Incidents tend to rise in the summer. Here's what it was like to ride in a Coast Guard helicopter for a flight full of intense rescues.
Two members of the Coast Guard, Michael Judin and Chris Moore, in the midst of a practice rescue scenario beneath a helicopter in May, 2021.The duck was dressed for the ocean below. Clad in an orange dry suit, black gloves and flippers, and a yellow helmet with goggles and a snorkel attached, he was prepared to leave our hovering helicopter for the first time and enter the water.
Rescuing someone via a helicopter and its hoist is an especially dramatic and effective way for the Coast Guard to grab someone in distress at sea. We were flying that day in late May 2021 out of an air station on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. From that location alone, the Coast Guard says they’ve used aircraft to save more than 200 lives over the past three years—either via a chopper, like the MH-60T Jayhawk we dropped Judin from, or a fixed-wing airplane known as the Casa.
You would think that the Coast Guard would train someone up especially for harrowing practice scenarios like this, but Judin is not a professional duck. Instead, he’s in logistics. Usually, he works at a desk. That was his first time doing the duck job, and was only his second time in a helicopter since he’d started working with the Coast Guard at the Cape Cod Air Station around five years ago.
“Then it was like, this is cool,” Judin recalled, standing next to the helicopter on the tarmac. “Everything from then was awesome.”The MH-60T is a relative of the Army’s. It will allow the Coast Guard to fly roughly 250 or 300 miles away from a base, rescue someone, and then return home. In total, it can hold some 6,000 pounds of fuel, but about 2,000 of that is stored in three big, detachable, torpedo-shaped external tanks.
The Coast Guard is under the Department of Homeland Security, not the Department of Defense, but it’s still part of the US military. I asked if we were carrying any weapons that day on our 60; the answer was no. “Except these ones,” McCabe said, tapping on his biceps and smiling.Rob VergerBefore we lifted off, Garza, the flight mechanic, walked me through what to do if there was an emergency like a crash landing.
The action began shortly before 1 pm, when we met a 45-foot-long Coast Guard boat below us. It bounced over the waves and its two flags blew in the wind. Garza lowered an orange trail line down and out of the chopper for the ship’s crew to grasp. Then the rescue swimmer, Moore, calmly lowered out the helicopter to meet them. What followed was a flurry of activity between the helicopter and the boat, all designed to simulate what it would be like to aid a vessel at sea.
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