Inside the H-60 Jayhawk helicopter overhead, Molthen was busily trying to imitiate the motion of the survivors. When they’d go up, he’d rise with them, and when they started getting smaller, he’d move toward them. Molthen was beginning to feel that things might just work out.
An hour of sweating effort later, however, left Molthen feeling somewhat desperate. And he thought to himself, We may not be able to pull this off. We’re not moving fast enough toward the solution here. At this rate, we’re going to run out of either fuel or strength before we resolve this.
Lieutenant Adickes’s thoughts were nearly identical. We’re running out of time here, he thought. We’re running out of gas. And my crew is getting fatigued.
Each time Molthen managed to maneuver in close, a blast of wind would lift and shake them like a dog rending a snake, sending them reeling.
Okay, Mr. Aircraft Commander, Bill Adickes finally said to himself, this is not working. So, what are you going to do to get these people out of the water? Those people down there are freezing to death. At
this point, Adickes decided to make a radical departure. He’d attempt something entirely new. It would be necessary to draw near to the serpent in order to snatch away her would-be victims.
“Let me try it from the left seat,” he told Dan Molthen finally. “With goggles.”
In an effort to shorten the uncontrollable length of the cable and the wild oscillating swing of the rescue basket, he’d hover down and attempt to hoist from an altitude of just eighty feet.
“If we can move in, then move out fast enough, maybe we’ve got a chance of getting somebody,” Adickes told Molthen.
Several times, Adickes knew, they had come quite close to “losing the bubble,” a term he used for crashing, augering in, buying the farm. He took the controls, thinking, God, we’ve been flying around so violently and all, I’m going to take this real slow and be very patient and methodical … . I’m going to make my control inputs very, very carefully, and I’m going to try and stop this thing from moving around so much.
In the back, Rich Sansone busied himself by calling out the altitude in an unemotional tone whenever the helicopter dipped too close. He watched the RAT OUT go from eighty feet to twenty feet in just seconds, giving notice that a sixty-foot wave had just swept by directly underneath them.
“You’ve got to imagine the chaos that night,” recalls Bill Adickes. “We were flying in wind velocities of near hurricane force, without the large bundles of flares needed to aid station. I was catching glimpses of these people. And they were here, they were there, and then here again. Suddenly we’d get blown back a quarter of a mile. Then we’d fight to scratch our way back. Now we’re thirty degrees nose up. Then we were getting blown away again. It was very difficult to pinpoint anything exactly.”
Still, Adickes thought the new plan might just work. They were staggering along, trying to hoist from that altitude, when, amazingly, Sean Witherspoon managed to land the basket just fifteen feet from the survivors in the water. Adickes saw his chance. They looked to be
within only moments of getting the first of the survivors into the rescue basket, when something strange occurred.
The unprecedented event unfolding before them was detailed in the unsettling, telltale movements of the flares. Instead of drifting around in the lower third of the pilot’s windshield screen, the flares had drifted up to the very top portion of the window. Neither Adickes nor Molthen had even seen anything like it. The topper came when the flares just blinked out overhead, which meant that the crest of the wave was now above the height of the rotor system.
Adickes was concentrating on holding his hover and listening to Rich Sansone’s conning commands as he took in the event. And he thought, Uh-oh, something is very wrong here.
Lieutenant Molthen had also seen the anomaly above them. It took him awhile to decipher it. The flares appeared to be floating, drifting farther and farther away. Then they disappeared altogether, and the reason they had vanished, Molthen’s racing mind soon inferred, was that they were now drifting down the backside of the approaching wave. Judging by the peak of the flares’ ascent, he also knew that the wave had to be above their present hover position.
At the time, Rich Sansone and Sean Witherspoon were squatting beside each other in the doorway, fastened securely to their safety straps, as the blasting effects of sea spray and blizzard snow sprinted horizontally past at ninety miles per hour, only inches from their faces. With his visor flipped down, and rain and snow striking his face, Witherspoon was hardly able to see at all. Physically, he was just freezing. He was trying, without much success, to see through his fogged-up visor and, simultaneously, keep track of the basket flying through the air, as well as watch the people in the water below.
Then, as the chopper struggled to maintain its inexact hover, Witherspoon and Sansone glanced up. The vision before them took their breath away, for they found themselves staring directly into the face of a rogue wave “at least one hundred feet high” in the very act of breaking down upon them. The foaming avalanche of cascading white water towered over the helicopter and descended toward them with the soul-shuddering
power of a locomotive. The wave was, in fact, about to bury them alive. Sansone was the first to react.
“Up! Up! Up! Emergency up!” he screamed. “Altitude! Up! Up! Up! Take her up! Now!”
The frantic warnings exploded from Molthen’s headset.
“Up! Up! Up!”
Concurrently, Molthen and Adickes watched from the cockpit as the collapsing wave approached.
“Oh-my-God!” said Adickes, his voice rising with each word.
Pilot and copilot reacted without thinking. They grabbed their respective collective sticks mounted alongside their seats and yanked up on them at the same moment.
“Oh God,” prayed Molthen aloud.
“Up, up, up!” the crewmen screamed.
“I’m trying!” called back Dan Molthen. “I’ve got an armload of collective here, and I’m trying!”
Sucked down in front of the wave by an invisible downdraft, the powerful H-60 rescue helicopter refused to budge. As if caught in a cycle of slow death, they watched the growling wave come thundering down upon them. The chopper’s twin turbine engines revved high under the load. The transmission box whined under the impossible strain like an incoming artillery round about to explode. To Sean Witherspoon and Rich Sansone, the feeling was one of being stuck down there with the consuming force of the wave about to swallow them whole—helicopter blades, rotor, tail section, cabin, and crew.
An H-60 allows a pilot to be fairly ham-handed and to fly his or her way out of most types of trouble with awesome amounts of power—almost four thousand shaft horsepower with which to climb out of danger.
Bill Adickes went full-collective, nose down in an effort to gain all the altitude he could, but he found that he was unable to free himself of the imposing downdraft. The roaring white mountain of breaking sea was about to wash inside the cabin itself; the helicopter began to break loose from the gripping suction. The wave surged past no more than five feet beneath them, missing their tail rotor by even less.
Adickes would be forever grateful to Rich Sansone for initiating the warning that saved their lives.
The sudden blast of wind that held the helo in its grip is known as a williwaw. Such a powerful anomaly of nature is normally created when storm systems move in against one of the fencelike mountain ranges in Alaska. As the already energetic forces press in over the mountains and are squeezed into the narrow mountain passes, they accelerate dramatically, creating fierce unharnessed blasts of turbulent air that break out, exploding with dumbfounding power, destroying anything in their paths.
On rare occassions, when high storm winds create such an extreme sea state, the same thing may occur. On this night, winds racing through the bowl-shaped contours of the wave troughs produced an avalanche of accelerating turbulence, creating wind vacuums in their howling descent, and upwellings in their rush to exit.
The departing forces tore the wave tops off the waves themselves and launched spray across the face of the sea, creating a bellowing vacuum of sea spray several hundred feet deep. It is the same kind of turbulence that pilots encounter when flying in mountainous terrain. When storm winds rush over a ridge or mountaintop, they take off, accelerating down the slope of the mountain, following the contour of the land as they go. Over the years, hundreds of single-engined airplanes whose pilots were unlucky (or unwitting) enough to get caught flying in such conditions in Alaska have been destroyed and their passengers killed when the planes flipped upside down, had their wings torn off, or were batted from the sky. The only way to overcome such explosive wind accelerating across the surface of a wave is with lightning-quick reflexes, luck, and—if one has access to it—pure, unadulterated power.
Adickes and Molthen were feeling grateful at having avoided the “big crunch.” But just then, as they rose up and over the crest of the wave, another punishing jolt of williwaw fury came ranging out of the wave valley and plowed into them. Adickes had lifted the nose of the aircraft only slightly, when suddenly it rocketed backward. He had never known a helicopter to get pushed back so fast. The sixteen-thousand-pound
machine went hurtling backward as if launched from a slingshot. Adickes could see the crashing waves peeling out from under their feet, flipping past underfoot. He feared that at any second the tail rotor would clip the crown of a passing wave and they would auger in. And he thought to himself, This is not good.
Seated securely in his chair in the chopper’s tail section, Sansone was tossed into a carnival-like ride. With the entire fifty-five-foot-long helicopter suddenly tipped up and knocked back on its tail, Sansone found himself seated in much the same position that the early-day astronauts once used—his knees bent and his feet planted on the near-vertical face of the floor—as he awaited the outcome.
Adickes had to execute the most radical control that he’d ever had to make in a helicopter. He was very much afraid that they were going to get into a pitch attitude from which they would not be able to recover and that he would simply fly the aircraft into the water.
When Adickes regained control of the chopper, he found himself wide-eyed and a bit breathless—and four thousand feet downwind of the survivors.
“Okay,” Adickes told his crew. “We need to regroup here. We need to retreat for a few minutes and get everybody calmed down and go back to the basics.”
Then, flying well above the water, he rose to three hundred feet. “I’m going to give the controls back now to Lieutenant Molthen,” said Adickes finally. “And we’re not going to try that again. So don’t worry. We’re going back to standard operating procedures.”
Though Molthen was not at all happy about his partner’s close call, he found it impossible to judge him. For he knew that it could have just as easily happened to him. Adickes would always appreciate Molthen’s measured response. He knew that he’d “screwed up.” He didn’t need anybody to get on his case. He’d gotten a little too aggressive, a little impatient, and had allowed his heart for those in the water to take him to a place where rescuing them was so imperative that he was going to make it happen.
Part of the problem, Dan Molthen knew as he descended into battle once again, was that every time he started getting close and “in the
groove,” it was extremely difficult and frustrating to have to give it up and let it go. Molthen had also become aware that flight mech Sean Witherspoon was nearly exhausted now. Several attempts later, he decided to give the young man a much-needed break. “Hey, listen,” Adickes told him, “this situation is absolutely horrible. We may not get these guys. But we’re just going to keep trying.”
For the pilots, one issue remained unsolvable: By the time they were actually able to see a given wave rolling toward them, it was already so close that they hardly had time to pull up.