Episode 1. Ryan's Commander with Derek Rogers

This week on Legacy, Survival Stories, Canadian forces veteran and senior project manager for Total Response Solutions , Derek Rogers recounts the harrowing offshore helicopter rescue of the fishing vessel Ryan's Commander in Newfoundland, Canada.

Hosted by Dan Latremouille

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Transcript

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On September 19th, 2004, after discharging a load of shrimp in Ba de Verde Newfoundland, the fishing vessel, Ryan's commander was headed home to the port of St Brendan's Newfoundland. The visibility at the time was five miles and light rain with northeast winds at 40 to 45 knots that evening at approximately 1830 30, about five nautical miles east of Cape Bonavista. The brand new 65 foot long liner was hit with hurricane conditions at 1835. They transmitted their last message, a distress call for help. Then a crew of six abandoned ship. This is legacy survival stories you're going down, you're going down legacy survival stories. Welcome to Legacy Survival Stories. My name is Dan Latremouille, and I'll be your host. We have an incredible show for you today. Now, on this show, we typically focus on people who've been exposed to unusual and sometimes extreme circumstances. Sometimes those circumstances lead to full blown emergencies. Today's show is focused on someone who chose a career of unusual and extreme circumstances, including emergencies. Our guest today is a Canadian Forces veteran having retired from the Canadian Air Force in 2010 while in the Air Force, he was a decorated search and rescue or SAR technician and a star team lead. He's currently the senior project manager for Tolla Response Solutions, or TR's, which is a veteran owned and operated helicopter rescue training and emergency response company. He's been through more emergencies than some Canadian cities. Please welcome Derek Rogers. Thanks very much, Dan. Welcome to the show. Nice to have you. Hey, my pleasure. My pleasure. I always like to support these types of endeavors. Well, listen, we we love it. And it's great to have you here, especially one with as colorful a career as you've had, at least it appears to be. So you were a sergeant with the Canadian Air Force. When did you enlist? Yes. Well, I got into the military in the early 90s, around 1989, 1990. I got to the military. I joined the infantry. I did about a decade in the infantry before I transferred into the Air Force. Originally, I was doing some other projects with the military, but some other trades. Then I transferred in to search and rescue because it was kind of the last bastion of operational experience at that time. This is pre Afghanistan. This is post Bosnia. So it was kind of that one time you could actually go out and do your job for real. I got into that. And believe it or not, when I first got into it, the medical was kind of like the poison pill you had to swallow to do all the cool stuff. But as I got more into it, I really enjoyed the medical side. When you say the medical, you're not talking about like a medical prescreening for you. You're talking about as a SMARTech. Yeah, as Spartech, you're a trained paramedic. You're one of the first courses to go through and actually be trained at the Justice Institute of British Columbia. If we segway there for a second, just so we can give everybody at home a little snapshot of of a of a Spartech. So in the States, when we watch all our American movies, it seems like every branch of every military, pyramidal, paramilitary, anything has got some variation of a rescue swimmer or a parrot. Yeah, for sure. They're predominantly the are military based. If you look internationally, most rescue services are military based. It's prohibitively expensive to do it for anybody else, like for civilian organizations and stuff like that. Prohibitively to train the people provide. Yeah, it's big bucks. I mean, these guys have to be divers. They have to be parachutists. They have to be hoist specialists. They have to be hyang or rescue specialists, and then they have to be trained as paramedics. So it's a pretty intensive endeavor. OK, so to be a star tech like all those things. Yeah, those things come in like in, for example, our sister trade. The United States is the pair of jumpers, PJs, but they're more of a tactical organization where we're more domestic operation. OK, and so, again, for the folks back home, tactical means they probably some shooting. Well, they're more likely to get shot at. OK, yeah, that's that's a more likely definition. All right. So and when you say domestic for for what? For what? Sara Texto in Canada, we're talking about primarily it's search and rescue. It is it is the most part. We are an extension of the emergency services for the Canadian public. That's really what we are like. You know, when if the fire and ambulance can't get there, we will. That's kind of the way that kind of works. So now you've been the the the team member for some period of time. And our adventure today about what time period and where to where in your career area for this. This was I had just been posted to Garner, and it was late September 2014. It was on the tail end of Hurricane Ivan. I was the team leader for the rescue. We were on the cormorant helicopter, which so essentially NDH 101. All right. And that's what they're still flying today. Yes, it is. This is one of the first kind of big missions we did with the one on one sortie with the Kormoran. And it was out of our Ghandour. And again, it was last light of the day. The sun had just gone down. And it was a nasty day. We knew Hurricane Ivan had been blowing up the coast, and it started about a week prior. We be kind of keeping an eyeball on it because hurricane season now is getting more and more prominent on the east coast of Canada, especially in Newfoundland. Things that might miss Nova Scotia, they'll usually clipped Newfoundland. Yeah, there's always, always get and it's almost always that peninsula like you're right down in the bottom part of Newfoundland. That's kind of the area that gets clipped. There was a vessel. It was the range commander was the name of the vessel. It was a new ship. It was a new design. There's a whole kind of what kind of ship are we talking about here? It's inshore fisheries, as they call them, 64 elevens. There are 20 meter vessel. They're designed to basically as more of an insurer fishery versus an offshore fishery, but they use them in multiple applications like most fishing vessels. Very few of them are a specific type of fishing vessel anymore. They're much. More Moulton's. Oh, yeah, when you want when you want to sell those things, you want to know that for many things, what's in season? What am I allowed to catch? Yeah, that type of thing. Right. So, so and sorry, before we get too far into the mission, for my knowledge and for everybody's. You're flying on the cormorant helicopter. What's the normal crew on that? Like how much you're talking about? Generally, what we do, we are on after hours. So basically after hours we're on a two hour call. So when the alarm goes up, technically, you have two hours to be in the air and en route. We're usually within 45 minutes. And I think that evening we were under 45 minutes, and that's from home. And I'm dating myself here, but the pager goes off. You check your cell, you're running away. You go right. You start doing your job that night. We are we are launched very quickly, but standard our crew on a cormorant as two pilots. In this case, it was Scott Trump and Mike Monori. Now we have a flight engineer. Flight engineers are the basically they are very important in this role. They are the hoist operators for these missions. They also maintain the systems on the aircraft. In all reality, flight engineers are probably the unsung heroes of helicopter search and rescue. They do not get enough credit for what they do this evening. Our Phleger is AB Peerce, very experienced gentlemen, really good guy. And then there is myself as team leader and my brand new team member, Norm Penni. Enormous is one of his first missions in search and rescue. So it was it was an interesting way to start off your career. All right. So you're five people, you've boarded up and you're you guys have gone home, but you've responded to your pager, as you said, and you guys are all ripped back into the base and perhaps the helicopter. And, you know, we got in and we started looking at the report. We had a mayday off the off Cape Bonavista, which was, you know, that's that's a rocky that's literally a rocky area, figuratively and geographically. There's lots of it's a it's a nasty piece of coastline, especially when you're in the middle of a hurricane. So we were looking at our options, doing some mission planning, and we actually started stripping down the aircraft. We took out as much nonessential equipment as we could. We just trying to save weight for gasoline. Sure. What I got. But forget it. We wanted to get as much fuel into that aircraft as we could to give us as many options as we might need. And so for just a quick Segway for the folks at home, when an aircraft takes off the weight, it's not like loading up your car where an extra, you know, 100 kilograms doesn't make a difference one way or the other. When you're flying an aircraft, every single kilogram of fuel that you take on board is a kilogram of something else that you can't you can only ever have so much on the on the frame. So if you can get rid of a bunch of gear to put an extra bit of fuel in there, that extends your your way. I'm sure for sure. And like I mean, we were when we started looking at the gear and we started emptying our pockets kind of thing. Right. We wanted as much as much buffer as we could get to get out there, have as much fuel as we were going to need to try and facilitate this rescue. Right. Originally, we had heard the original call we had heard was mayday. They were still on the vessel and it sounded like things were as bad as it was. It sounded like things were good in some ways where they had their survival suits, they had this, they had that. And the fact that they were making a call, even Xoc, that means it's a good thing, you know? Yeah. Okay. So this could be, you know, this we know it was gonna be a hairy mission, but we knew that, OK, things seem to be going in the right direction. That's a directory is positive right now. They're making the call. They're on the vessel. They're still on the vessel. Whenever they're on the vessel, at least you can find them easier and usually can get to the easier than in open water. Yeah, finding finding a you know, as you say, a 64, 11 boat is a heck of a lot easier than finding a head bobbing in the well . And that's just it. And people don't realize, you know, you take the average cantaloupe and throw it in the ocean and that's what you're searching for. You're looking for a cantaloupe in the ocean. All right. And for those that don't know, the ocean is awful big. Yeah. And even inland search, I mean, you don't realize when somebody curls up in a ball. I say in the ocean, you're looking for new ocean. Look for cantaloupe on land. You're looking for a pumpkin. You know, those are kind of your two. And those size comparisons aren't that much off. You know what I mean? Like it's. So we were happy to hear there on the vessel. So we stripped the aircraft and we started making our way en route to the last known point, the last known grid reference that was provided from chessy and as well. Basically, concurrently, they launch the HIRC out of Greenwood, which turned out to be a life saving factor. So what's a Hurk? OK, the Herk is a C-130. It's a cargo aircraft. That's your classic military cargo aircraft. It's pretty much a big like. I mean, it's used by every military in the world. The HIRC is the workhorse. And I think I don't think obviously the Herk disappear. It'll always be around it, just not too useful. Yeah, it's too it's just a great utility aircraft. But we use it for search and rescue out of all the search and rescue squadrons that are fixed wing. Basically there they'll have a a higher to go. And the HIRC is all preloaded ready to go. It's got all the stuff for parachutes, all the stuff for supporting Sahe operations. And in this case, most importantly, they carry a boatload of. Flares, these great big flares that are like millions of candle power, and basically you can dispatch those to illuminate an area during search operations, and they are such a valuable such a valuable tool in these types of situations when you're trying to see what's going on in the water. And it ended up being a big factor in this mission, actually, was the support we got from actually in all reality, all the support came together to make this mission less tragic than it could have been. Still very tragic, but at least everybody pitching in, it really did help out. Yeah, from an operational standpoint, a lot of things came together for everything that went wrong, something went right, or we had a contingency or a redundancy that kind of saved our lives, literally. Right, you know. Yeah. OK, so back to where we're at then. So you guys are en route and they've also dispatched a Hercules from and they don't want from going to do they become that sort of Greenwood, Nova Scotia. OK, so flying time for them there. They were probably an hour, hour and a half to on scene, OK, out of Greenwood, depending on their actual launch time. No, I don't recall their launch time, but they were there pretty quick. OK. So when we were swimming, they were overtops swimming. Oh, I can't wait for the. All right. We're getting to the good stuff. Yeah. All right. So there's you guys you're en route then to the location last time that you've arrived, the last known location of the May Day. And what do you find? Well, at this point, I realize we're we can't see a boat. There's there does seem to be any in the area. Nothing's getting painted on the radar. I mean, there's doesn't seem to be anything there. And we quickly realized that these guys are now in a raft. All right. They're in a race on our mind, OK? Things went south. Now they're in the raft. We ended up getting some radio communication or we end up getting a actually sorry. It was an eel beacon that we picked up on. So it wasn't verbal communication. It was electronic communication. And once we said once we kind of had a visual on the guys, the the boys in the in the raft fired a flare or a handheld flare and held it above the raft. OK, so hang on. Let me back up a second there. So you picked up a digital signal or something? Yeah, it was a beacon. We picked up a beacon, like a PLB type thing. OK, or a beacon. We picked up the beacon. We kind of homed in on the beacon. OK. Once we got danger, once we started getting close to them, they must have hurt us even over the hurricane winds. They must have heard us or seen us because we later we turn on every light we have. All right. We don't even know what tactical is. We just like light it up. Night Sun's everything else. So the way we get so people can see us, they either source or hurt us and they decide to fire a flare to bring us into their location. OK, it was perfect. Exactly what you're supposed to. All right. So before we get to that now, you mentioned about being maybe hard to hear your helicopter over the wind. What kind of conditions are you looking at when you're when you were in a full blown hurricane at this point? This was you're flying a helicopter in a hurricane. It was in a hurricane, yeah. And it was dark. It was like it was a black, dark, stormy night. It's like your classic. It was a dark and stormy night. Exactly. That's why it was. Right. So. So we're talking like what sort of 50, 60, 70 knot winds. And I know they're were over a hundred kilometers an hour. They're over hurricane strength. Okay. So it was it was a lot of wind and a lot of weight. Very heavy. You state it's estimated the state was between eight and 10 meters. Oh. So it was it was a significant sea state, to say the least. That's a seasick making machine. Well, yeah. And the boys were in this raft and they were they were getting thrown around tough. But it wasn't until the fire the flare, because at night over the ocean, you want the illumination. All we're seeing is kind of foam and sea froth. We're not really getting a good visual. Being in an aircraft, that's always very hard to estimate height unless you have like a reference on the ground. You know, it's very easy for people to think they're 10 feet above the wall. They're actually 50 feet above 50 feet above the water, those types of things. Once the boys fired the flare, they almost look like they're at eye level with us and then they hit the backside of the wave. Next thing I know there, like 30 feet below us. So we knew it was a nasty night. Right. So we had to readjust all our procedures. We had to bring the aircraft up. We had to try to ask the pilots had to try to estimate what the wave height was. They didn't want to get too low because they didn't have wave impact. All that type of factors came into play. Right. How high can you hoist from in that helicopter in the cormoran? There's actually like two hundred and fifty feet of usable cable on a cormorant, but it's it's very rare you use that much cable. Okay. Theoretically, you could. In theory you could. And in fact, I've done long hoist before in other areas, and I've actually done hoist that exceed 250. We call them a lock rope. So you go down to the safe extend of the cable and then you hook up your rappel line, then you go to repel down the rest . It's prominent on the west coast of Canada, where you have very high mountains, very high trees. The West Coast trails a perfect spot where you might see somebody doing an extremely long hoist, you know, over 300 feet type thing, because they have to penetrate the canopy and get they got to get so far down to the ground . So there's more than enough cable to deal with it. I mean, there's 250 feet of usable cable. And, you know, it's it's it's a cell and it's a tandem hoist as well. There's two hoist on the aircraft. So you have some level of redundancy there as well. Okay. So you've seen a flare. And obviously the people in the water wants to they they they know you're there. You know they're there now. Yeah. So what do you do, try and pick up? Well, this is a big confidence builder. Like once you're on top, everybody kind, OK? Everybody in the draft is going be a little more, you know, usually a little more relaxed. We know where our cat, we know where our mission is. We're on target. So everybody starts to kind of just go into their role, go into their procedures. Right. So we're checking equipment, setting equipment up. We're also doing this the whole way out to the aircraft, checking your equipment, double checking your equipment, all those types of things. We're discussing, you know, emergency procedures in the aircraft. You know, if we have to ditch, you know, this is where I'm going, this is where the pilots go. And so everybody has a mental picture of what's going on. We're constantly trying to feed and information that's going to improve everybody's situational awareness. And then once we get on top now, we can actually assess what we're doing and kind of a throwback to my paramedic days. What you get from dispatch and what you get on the call rarely are the same thing. And this kind of happened here as well. Like we were anticipating, you know, five crew members and they're in their survival suits in the raft. Good to go. We get we over top. You can tell there's a guy in a white T-shirt and jeans waving at me. They didn't have time to get in their survival suit. You know, whatever happened, happened quickly. So that's another consideration. What's the water temperature? What's the survival rate? You know, all these types of things. Starcom, how able is if you have to go haul somebody, how abler are they going to be to help? Not just it? Are they going to be debilitated? Are they going to be able to do or can you do a passive rescue with these people? Can you put a basket down on them, get in themselves, or is it all going to have to be physical, those types of things, because you don't know what the level of debilitation is going to be, especially with cold water. And, you know, how long have they been in? And this is stuff we didn't really know. So you only you just you kind of assume the worst. So we looked at it. We said, OK, this is going to be a bone hoist, not a boat, a raft, toys. We're going to have to get as close to the raft as we can and basically get in the raft and start loading people into a basket and bring him up that way. So the baskets you have, how many people can you take in that basket? In theory, too, I have had two small people in it any more than that. They're not going to fit. It's about the the U.S. they call it the U.S. Coast Guard rescue basket. It's used around the world. It's kind of the go to if any piece of rescue equipment for helicopter rescue has saved a lot of lives. It's probably the rescue basket. It's simple. It's easy. It's effective. It's very fast. And the other thing, too, is it offers full support to people so that they're not falling out of it or dropping or falling on the way up type thing. Okay. But it doesn't hold two big dudes. It will not hold two big dudes to Newfoundland fishermen. Sorry. You got to wait for the next ride. Yorubas on the way next. That's kind of the way that folder's, right. So yeah. So we looked at what this is all we can do right now. Right. So as a team leader, my team member was, I mean, probably one of the most checked out individuals I ever worked with, Norm Penni. The guy's just a consummate professional. He's like Canada's answer to Djoko. You know, he's just that type of a guy. So, I mean, we had a good team on board. Everything was good to go. So basically, I went first. I said, OK, well, we'll maintain distance. The thing I was really concerned about, because in the back of the airframe, everybody again, going back to that situational awareness, everybody puts inputs in to make sure everybody knows what's going on. What I was really concerned about on that area of the coastline, and I wasn't exactly 100 percent certain where we were off the coastline, but the coastline has all these big rocky spear like spires that kind of come out of the ocean. It looks like something you'd see in, you know, medieval movie or something like that. Exactly. Exactly. It looks like that. And what I was always concerned about is you're not going to see those things. Are there the dark rock at night? I don't want to back in anything like that, you know, as we're trying to position it, because it's very easy to get focused on the target and kind of lose your awareness of your surroundings. Right. So that was a big thing, was we want to keep one guy at the back window. And if you saw anything or any changes, you know, he could call the crew that, hey, guys, check your rear or, you know, we want to make sure we don't back into something here. Right. So I was one of concerns among many, but that one was really in my head because I just wasn't sure where we were geographically over the raft and the raft was moving. They had a sea anchor, but it really didn't seem to be slowing it down that much on the winds. And that's what our concerned about, is going from the rolling seas to breaking waves. So for folks at home, a sea anchor is not is not the anchor that you classically think of, an anchor, you know, big hockey thing that you drop on the bottom. A sea anchor is really a little parachute type thing that you exact that you throw out there and it creates some drag. So if the current in the winter go in, that raft is still going to be hauling along pretty good. Yeah, they can move pretty quick on top of the water, like they won't get up to full wind speed. But I mean, you're basically sitting in a big inflatable sail, you know, and that's pushing them pretty quick. And usually the winds are going onshore. So, I mean, that's what I was concerned about as I'm getting out of the rolling waves, which you can deal with, and turning into breaking waves. And that's when rafts get flipped over and people get drowned. You know, that's that's typically what happens in North Plus also could be an indicator that maybe the water is getting a little shallower and you're getting closer to the shore and it's. All cliffs along that area, it's Bonavista area, it's all a lot of it is big cliffs, there's a few small bays, but there's probably more cliffs and sand. Billy. Something to consider? Yeah, I decided I go down first and look like a standard hoist in really bad situations. So the procedure was I was going to go down. I was going to get to the raft and I was going to stay on the hook as long as I could. So I didn't have to disconnect from the hook and then get to the raft and brief the guys in the raft. And then the goal was to get the basket down and kind of do what we call elevator work. One basket up, one basket down, one basket up, and we do it with a guideline. That was your original plan going back to how sometimes the plan and reality don't really line up. That's pretty much what happened. I went down first. I was swimming to the raft. Our flight engineer, Adobe Pierce, is doing a phenomenal job. He was paying cable and he was kind of working the cable. So I had enough cable to swim with, but not too much to drag me down. So he's doing a great job of that. But the problem we ran into is the wave height. The hoist was cycling so much up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down. The hoist overheated. Oh, so the the this would be the flight engineer was one of them. Yeah. And he's trying to he's trying to cycle that cable so that you have enough to move, but not so much that it's dragging you down or you can get back around you get down under water or get into debris. So, you know, he's doing a great job with it. But it was just such a high wave cycle that you're constantly going up 10 feet down, 20, up ten, down 20, up 10, down 20, that type of thing. And it overheated the electric hoist. So it heated and it froze. So just as I was getting in the raft and explaining, OK, we're going to take the guy without. But when I got there, there was one guy that was, you know, not in a civil suit, a couple of guys, just your T-shirt and jeans. And that was my first guy. I want to get out of the water. Let's get him out of first. So I'm OK. So we're going to get you out here right away. Next thing you know, I, I don't know what happened. I was 30 feet away from the raft. I didn't have a mask. I didn't have a snorkel. My friends were ripped off. What had happened is the cable had froze. And as the wave dropped, I just got yanked out. Oh, so so like suddenly getting just yanked back. Literally, it was like so many lassoing somebody on the side of the highway was traveling at 60 kilometers an hour. I literally got pop like a cork off the raft. And I didn't know what hit me. I really didn't know what I mean. I kind of came not came to like I kind of got my bearings a second or so later and I was literally 30 feet from the raft and it was moving in the opposite direction. The aircraft was still above. But I you know, I'd lost my mask, I lost my snorkel, I'd lost a fin. And what I quickly realized is what had happened was the hook which hooks up in front of us had come around and smashed me on the side. It actually tore my support, my my dove suit open. My dry suit was ripped open. And I actually ended up cracking a couple of ribs because the hook had come around hard enough to kind of smash me because I was hanging on to the raft. If I hadn't been hang on the raft, I probably would've been OK or I was hanging on to the raft. I basically, you know, I didn't let go soon enough. So the hook came around and hit me. So I was basically dead in the water. You know, all I had left is the snorkel, you know, the mouthpiece of the circle. That's all I had left was the mouthpiece. So I clench my jaw to hang on to the mouthpiece. Now I'm in the North Atlantic in a hurricane with a duck call. That's all I got. Right? So I popped my flare. And, you know, that's our emergency signal to the crew that I need to be recovered. And lo and behold, I was still on the hook. Thank God I was still on the hook. And they managed to recover me up to the aircraft and my suit was trashed. So I am no longer I'm no longer viable for in water operations at this point. Right. So basically, it was like I had to look at Norm and say it. You're up, you know, next, guys, try. So we had to re brief what we were going to do. So now and how much time would you say has elapsed now in all reality? This first initial sequence was probably three to five minutes. So pretty quick. Pretty quick. Yeah, it's probably three to five minutes or so. Most hoist sequences are, you know, five minutes, give or take. But it can take a bit of time now once you get into a routine and once you get into that, like I was seeing elevator working to hoist every minute, you know, and like depending on what your scenario is. Right. But in this case, was probably will five to seven minutes for me leaving the door to getting back in the aircraft. There's still drifting toward shore, are you not? Yeah, that's just it. We're still working it, right? Like we are still work on the problem we have at this point. Now we have six people in the water, if you include me, which isn't a good way to go. You know, our job is get people out of the water. So we have five in the raft and me in the water. So I we get back on the aircraft. Okay, Norm, we're going to go down. But the big change we did here was I said, okay, Norm, I want you to take down. We had him put on a small scuba bottle so that if the wave heights or he got hung up at anything, you had a secondary air source. And basically I made sure he was illuminated between glow sticks and flashlights. We want to make sure you can see him because he actually had problems seeing me where I was and probably because I had a strobe on. On the strap of my mask and my mask went, I lost my strohm, right, so that could actually lead to, you know, some confusion. Yeah, it could be changing your mask, Aniu. Yeah, exactly as well. It was one of those standard, you know, those mash mount lights that firefighters and stuff used something similar to that. Right. So we got Norm ready to go. And Norm went down to do to rescue the first guy again, explained the guy in jeans and T-shirts. The guy we got to get. Norm went down and did like a picture perfect pluck. You got this guy got the hoist. You went down with the rescue caller, got the call around him, got him up to the aircraft. I mean, it was pitch perfect, but he was but he was hypothermic. So we kind of just packaged him very quickly because we didn't want to start we didn't really have a chance to assess him yet. So we kind of moved into the back and we just did like passive warming and just threw him literally a blanket and strapped into his seat. Now, we went back for the next. We're still busy here. You got to sit tight, warmer. Some more to do, right? Unfortunately, this is when things got stupid. So Norm is going down for the next call. And as I said, we weren't entirely sure of our situation in relation to the land. And it looked like we were starting to go into breakers versus rollers on the waves. So as we were backing up, we had drifted back a fairways and enormous forward of us. So he's kind of forward and right of the aircraft, which is a standard position because the pilot can observe what's going on in the guys in the door can observe what's going on. But unfortunately, what ended up happening was we drifted off fairways back considerably and we were actually starting to push cable lexer. We were probably getting, you know, 150 or more feet away from them. And we didn't know how much cable was in the water. As we started going back further, it seemed like we were encroaching or we were getting too far back. So the call was made. Forward, forward, forward. Which is a call to move the aircraft forward exponentially or expeditiously, like move it now. So the forward for forward was called. And as we came forward, we we basically picked up too much speed. So we ended up pulling Norm out of the water like a pot, like a like a top. And the cut the cable cup was calls. It was cut cable cut cable cut cable, because we didn't want him getting, you know, basically yanked over the water. What happened is now, what happened to you going backwards? Almost the same thing happened to him going the other similar. It was I'm not sure it was the hoist or how exactly. To this day, we figure we just you know, we got too much forward speed because of the winds and the circulating air and stuff. We get too much forward speed. We were moving forward. We knew basically we're moving forward and we're certain approach on Norm and we're not slowing down. So we know that if a cable cut isn't made, you know, he's basically going to pull out of the water the same way I was or plucked out the water same way I was. Right. I mentioned earlier we had to hoists well, when the hoist that I was on was damaged, the actual hook was bent. So are you using the other hoist? However, the power was still on for the first choice. So the first hoist, our backup hook got cut. Then our primary hoist got cut. So we cut both hoist on the cable cut. So now we don't have any hoist anymore and norms in the water. So we had to cut both cables during the mission, which is kind of unheard of. It was an inadvertent cable cut. But, you know, it's one of these things that they've gone back and kind of addressed that. Now, by the way, how do you cut the cables? There's a multiple there's actually yeah, the pilots have an electronic mechanism to cut it up front. OK, we have an electronic mechanism in the back. And then we also have a redundant manual cable cutter as well. Hand plier type thing. Yeah, because the whole idea is that, you know, if something's going to happen, you want to save the airframe. You're starting to look at like, you know, you're starting to do some triage. There's for people on the airframe, there's one person on the hook. Yeah. You know, you got to save the most amount of people or save the, you know, the most valuable assets, so to speak. Right. Suk's if you're on the hook. But it's understandable. Right? But that's kind of where we went. Basically, Norm was still in the water. Both cables are cut. And now we're sitting there trying to figure out what to do. We still have four people in the raft and we're not sure what we're going to do at this point. Right. So this is where our ocean rescue turned into a mountain rescue. We are fortunately, when we were stripping the aircraft to make more room for fuel, we decided to keep what we call the belly kit. It's like the high angle rescue kit. We decide to keep it on board. So myself and Adobe Pierce and I can't speak highly enough about Pierce. He was just phenomenal. That's the flight engineer. We ended up rigging a mountain rescue system in the back of the aircraft in what we thought was record time. Probably felt like forever to norm on the ground. We rigged a three to one rescue system and we actually had to recover Norm with a rope attached to the rescue basket because we had no cables. At the same time, the guys are still washing ashore on the raft and we have a casualty in the back with hypothermia . So this turned into an interesting event. So you rigged up rope to the hoist or two? What we did is we we rigged up basically an anchor point on the floor. OK, redirected through a ceiling. Hard point, OK. And then I hooked up a three to one on the rope. Four of the anchor point so that we can raise if we had to raise them, OK. We ended up not raising Emanual. We ended up, however, taxing. But he was secured with a couple of Prosek's and a tie off shows like high angle. Technical role for sure. Yeah, that's part of our training as we do full on high angle mountain rescue training and that not necessarily intended to be used in the helicopter. But here's the thing. Whenever you're working with whenever you're working with a single hoist, you should almost, almost always have a rope rescue system because you ones that's what happens on that single hoist fails. Right. So we had a dual hoist, but we also had the rope rescue. So we had like like three levels of redundancy. Wow. So the the worst part of this whole thing was when I was looking down at Norm, his face is down in the water. All right, so before we got into the mountain rescue system to backtrack a minute or so, when I looked out, all I could see was him face down, but he's still not on the hook anymore. He is on the hook. The cable has been cut, but the cable has been cut. So he's on the hook with about a hundred and fifty feet of cable connected to his chest and hanging off him and keeping an eye on anything. So he was face down. Little did I know he was trying to un connect, disconnect the hook and get rid of the get rid of the extra cable so that he can kind of put his head up. Right in my mind, I'm thinking he's unconscious or he's injured. He's face down the water. So I grab a one man raft. And my theory is, well, I'm going to jump in with them and and I are going to climb on the raft. And next stop, Bonavista or England, depending which way the wind's blowing. Right. So that was the initial plan. But then he all of a sudden he kind of popped up out of the water and sort of flashes flashlight at us. So we knew he was OK. This is when we knew, OK, we got a couple minutes to sort something out. We can come up with a solution. And this is where we started rigging the mountain system. All right. So we end up bring the mountain rescue system or the rope rescue system. So so you rig up your your your rope rescue system, dangle, dangle a rope down to him. Well, we lowered the rope down. The rope wasn't sufficient. Was too windy. Right. So we're just getting stuck in the trail. So we're not putting the full rescue basket on it. That worked perfectly well. And I don't think I don't think it I don't think at the time Norm even realized he was climbing into a rescue basket on a rope. I'm pretty sure he thought he was on just getting in on the second cable because he wouldn't have known that the second cable was cut inadvertantly. Right. Okay. So you lower that down to him. He climbs into that and you but now you you can't easily hoist him up. Well, we were going to hoist him up, but at this time we had closed with the shoreline enough that we could see car headlights on the shoreline and they were rather close within like an uncomfortably close. Yeah, we were getting there. Right. So what we ended up doing was hover, taxiing over to the land, an area in point. And Bonavista, we end up hovering, doxxing. So basically we just left them hanging, dangling below the aircraft about 50 or 60 feet. We just came up to height and then flew them over and then and put them down on the ground first. And we landed right where he was kind of thing. Right? It was it was a crazy land. But now we still have four guys in a raft. All right. So we're trying to figure out, okay, what do we do now? How's your by the way, how's your fuel situation? Is that like not been an issue? Hasn't been an issue because we were close enough and we were light enough. But the the big issue was the weather. Like basically we were in a situation where, you know, we couldn't really do anything. We couldn't shut down. And those winds where we were, we like. So they wanted to take one, take the aircraft back to base. Right. I forgot to mention the pilots did an absolutely phenomenal job out there. I mean, this is not easy flying. This is highly technical flying with a lot of stress. And like there's people screaming in the back of the aircraft and you guys are cool as cucumbers, man. They did a great job. But you want in a pilot shake exam, you want the most boring person on earth flying over. You know, you want no emotional, you know, attached, but they should also be your accountant. That's exactly that kind of stoic. There's a lot to be said for that. Right. But they did a phenomenal job, man. And same with Adobe Pierce, like the flight engineer, he works. He almost burned the skin off, skin off his hands and came on and run the rope and run the cable. And I mean, he was just machine people just running on adrenaline. Right. And again, the flight engineers. I've said it. I said it before, but they're kind of the unsung heroes of helicopter search and rescue because they not only dispatch and recover everybody, they're your communications link as well. Like either through hand signals radios. They're they're running the show. So they're the one who's sort of standing there and looking at the looking at the bay, looking at the hatch and staring down and relaying all the communications to the pilot. All that forward, forward, forward. Exactly. The one conning the aircraft around corners is just an abbreviation of control. They're the one conning the aircraft around, you know, giving the pilots direction because the pilots can't see everything right there. They're visual. The visual range is pretty limited in aircraft. So, you know, you can get a backup camera on a whole day, but heaven forbid you get a backup camera on your aircraft for a million dollars. Exactly. Exactly. They're installing them aftermarket now, though, right? So but yeah. So basically the flight engineers, pilots, everybody is a phenomenal job. But once we got Norm on the ground, we knew Norm was safe. He wasn't injured. I had gun taped up my suit. So I'm somewhat operational again. Thank God for gun tape again. You know, so everything's taped up and we're we're thinking ourselves, OK, let's deal with our patient. We got our patient squared away. We know hot drink like is he was he was hypothermic. He wasn't a point where we were worried about like heart palpitations or any doubts or any kind of a more active warming scenario. And we turned him immediately over to EMS because EMS was on the scene. There's a local paramedic bus that was in the area. So we came to the boys on bus. And then we after that, you know, kind of assessing the situation, we realized that the local. Ground search team was out as well. So kind of a last minute, decisions like this mission isn't over yet. We've been called to get these guys. So we decided to grab the mountain rescue equipment and take off and go and try to find these guys as we knew they're washing into this area. And the ground search teams seem to realize that they were going to probably wash up in this cove. That's a very common area for debris to wash into. So they had kind of set up their plan to go there as well. What we found out later is they are watching this whole scenario offshore with the helicopter. Right. So they could see it all. So they kind of knew where the raft was offshore based on where our helicopter. OK, so they had some sense of where it would be. These ground search teams, I mean, you cannot beat local knowledge. And these guys were local boys doing, you know, trying to help with their friends. They knew everybody on that vessel. Right. These are small communities. These are you know, these are you know, it's like your shop, your local shopkeep. You get to know the guy. You know, same thing with the fishing community. Very close knit community. Yeah. They were trying to help their friends. So we decided, well, we're going to go help them, help their friends. So, Norman, I grabbed the gear. We had ended up waving down a truck saying, can you get us over there? Hopped in the hop in the back of the truck, but he drove us over to the ground search team. Once we got on the ground, they had already found one guy that washed into this call and started recovering them. So one guy was up. So now he could account for two out of the frigging two out of the five that were on the vessel. And so theoretically, three would still be in the raft, theoretically, in theory. Yeah, but we also know that these rafts tumble, right? Like as soon as they hit that heavy wave and you already know that one guy is out of it. The one that we had one guy. So we know we know we're still missing three people. Right. But it is a nasty night. I mean, there is actually chunks of grass blowing off the edge of the cliff and hitting people. It was so windy. It was like Newfoundland's of the few places you'll see grass getting torn to the ground by the wind and thrown. Right. It just just an atrocious area. But the other problem is there's there's nothing for anchors like you want to rig a rope rescue system. If you can find a tree higher, three inches. You're lucky, you know, unless you can find a massive boulder or a rock. It's very hard to do rope rescue systems on a cliff in a hurricane at night. You know, it's just not a great scenario. But the local ground teams were there. And about this time, because during this whole scenario, about halfway through the mission, we started getting illumination. Right. That's when we started getting the flares I had mentioned from the HIRC. So somewhere in the midst of all this that he showed up and just started dropping flares for us. Right. So that's one of the reason we were able to kind of spot Norm and, you know, that type of thing. But as they're dropping the flares, we told them, hey, we're going to stay on the ground and we're going to carry on helping the ground search and rescue guys. The helicopter was going to return to base because they had no hoist there effectively U.S. and they were the only Sahe assets. They had to get back and get repaired as quick as possible. Norman, I stayed on the ground and as the illumination started coming in, we actually saw a guy on the side of the cliff and we're like, OK, we got two guys. He's hanging on to the side of the cliff. We never want to see some poor bugger hanging on the rocks, hanging on the rocks. You've been washed up. The rock, to a certain extent, managed to grasp on. Then the water fell away from him. And I guess he had managed to scurry up a little further because he was actually above the wave height now. But he was just perched on the side of this cliff like there was nothing, nothing we could do right now. I had already had some advance mountain rescue training. Norm had none. So we opted that I would rig the rope system and he would go down just because I had a little more experience running the rope systems. But we didn't have anywhere to anchor the ropes. So I got the local boys to put two quads together and everybody sit on the quads. So those were our anchor points, four to four wheelers tied around the four wheelers as a double anchor. And that's what we used to basically rig another I guess this was a five to one system for Norm to repel down to the guy, put a rescue call around him and then bring him up. All right. So we managed to do that. So we got another guy up. So we're like, OK, we're not doing too bad now. Now we're back in the game. We're doing rescues again. So we managed to recover that gentleman. So now we got we managed to find out of the missing people. So we had the first guy, we got the ground search team recovered, a guy that we recovered. So now we got three. So you got three or five? Three to five. So we're doing not too bad. Right then as the illumination is coming in, we seen some reflective material in the wash in the cove. So this time it's my turn. I told explain, Norm, the system. And you understood the system probably better than I did on reality. So I climbed down the cliff. And basically when I got down there, I found one of the one of the one of the probes deceased. He had been he had died in that. But we it was very hard to facilitate a recovery at this time, because where he was located, he was in the wash. So what we tried to do is secure the secure the body on on site instead of trying to recover it, because we still there's one more person still out there. And the person who might be alive is that that was our stuff. That was our. Priority again, it's it literally is triaging, right, so we think, well, we can get this guy, we can get this guy secured, then we can go search for the other guy. But believe it or not, the weather started deteriorating massively. It actually started getting worse. So we were starting at the full brunt of the hurricane. The wave height was going up. Everything was getting worse. And we decided, you know, once we got up, we started talking on the ground. Our team, some of the local authorities were there. It was the call was made because the the sides of the cliffs were getting very hard to determine if they were safe or not, because the water wash and all the wind, you know, people were slip and fall. And obviously all we need to do is lose another guy from the ground search team or a bystander. So we kind of made the call to wrap the mission at that point, unfortunately, with one person missing, still unaccounted for. You know, it just it's it's terrible like, you know, just the fact that we lost two people from that mission. But I mean, it's tragic. It could have been a lot more tragic. Yeah, it hadn't been for everybody pitching in and helping. The next day, we went back and recovered. The next morning we went back with you. I assume you recovered the one body that we had secured, but the next guy the other gentleman wasn't found for a couple days? I think so. I don't know if he was still offshore or what scenario was he. But he did get found eventually was recovered. Yeah. So all the people were recovered. The family did get a degree of closure, as tragic as it is. But it's probably worse than, you know, searching for people or, you know, the big the big ocean. Not knowing. Yeah. Yeah. And that is a tough one. That's a that's a that's a tough call when you know that there's still people unaccounted for. But but at some point. Well, you have to because you start thinking much more clinically. Right. Again, you're triaging everything. Okay. What are the chances of survival versus what are there? Because this now or a couple of hours into this now, you know, we don't know if he was properly in a survival suit. The the one one person I found was deceased. His survival suit was open and flooded. So, you know, you're trying to make calls kind of based on that. And they were actually getting at a point in the mission now where we're actually starting to kind of exceed survivability rates within even within a survival suit. We're getting three or four hours into it at this point. Right. So, you know, the call was made. And as you say, if the cliffs are getting that dangerous, like how long do you have to do it before you get another? If you don't second guess that call, you got to worry about some of these empathy. I hate shutting things down like that. You want to go forever. But again, you got to make that safety call, you know, and that's what it boiled down to, safety. Yeah, well, again, you can't put another one in the water. That's that defeats the purpose of being there. Well, I mean, how tragic is that? Something like there's nothing worse than losing people in a rescue, trying to perform a rescue and just it's a serious moral injury, like, wait a second, this guy's trying to do the right thing. And and also you don't want to be on that side of it either. Oh, wow. That is amazing. It was interesting night out. And again, this was Norm Penneys first mission, like his first of I call it his first real mission. So I don't know if it's going to go up from there or down for him, but it was a very interesting career introduction. Everybody on that mission did so well, though, and again, set the bar pretty high for, you know, between everybody that was involved, like the guys at a Greenwood the ground, sir, the crew themselves did everything right that they were supposed to do on the water. Like once the emergency happened, they did everything they were supposed to do. I mean, you can't point a finger at anybody. You know, there was a lot of politics that got involved later on about safety standards and stuff. But, you know, at the end of the day, this was a mission that kind of exercised lots of skill sets and lots of different coordination. And that was my biggest takeaway on this whole thing, was the importance of diversity, of training, inter-agency cooperation. All those things came to light under this mission. And those are things we tried to build on. Those are the kind of the positive takeaways we try to. Well, it sounds like there's a ton of positive stuff. Well, let me ask you this, if if you could, knowing knowing what was going to happen later on in the evening or having some idea what was going to happen later on in the evening, what would you have done differently before you took off in the helicopter? I think what we mean, we maintain the like I mean, we did everything we were supposed to do. We kept the Billey kit. In hindsight, it would have been good, really, to have like maybe a spare basket or something like that, you know, so you could have like, you know, you kind of get a multiple. I've thought I thought this through so many different times on different scenarios and how we could have done this in hindsight, really, there would have been a lot of argument, the same attempts, somewhat of a passive rescue draw, drop a guideline to them. They pulled the basket down. They start loading themselves in. You know, just try to, you know, that that edge transition that might have been. I mean, there's lots of different options that we could have done. The biggest thing for myself is I would have been better illumination in the water also as well. It would have been really good to have, I guess, a better visual picture of the area. So we knew more like what the coastline was like and stuff like that, you know. I was going to ask you before, but I didn't get you where you were in the middle of a hotspot in Australia, did want to mess with it. The the the aircraft might have sort of navigational church, that sort of thing. They do. But I mean, it's like any map like, you know, you almost need a full. Well, those types of things like, you know, a little a little speck on the map isn't really going to tell you that's an 80 foot rock column off the coast. Right. So another thing might have been Flirter Flur, might have been Halaf helpful. That's something we hadn't incorporated for the folks at home with flair for looking infrared radar. So it allows you to paint the surroundings a little better and works better in low light conditions and rain conditions and stuff, because airbags aren't that great in rain, because they basically the rain kind of washes them out and you start getting your circuit and foton reflection off the particular just blinding you. Yeah, it doesn't work. It's great. Right. So there's a lot of like there's a lot of equipment, things we had to revisit. But I think for us, the biggest thing is in some ways was a confirmation for years and years and years, people are saying, OK, do you really need to do this training and never do that type of rescue that much like a Newfoundland, you need to do mountain training. There's no mountains in Newfoundland. Well, this kind of brought you know, this kind of brought the probably probably ticked off a lot of the bean counters because they're looking to reduce training budgets. Well, no, we need that training. This proves it. You need to have that diversity of training. Right. Whenever you're working on a suspended rope, we had a wire rope or a Kevlar rope, whatever it's going to be, you need to understand, you know, edge transition, drop rigging, all that stuff. You need to like what are you going to do if somebody gets stuck halfway down? You need to have all those contingencies in place, right? Yeah. Yeah. If you don't have that cross training, you don't understand it. And I've seen it actually. We've we've helped out with a number of of accident investigations. And as more and more agencies get into helicopter search and rescue, a lot of them just focus on the helicopter aspect of it. They don't really focus on the high angle rescue component. Well, as a casual observer. Right, it doesn't sound like something that should be critical. It like it doesn't to to a casual observer. Oh, well, yeah, sure. They should know how to swim and they should know how to do some some medical stuff. Why? Why? Like what is hyang will have to do with it now that you've put it in context with a story? Well, I've got this thing in my mind. Why would you ever not have it? Of course you should have. Well, even things like understanding, locking your carabiners and understanding your role. Pinochet, how to use a prusak and your EDG transition on a dynamic platform like your legs moving up and down and left and right. All those types of things come into play. Right now, luckily enough. So we had that background training. We use it to recover Naum, then we use it on the cliff to recover people. So we had that, you know, cross training that was very beneficial for us. Well, probably to live saved just right there. That all reality. I think most people doing helicopter rescue have to look at this type of cross training so that even like for paramedics that might be exposed to a helicopter hoisting, you want to have a better understanding of your harness, a better understanding of your carabiners, a better understanding of your equipment. And, for example, high mountain rescue or hyang or, of course, is a great way to instill that. They may never do a high angle rescue like most. That's industrial's type stuff. They may never do that. But you don't know when you're going to put it in an environment where you have to do, you know, a nonstandard procedure, like a rope rescue on a helicopter, which I would consider a non standard procedure. You never know when that's going to come up. So that's where that diversity of training is pretty important, right? Yeah, that's amazing. That's amazing. All right. Well, we won't take up any more of your time today, Derek, but please, on behalf of the crew here, let me say thank you very much for that incredible story. No problems on Wogan's. You're welcome to share. And hopefully we'll have you back on on the show here some point down the road and all the best. Thank you so much. That was great. Thank you to you guys. All the best. Take care. Stay safe out there. If you're enjoying the podcast, please subscribe and help us move up the charts with a five star rating. We like comments and reviews, so we'd love to hear from you. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, Stitcher, and almost anywhere you can find podcasts. If you've got an interesting story or think you know someone who'd make a great guest on the show, please reach out to us at Legacy Survival Stories. All one word at Gmail dot com. You can also find us at legacy survival stories. 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