Oh, cool. It's pretty sweet. It's weird because, like, we try to get in Savannah forever, but we could never. But, like, places like Detroit have it. You guys have it. It's fantastic.
[01:32:56] Speaker C: Well, that was even the channel that when we got. By the time we were starting to get up there, they were like, they are on deck.
[01:33:01] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:33:01] Speaker D: We told them, we're not coming near the AOR until they're on deck because there was no room to maneuver.
[01:33:06] Speaker B: And they immediately landed.
[01:33:08] Speaker C: They had already done, I think, one or two.
[01:33:10] Speaker D: We told them we would come in down, but we told them we were not coming into the valley until they were on deck.
[01:33:13] Speaker A: Okay.
[01:33:14] Speaker D: And I think we. I think as we entered the valley, we called them, and they said, yeah, you're good. Come on in there on deck. That's all shut down.
[01:33:20] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:33:21] Speaker C: And we went straight back to the site.
[01:33:23] Speaker D: We went straight back to the site. We asked, you know what, after that? And they said at that point, I have it written down. But I think they said, if you can get the survivor and three more rescuers.
[01:33:38] Speaker C: Yeah, they had the gas for the rest of it.
[01:33:40] Speaker D: If we could get those guys, if we could get four more, they could get the rest.
[01:33:44] Speaker B: Nice.
[01:33:45] Speaker D: So we went up the wall. We picked up my mike. That was relatively straightforward, I think. Mike asked for lower, as I recall.
[01:33:52] Speaker A: Yes.
[01:33:52] Speaker C: For an altitude change.
[01:33:53] Speaker D: Yeah, yeah. And that. This is when it Started to get spicy from a power perspective.
[01:33:57] Speaker B: Wasn't spicy before.
[01:33:59] Speaker D: From a power perspective. The fog cleared out and the wind picked up.
[01:34:03] Speaker B: Yeah, there it is.
[01:34:04] Speaker D: Yeah. When we came in, we were lower altitude to pick up Mike. I think this was like 150, 160ft or something.
[01:34:11] Speaker C: Like that's cool, but still cool.
[01:34:13] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:34:14] Speaker D: I don't know, it was like 30 or 40, maybe 50ft lower or something like that. We picked up Mike, but we had a 5% torque margin for that whole hoist we picked up. Mike was on com. We talked about how we're going to get the second guy. The second guy was probably 100, 150ft.
[01:34:30] Speaker B: Higher than the first guy. Second survivor.
[01:34:32] Speaker D: Second survivor.
[01:34:33] Speaker B: Gotcha.
[01:34:33] Speaker D: Yes. Was, I don't know, 100, 150ft higher than the rest of the rescue party. Just hanging out there. The fog had cleared out. So we get.
[01:34:40] Speaker B: Actually.
[01:34:40] Speaker D: Actually, we couldn't have gotten to him the first time because the fog was where he was. There was no getting into the fog. Fog burned out. So we could actually see him.
[01:34:47] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:34:47] Speaker D: Climbed up above him. Essentially did the exact same hoist we did the first survivor. Yeah. A direct. No. J. Reverse J. Rescuer. Didn't come off the hook this time. He literally just threw his arms around him through the quick, quick strap and the cross, cross traps, and then we went.
[01:35:02] Speaker C: Yep.
[01:35:03] Speaker B: Did he have any. Again, I'm sorry, but did he have any injuries that were reported the second.
[01:35:07] Speaker C: He was fine.
[01:35:08] Speaker D: He was just stiff. Stiff and cold. Hypothermic.
[01:35:11] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:35:11] Speaker D: Yeah.
[01:35:12] Speaker B: Cool. Uh, quick strap for hypothermic patients. Is there any concern or is it pretty.
[01:35:17] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, like, I think the concern is if they are hypothermic, like, all the blood rushes from their core down to their legs.
[01:35:24] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:35:25] Speaker A: Because that is a really uncomfortable thing.
[01:35:27] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:35:27] Speaker A: But you know what I mean, Like, I don't. I'm beyond that.
[01:35:30] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. No, I would probably be fine.
[01:35:32] Speaker D: I mean, at that point, Mike verbalized that he was afraid he wasn't going to be able to hold on to anything.
[01:35:36] Speaker B: That's what.
[01:35:37] Speaker D: So if we just threw the thing around him, that would be bad. So he used the crotch straps. Keep them in there.
[01:35:42] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:35:42] Speaker B: Sweet.
[01:35:43] Speaker D: I do want to mention still a fantastic hoist, but we did drag Mike through a tree on the way up.
[01:35:49] Speaker A: I mean, wolverine can handle it. Yeah.
[01:35:51] Speaker B: He's got to go through one tree.
[01:35:53] Speaker D: Yeah. It's not a story.
[01:35:55] Speaker B: Not going to go through a tree. Come on.
[01:35:56] Speaker D: Yeah.
[01:35:57] Speaker C: Do you want a good story or not?
[01:35:59] Speaker D: Yeah. We pulled him off the wall. And I think he just drifted about 10ft down the wall. Just drag him through the tree.
[01:36:05] Speaker A: We're talking Douglas furs here.
[01:36:07] Speaker B: High alpine pine tree.
[01:36:10] Speaker C: We got the kid back to the landing site. And I had heard this rumor from other friends, like, don't look back. Like, your job is up front. Don't look back. And I looked back and I saw that kid's mom. Yeah, that changed my whole.
[01:36:23] Speaker D: His mom was standing like six feet outside the road arc when we landed.
[01:36:26] Speaker A: Oh, wow.
[01:36:27] Speaker D: It was awesome.
[01:36:27] Speaker B: Wow.
[01:36:28] Speaker C: He got out, patted you on the shoulder, I think.
[01:36:30] Speaker A: Oh, man.
[01:36:30] Speaker C: And hopped out. And that was like. That was the moment I. Not to be dramatic, was like, that's it, dude.
[01:36:34] Speaker D: That's awesome. Yeah.
[01:36:36] Speaker B: I mean, that is a great moment to have.
[01:36:38] Speaker A: Yep.
[01:36:39] Speaker B: Hold on to that, man. That's. That's a. That's once in a lifetime right there.
[01:36:43] Speaker C: Yeah, I really did it.
[01:36:43] Speaker B: That's awesome. Cool.
[01:36:45] Speaker C: Then we went again.
[01:36:46] Speaker B: Again.
[01:36:46] Speaker D: We went again. I think at this point, they originally said three, and they said, okay, we've, you know, done the field planning again. If you can get two more, we'll be good. So we said, all right, we'll get two more. And we went up and it got really spooky. From a power perspective, these were the scariest hoists. The first hoist was scary just because it was the first one and it was fog and everything thing. We had a.
[01:37:08] Speaker B: Are you door two at this?
[01:37:10] Speaker D: We were still nose in. We're still nose in because there was no other configuration that could get us close enough to the wall. Yeah, we had. On the second to last hoist, we had a 1% torque margin for the entire hoist.
We. The entire way down, we were at 99% for the entire hoist. And I was pep talking myself the whole time. You know, if we hit the red line and we start to droop, you know, if I over torque, I have to really over torque because I don't want to start drooping turns. I want to gauge aphatic safety features. So I need to y.
[01:37:38] Speaker A: You got up to 110%, bud.
[01:37:39] Speaker D: Yeah, it was.
[01:37:40] Speaker A: You're good.
[01:37:41] Speaker B: I. Holy cow.
[01:37:43] Speaker D: It was that last. That hoist. I was. The whole time, I was like, if I fly out, can I do a, you know, a tail slide and do a pedal turn into a fly out? That. A lot of different scenarios went through my head on that hoist.
[01:37:57] Speaker B: What if you lose an engine? Is that what you're saying or just in general?
[01:37:59] Speaker D: Honestly, that never even crossed.
[01:38:01] Speaker A: Well, talking about Is pulling too much power, then drooping.
[01:38:03] Speaker B: Oh, oh, oh, oh.
[01:38:04] Speaker D: And if I pull too much, if I hit the fade and then start to droop. I got you.
[01:38:07] Speaker B: I'm tracking at this point.
[01:38:08] Speaker C: The wind's actually started to pick up too. We had.
[01:38:11] Speaker D: That's what. I think that's what caused the problem. I think we had a left crosswind down the valley. We tr. We tried it actually on the second last hoist, we tried to go door two for the last time and was like, there's no way. This will be almost a three underfoot hoist to get over the spot. So.
[01:38:25] Speaker C: Yeah.
[01:38:26] Speaker B: Okay.
[01:38:26] Speaker C: But Mike got the two rescuers on two different hoisting evolutions. The one of them, he hit a rock.
[01:38:34] Speaker D: Yeah, he had a rock on this, actually, I think on that second to last hoist, he hit the rock. Rock.
[01:38:38] Speaker C: Yeah.
But at one point, we had picked up. So we were up in the air. We have Mike with the. One of the rescuers all hooked up, and we started to come back into the valley. And if you look at the hoist cam footage, it's like, what, 800ft below?
[01:38:53] Speaker A: Oh, my gosh.
[01:38:54] Speaker D: Yeah. So when you picked up the person we were on the. On that second last hoist, we were like 170, 160AGL or something like that. And you see a slide aft and like that, it's were 900ft in the air.
[01:39:07] Speaker B: That's insane.
[01:39:07] Speaker D: Yeah. The exposure underneath. Underneath them was instantaneous. Yeah.
[01:39:12] Speaker A: So the sheer considerations were. Do not.
[01:39:14] Speaker B: I mean, let's be honest. The sheer considerations at 150ft, 900ft, it's probably the same.
[01:39:19] Speaker D: Yeah.
[01:39:19] Speaker A: Actually, maybe I want 900ft.
[01:39:21] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.
[01:39:22] Speaker C: So the quick way out.
[01:39:23] Speaker B: Yeah. At that point, it's like. It's One just looks higher, but it's the same. But that is. That is a lot of. That is like saying air underneath you instantaneously.
[01:39:30] Speaker A: Sure.
[01:39:31] Speaker D: Yeah.
[01:39:31] Speaker B: Holy cow. Okay.
[01:39:33] Speaker A: And we're still doing direct deployments to the rescue swimmer with quick strap recoveries.
[01:39:38] Speaker D: Yep. On those, he didn't come disconnect or anything like that. He just beckoned them. They walked over, he threw it around.
[01:39:43] Speaker B: Come to me.
[01:39:45] Speaker A: Come to Wolverine.
[01:39:52] Speaker B: Hell, yeah. Okay.
[01:39:53] Speaker A: I like how we create a new character.
[01:39:55] Speaker C: I want to make him like a patch or something.
[01:39:57] Speaker D: Oh, yeah.
[01:40:01] Speaker B: So this is. That was the last one.
[01:40:04] Speaker D: Yeah, we did two. We. Well, we picked up one. We went and dropped them off, Came back again to the wall, Picked up the last one, dropped them off.
[01:40:10] Speaker B: Yeah. And then, you know, you hear, like, you know, rescue swimmers clear the vertical surface. Clear back. Are you just like I was.
[01:40:17] Speaker D: I remember Jordan says, they're clear. So that was one where he hit the rock. He hit the rock. And he's like, okay.
And then Jordan's like, all right. Clear of all obstacles. You're clear back.
[01:40:29] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:40:29] Speaker D: And you're. He said, you're clear back or up or whatever. And I said. And I just replied with. On the hoist count, it's just like we're at 99.9. And then Jordan goes, okay, well, you don't have to climb.
[01:40:41] Speaker B: All right.
[01:40:41] Speaker D: Okay. Don't worry about it.
Trying to give you options, bro.
[01:40:46] Speaker A: I like this guy.
[01:40:47] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:40:47] Speaker C: I really do.
[01:40:48] Speaker A: I wish. I wish the other guys were here.
[01:40:50] Speaker B: That's awesome. Okay.
[01:40:53] Speaker D: Yeah. Slid afton. Right. Landed for both.
[01:40:55] Speaker B: Both of them at the landing zone. Zone at planning zone.
[01:40:58] Speaker D: Yep.
[01:40:59] Speaker B: Sweet. And then back for gas. Easy flight back for gas.
[01:41:03] Speaker C: So we went back to Davis. Our litter was still there. Got on deck, got gas. I think Mike went to the bathroom, but he had a biggest smile on his face.
[01:41:12] Speaker A: Nice.
[01:41:12] Speaker C: Like, there was.
[01:41:13] Speaker D: We talked about it the whole way back. Like, what did we just do?
[01:41:17] Speaker A: He was pumped.
[01:41:17] Speaker D: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:41:19] Speaker C: At that point, I think we knew it was, like, weird. It was over, over, and it was safe, and we felt good. Like, we saw the transit home, but.
[01:41:25] Speaker D: Yeah.
[01:41:26] Speaker C: But the adrenaline was still high.
[01:41:29] Speaker D: It was nice to hear the sign offs from the. From the rescuers.
[01:41:32] Speaker B: Oh, my gosh. Holy cow.
[01:41:33] Speaker D: That was pretty cool.
[01:41:34] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:41:34] Speaker D: CHP was still in the fight. They had.
They had three more to pick up.
[01:41:40] Speaker B: They put a couple more in the scream sack or whatever.
[01:41:44] Speaker D: I'm just gonna call it the scream sack from now.
[01:41:47] Speaker C: That's easier. Can we ever say that on the podcast?
[01:41:49] Speaker B: Yeah, we can. We can say. No, we can say scream sack. That's safe.
[01:41:52] Speaker C: Spotify definitely won't delete this.
[01:41:54] Speaker B: That is a. I don't know. No, they won't. I don't think so. I don't know what the rules are.
[01:41:57] Speaker A: This is a PG rated podcast.
[01:41:59] Speaker D: Yeah.
[01:41:59] Speaker A: You could say. You could say stream for all ages.
[01:42:02] Speaker B: Yeah, dude. Sweet. So we land.
[01:42:06] Speaker D: We landed Davis, and then we started calling home plate.
[01:42:09] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:42:10] Speaker D: At this point, we'd been in dry suits for almost 18 hours or something like that.
[01:42:15] Speaker B: That's called marinating.
[01:42:16] Speaker D: Yeah. It was so gross. Reduced.
[01:42:20] Speaker C: Reduced.
[01:42:21] Speaker D: We were reduced.
[01:42:24] Speaker B: Very interesting question. Did you bag out there?
[01:42:27] Speaker D: So. So this. This was the funny part. I called the. Or the CEO called me. Or I called the CEO and he said, how you, like, take a pause button?
[01:42:36] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:42:36] Speaker D: Nobody's lives are on the line right now. You guys had three hours of sleep or whatever. Calm. You know, everybody calm down and think about it for a minute. And we did. I think we stayed there for half an hour. We got some coffee, we laid around. I called ops, lying on the ground of the fbo.
I said, hey, sir, I just want to let you know, I'm horizontal on the floor.
The CEO called us and said, just. Just hang out. All right? I think. I think I told him, we're good to go. And then he responded with, just hang out. I just want you to hang out for like half an hour. 45 minutes.
[01:43:05] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:43:05] Speaker D: And in that 45 minutes, he drove all the way out 60 or 70 miles to where we were.
[01:43:12] Speaker A: Dude.
[01:43:12] Speaker C: Yeah.
[01:43:13] Speaker B: Hell, yeah.
[01:43:13] Speaker C: Just to come see us.
[01:43:14] Speaker D: Unbelievable.
[01:43:15] Speaker A: That's awesome.
[01:43:16] Speaker D: And I said, I was like, do you want us hang out just for safety? And he responded with ADD Just something like that. And then about half an hour later, like, he pulls in the parking lot, he just walks over to shake.
[01:43:24] Speaker C: I will say we were having bets. We were like, is he ordering us pizza?
[01:43:28] Speaker D: I thought it was pizza.
[01:43:30] Speaker B: I was like, okay, it's just him, but it's fine. It's cool.
[01:43:33] Speaker C: Yeah, but him showing up and just giving, like, shaking the hand.
[01:43:36] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:43:36] Speaker C: Like, that was another big, like, holy.
[01:43:37] Speaker A: Cow, what a great boss man.
[01:43:39] Speaker B: That's awesome.
[01:43:39] Speaker D: It was epic.
[01:43:40] Speaker B: That is great. And you don't forget that kind of stuff.
[01:43:43] Speaker D: No leadership like that.
[01:43:44] Speaker C: We almost forgot the litter.
[01:43:45] Speaker D: We did almost forget the litter where we started up.
[01:43:48] Speaker C: When we remembered it, we got, like, got in. I think I had my helmet on. And we went like avionics. Dax and I could see it, like, behind the thing. And Jordan goes, do we want that?
[01:43:58] Speaker B: No.
[01:43:59] Speaker C: It's like, oh, yeah. So we went on grandma.
[01:44:00] Speaker B: Y'all gonna finish that? Dude, that's awesome. Awesome. And then, you guys, how much flight time?
[01:44:06] Speaker D: Not very much in the end. I think it was, what, 4.3 or something like that.
[01:44:10] Speaker A: That's a lot.
[01:44:11] Speaker D: That was a lot packed into 4.3.
[01:44:12] Speaker B: I mean, that's a lot of 4.3, but that's still not banging out.
[01:44:16] Speaker D: Yeah, 4.3, but crew day, right?
[01:44:18] Speaker A: Crew day. You're bet there's bagging considerations for crew day, right?
[01:44:22] Speaker D: We. Yeah, I didn't even count it, but we.
[01:44:24] Speaker C: We got home before our duty day would have officially.
[01:44:28] Speaker D: Yeah.
[01:44:28] Speaker B: So when you landed back and so.
[01:44:29] Speaker A: It was like just a. Just a normal 24 hour period.
[01:44:32] Speaker C: Yep, just a normal day.
[01:44:33] Speaker A: Dude, what a freaking case. Wait. And just Real quick transit from Davis back home, what, 30 minutes, 40 minutes?
[01:44:41] Speaker C: I think it was closer to an hour.
[01:44:42] Speaker A: An hour?
[01:44:43] Speaker D: It was a bit. Yeah.
[01:44:44] Speaker A: Okay. I'm just. I was just curious in case I get stationed San Francisco and want to go fly over my cousin's house. I just need to know.
[01:44:50] Speaker C: I will say so. As pilots, you know, everyone loves to fly.
[01:44:53] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:44:53] Speaker C: He had been flying the entire time.
[01:44:55] Speaker B: Did he let you fly?
[01:44:56] Speaker C: I've never seen him give up controls faster than after he ripped the takeoff. He's like, watch this. Like, did a takeoff. And he's like, okay, your controls.
[01:45:04] Speaker B: Hell yeah, dude.
[01:45:05] Speaker C: And I. I just imagine you just doing one of these, like, stretching your hands out.
Yeah.
[01:45:10] Speaker B: I bet you still didn't get the right seat, though.
[01:45:11] Speaker C: Did not.
You know what? I'm okay. I was okay with it. I was not.
[01:45:15] Speaker A: You know, I want. After this podcast, Max needs to share a story about his big SAR case and. And getting past the controls for the landing. It's. It's a. It's a great story.
[01:45:25] Speaker B: Pretty funny story.
[01:45:26] Speaker A: It's really, really funny.
[01:45:28] Speaker B: Sweet. So very benign.
[01:45:31] Speaker D: It was an. The weather had cleared out, thank goodness. And it was just a straight shot.
[01:45:36] Speaker C: I think the coolest thing we did on the way home is we did a low pass of sector.
[01:45:40] Speaker D: Oh, yeah.
[01:45:40] Speaker A: Just wave the flag real quick.
[01:45:42] Speaker C: Just a nice little past sector, past the admiral's house. Just. It was a very Coast Guard moment, and it felt good.
[01:45:48] Speaker A: And at that point. So, like, what, maybe an hour or two hours elapsed since. Since the awesome phone call was set. Sector. Did they bring another aircraft up? Were you still the only B.0?
[01:45:58] Speaker C: They. We went sight down once we got back for like 30 minutes.
[01:46:02] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:46:02] Speaker D: Yeah. We went site down for half an hour until the other crew came on.
[01:46:06] Speaker B: Two very important questions.
How many lives saved? Did you count?
[01:46:11] Speaker D: Four.
[01:46:12] Speaker B: Four. Okay. All the people you brought, and if the weather was shitty coming back from Davis, would you just have bagged out at that point? Were you okay leaving a helicopter there?
[01:46:23] Speaker D: If there had been any variables, yeah. To us getting back home from Davis, I would have called it right there. But we would.
[01:46:31] Speaker A: Any variables include having to file an IFR flight plan?
[01:46:33] Speaker D: Yes.
[01:46:34] Speaker A: Okay, cool.
[01:46:34] Speaker D: Yeah, dude. If it had not been a straight VFR shot back, skippers bringing you home. There were clouds, but there was no risk of going.
[01:46:41] Speaker C: Skipper did bring his suv. We all could have fit.
[01:46:43] Speaker B: Skippers bringing you home in and out.
[01:46:45] Speaker A: Do the Yukon XL in route.
Got the TV in the back seats.
[01:46:50] Speaker B: Okay. Those are the two questions I had immediately.
[01:46:52] Speaker C: Yeah, we Were very lucky to have four saved and then CHP had five saved.
[01:46:56] Speaker B: They're in the same sack in the scream sack.
[01:46:59] Speaker A: A couple things I'm doing tonight when I get home, Googling CHP helicopter jobs and scream sacks.
[01:47:07] Speaker B: Sweet.
[01:47:08] Speaker A: And I'm afraid I'm a Google scream sack and it's going to.
[01:47:10] Speaker B: Yeah, it's private browser.
[01:47:13] Speaker C: Make sure I'm talking to you.
[01:47:14] Speaker B: Use your iPad on the ATC WI FI hotspot.
All right. At a risk of adding another hour and a half to this podcast cast, but I think this is really important. I need to know from both each of you and in detail, is there things that you would have done differently?
[01:47:32] Speaker D: I just gotta ask a question.
[01:47:33] Speaker B: Yeah. And if that, you know, what are they? Obviously. Or like, not differently in the sense that you did something wrong, but if you were to approach this case, would you approach from that angle? What would you have done differently?
[01:47:46] Speaker D: Someone just asked me this question. Cooper Dameron asked me this question on a flight the other day.
[01:47:50] Speaker A: Cooper.
[01:47:50] Speaker B: Yeah. Damn, Ron.
[01:47:51] Speaker A: What up, Cooper?
[01:47:52] Speaker C: Good guy. Best mustache in the game, dude.
[01:47:54] Speaker D: Absolutely, 100%.
And I. I think I was. I mean, it certainly thought through it before, but he forced me to really think about it. I thought. Thought about it for, I don't know, a minute before answering. And I. Absolutely. I can't. I'm. I'm being serious. I. I don't want this to come off as arrogant. I don't think I would have done anything differently. And the reason is, there's a singular reason. We were a team. Team. We'd made every decision together as a team. We reevaluated at every decision. Kate, you always hope you're going to get a team together where you rely on everybody equally. There's four pillars. Four people are holding it up. This was that team. There were four people that we trusted each other. I don't mean this sound melodramatic or anything. I trusted everybody else to help affect the best outcome, to make the best decision. And so at the end of the day, I felt like we arrived at the best possible decision we could make in that moment, given the variables we had to work with.
[01:48:49] Speaker B: I've used this analogy before on this podcast. It's like when you're. When you have the right crew, it's like, you know, when you're cutting a piece of construction paper with scissors, you stop the cutting motion and the scissors just glide through the construction paper. That's what it feels like when you have the right crew dynamic. And it's just like, yes, it probably was this very scary case. But the one thing you didn't have to worry about was crew composition, because everybody did their jobs.
[01:49:11] Speaker D: Yep.
[01:49:12] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:49:12] Speaker D: No, I did them really well.
[01:49:14] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:49:14] Speaker D: Couldn't have done it without, you know, Mike's experience and Jordan's com. And you're pulling everything out of your. Your center console. The center console elf.
[01:49:24] Speaker C: Center console ELF is gonna be my new call sign.
[01:49:28] Speaker D: It was. No, it was awesome. It was a. It was great.
[01:49:31] Speaker B: That's awesome. Yeah. All right.
[01:49:33] Speaker C: I think for myself, I mean, there's always things that I will look back on that and be like, I could have done that better.
[01:49:39] Speaker B: Yeah, of course.
[01:49:40] Speaker C: But I think the biggest takeaway that I had was not really looking at the icing before we took off, because I had, like, tertiary, like, done the foreflight, planned route, filed it, looked at the weather briefing, kind of checked the icing layers, kind of tertiary. I wish I had taken a moment and just kind of remembered all those things that we were all taught in that weather class in IFS or whatever. It's like visible moisture.
[01:50:01] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:50:01] Speaker C: Temperature at this level.
[01:50:02] Speaker A: Yeah, fair enough.
[01:50:03] Speaker C: Take a peak. I wish I had done that a little bit better because it might have saved us an hour maybe.
[01:50:07] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:50:08] Speaker B: Is your comfort flying in all of those things, like visible Moisture, temperature below 4 degrees Celsius? Is it. Is your comfort level more or less now, would you say, from doing that?
[01:50:22] Speaker D: Mine is certainly not more.
[01:50:24] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:50:24] Speaker C: It's not more.
[01:50:25] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:50:25] Speaker D: Yeah.
[01:50:25] Speaker B: Because, like.
[01:50:26] Speaker D: Because I would never want to do.
[01:50:27] Speaker B: That again talking to people who have done this. And it's like, yes, I. My comfort level is actually greater because I know. Know that I can. At least if I'm ever in this situation, I'll be more comfortable. I've never heard that. And it's like. It's like. Yes. It's less now.
[01:50:40] Speaker C: Yeah.
[01:50:41] Speaker B: Yes. We went through it. Everything was fine. We followed the rules. We didn't, you know, go too far into the red, but I'm still not comfortable doing this.
[01:50:49] Speaker D: Icing's icing. Talking about icing specifically, it's all different. You're never going to ice the same way.
[01:50:53] Speaker B: Right.
[01:50:54] Speaker D: And I was just grateful that, you know, the frost formed. It formed slowly. And, you know, it wasn't like we weren't building up thick layers rapidly. It was, you know.
[01:51:05] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:51:05] Speaker D: Yeah. It ended up being very benign, but it's probably not going to be like that the next time, you know, if we encounter it. Yeah.
[01:51:10] Speaker A: Fair enough.
[01:51:11] Speaker D: Yeah. I just keep telling people this is a great case to have behind You.
[01:51:14] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely.
[01:51:16] Speaker C: I think it was, it was the start of my SAR career.
[01:51:18] Speaker D: So this is, you know, this is number one. This is number one.
[01:51:21] Speaker C: It's my first life saved is this case.
[01:51:23] Speaker B: No.
[01:51:24] Speaker C: Yeah.
So we go out and now that's kind of not the benchmark, but I look at that as like, okay, that was the scariest part. Yeah.
[01:51:32] Speaker B: That's also the highlight of your career. It's all go downhill.
[01:51:34] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:51:34] Speaker C: I got patted on the back a couple times.
[01:51:36] Speaker A: How many times do we talk about this? Like your first SAR case might be the biggest SAR case you ever have.
[01:51:41] Speaker B: It not might be, apparently it probably is. I don't know, man.
[01:51:45] Speaker A: It just seems to be a common thing.
[01:51:46] Speaker B: It really is.
[01:51:47] Speaker A: You know, it's crazy, but that is.
[01:51:49] Speaker B: A testament to paying attention, you know.
[01:51:52] Speaker A: Yes.
[01:51:52] Speaker B: When you go out on training flights pushing yourself safely.
[01:51:55] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:51:55] Speaker D: Well, when they mean safety pilot. Yeah, they mean safety pilot.
Like, I, we could not have done the mission if he hadn't remembered these, these things or whatever.
[01:52:04] Speaker B: And yeah, you know, we push the students through the D course, you know. You know, they obviously are, you know, working hard and producing, you know, good flights and, you know, doing well. But I feel like when we, when we get done with that Dewater 3 flight, that flight that I got done with my on wing today and we push, we start going to the night stuff. I kind of like, I always talk to the students. I'm like, hey, this is a pause. Like, hey, you better bring your A game for these last couple events. Like, you are going to be pushed pretty hard. You might be scared a little bit because it's at nighttime over the water and it's like, this is our last chance to evaluate you, to send you out to the fleet to go hoist in a valley with shitty weather at thousands of feet and something you've never done, like you were going to leave this course and potentially have this case. It can happen.
[01:52:51] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:52:51] Speaker C: Pushing that comfort zone here was really, really helped too because that first time over the water when I'm in the right seat.
[01:52:56] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:52:57] Speaker C: I had no clue what I was doing. It's like, we are how low.
[01:52:59] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:53:00] Speaker C: And you're going to make me do what?
[01:53:02] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Something you have never done before.
[01:53:04] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:53:05] Speaker A: I, I went through this survival school once. It was up in, just outside of Port Angeles, up in the Olympic mountain range. They're really cool. Mountain well weather, cold weather survival school. But the instructors, they're all these old air force instructors and they go, hey, you should never plan on just rising to the occasion, you should always rise to basically, like, the level of your knowledge. And I think that's important. You know what I mean?
[01:53:26] Speaker D: Interesting.
[01:53:26] Speaker A: And that's what it sounds like you guys did. You know what I mean? You didn't just show up and be like, oh, yeah, we'll figure it out. Like, you guys had a very clear plan on what you wanted to do, and you knew how to use all your tools. I just absolutely love to hear it.
[01:53:37] Speaker B: Yeah. And again. Again, we have these courses that we send pilots to. Hats Ahars. Obviously, not everybody gets to go, but if you're listening to this and you're an instructor or you're an aircraft commander that's going through these courses, it's so important to bring that knowledge back to your home unit. Teach people about the J. Teach people about Green Zone. Teach people about all the stuff you learn at these courses. And don't just teach it once. Keep reiterating it, because these cases happen.
[01:54:06] Speaker D: Yeah.
[01:54:07] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:54:07] Speaker A: Hey, Max, can I go to Ahars and Hats and San Diego?
[01:54:11] Speaker C: San Diego.
[01:54:11] Speaker B: You have to rub the roadcaster.
[01:54:13] Speaker A: Okay. Rubbing it. Oh, wait, that's not the roadcaster.
[01:54:16] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:54:16] Speaker C: Whisper sweet. Nothing.
[01:54:18] Speaker B: All right. Any advice that you guys have to folks, you know, coming through the course, graduating, you know, our view. A lot of our viewership are folks in flight school. Like, what would you tell them after going through this case as they progress in their career? Career.
[01:54:33] Speaker D: Don't be arrogant. That's what I would say. Don't be arrogant. You.
If we hadn't had Mike. I mean, I just said it. But if we hadn't had Mike, if we hadn't had your knowledge, if we hadn't had Jordan's. Com.
And I think what you said is really poignant. Like, don't try. And if you can't rise to whatever this level is, you're not there yet. And that's okay. Yes.
Go to the next step that you know you can make it to, and then go to the next step that you know you can make it to. And. Yeah, that's what. That's what I would say.
[01:55:02] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:55:02] Speaker D: Be humble as you go through the process and go to the next gate you can know you can make it to and then go from there.
[01:55:06] Speaker B: Yeah. Love that.
[01:55:07] Speaker C: I couldn't say it better. I think the one thing I'd have to say is trust the process. Everyone going through flight school and going through all that is a slog. There's so many moments you're like, is this worth it? Yeah, you're doing it, and you Think you're learning a nothing burger, right? What is an occluded front? Why do I care about it?
[01:55:22] Speaker B: What is adiabatic lapse rate? What do I care about?
[01:55:24] Speaker C: Why do I care about 2 degrees?
[01:55:25] Speaker A: What is the ad tech? I don't even know what that means.
[01:55:30] Speaker B: San Diego.
[01:55:32] Speaker C: San Diego stands for whale something.
[01:55:37] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:55:37] Speaker C: Just trust the process and trust your crew.
We've talked a lot about, you know, gassing me up and grassing Jordan up, but the stick skills on this guy over here, like, we wouldn't have got it done. We wouldn't have gotten home if it wasn't for his flying.
[01:55:50] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:55:50] Speaker C: And I know my wife would give him a big, big hug at any point.
[01:55:54] Speaker D: So, yeah, I'll just take one of.
[01:55:55] Speaker A: The cookies or one of her cookies.
[01:55:57] Speaker C: Yeah.
[01:55:57] Speaker D: Which.
[01:55:57] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. Cause she works at a bakery.
[01:55:59] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, that's right.
[01:56:01] Speaker B: What is it? Hold on. Remind me. It's a vegan bakery.
[01:56:03] Speaker C: Yes. Works at a vegan bakery. And then she makes stuff in her free time for fun. So I'll bring in goodies to work.
[01:56:09] Speaker B: I had some of those. When you are everyone's best friend, if.
[01:56:13] Speaker C: I do something wrong, I bring those.
[01:56:14] Speaker B: In and they're like, tommy is fine. He did great.
[01:56:17] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:56:18] Speaker B: I don't even know what he's talking about.
[01:56:19] Speaker C: Stancheck. I don't even remember that.
[01:56:22] Speaker B: Thanks, guys. This is huge.
Hang on. Every word. I was sitting here enjoying this. It was just a conversation. This is fun.
[01:56:30] Speaker D: Yeah.
[01:56:31] Speaker C: This is awesome.
[01:56:31] Speaker B: I. Poof. It was a good one.
[01:56:34] Speaker A: Yeah, Absolutely.
[01:56:34] Speaker B: I'm pumped. I want to go back and I talk about that. I want to come back to a SAR unit so badly right now, man.
[01:56:40] Speaker A: It is true.
[01:56:41] Speaker B: I'm so. I miss it so much.
[01:56:43] Speaker A: You know, one of the things, like, come over to Mobile and you kind of lose the sar, but you get to do the training.
[01:56:48] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:56:48] Speaker A: And. And. Which is sometimes a nice break. Right. Not gonna lie. It's nice to not stand duty for a little bit. But, man, getting guys like you rolling through and sharing your stories is just outstanding. And, yeah, I get a little jelly. I'm not gonna lie. But it's cool, man. It's.
[01:57:02] Speaker B: It's.
[01:57:02] Speaker A: It's. It's so. It's. It's so like awakening just to. To realize all the cool things that's going on at the Coast Guard and what we. What we bring to the public. So 100%, keep it up.
[01:57:12] Speaker B: This is. I mean, I'm pumped that us four are going to San Diego, and I know.
[01:57:17] Speaker A: Yeah. Dude. What are we going to repaint the helicopter?
[01:57:20] Speaker C: Oh, absolutely.
[01:57:21] Speaker B: It's going to be Red Bull livery.
[01:57:22] Speaker A: Because Red Bull athletes sponsored by Red.
[01:57:24] Speaker D: Bull or yellow and blue air station Wolverine.
[01:57:26] Speaker A: Oh, oh, we're bringing him too.
[01:57:29] Speaker D: I love that Mike's coming.
[01:57:31] Speaker C: Mike's our mascot, actually.
[01:57:32] Speaker B: Five.
[01:57:33] Speaker A: Okay, six of us.
[01:57:35] Speaker C: I'll split it five ways.
[01:57:36] Speaker B: Sweet.
[01:57:37] Speaker A: Great discussion, guys.
[01:57:38] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:57:38] Speaker C: Absolutely having us.
[01:57:40] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:57:40] Speaker C: This is awesome.
[01:57:41] Speaker A: Let's do it again. Go back home, get a good sarcase.
[01:57:43] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:57:43] Speaker A: We'll see you next year for the next podcast.
[01:57:45] Speaker D: Sounds good.
[01:57:46] Speaker A: Hell yeah.
[01:57:46] Speaker C: We'll get right on. Red flare in the bay.
[01:57:49] Speaker B: Let's go. Thanks, guys.
[01:57:49] Speaker A: Cool. You got anything else? No, let's do it.
[01:57:53] Speaker C: See ya.
[01:57:55] Speaker B: We say goodbye but never let go?
We live, we die?
[01:58:06] Speaker D: Cause you can't save every soul?
[01:58:09] Speaker B: Gotta take every chance? To show that you're the kind of man who I'll never look back?
[01:58:18] Speaker A: Never look down? I never let go?