Air Rescue Crews Overmatched by Anger of the Storm

IN THE GULF OF ALASKA —  The Story So Far

Two teenagers hunting on an uninhabited island in the Gulf of Alaska have made a grisly discovery: a mitten containing five fingers. What they have stumbled on is the final clue to a 6-month-old mystery. It all began when the fishing vessel La Conte broke up in mountainous seas on the Fairweather Grounds, 150 miles north of Sitka, Alaska. Without a lifeboat, the five crewmen were left bobbing in the bone-chilling sea. Their only hope: the radio signal beaming from a device that was triggered automatically when the ship went down. Alerted by the signal, the Coast Guard swings into action.

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At liftoff, wind speed is 25 knots. No sweat, Lt. William Adickes says to himself. He’s flown helicopters for 15 years. He won a medal for saving fishermen in a storm. He’s trained to fly in 30-knot winds.

But as he rises from the Coast Guard air base in Sitka, Alaska, and swings the H-60 Jayhawk helicopter around Edgecumbe Mountain, they get swatted by a 40-knot gust. The anemometer jumps to 35, 45, 55. Within minutes, winds are hitting 70 knots.

The wind shear keeps spiking the helicopter downward and making its tail slew about.

“Jesus,” he says, “how bad is this going to get?”

With his crash helmet rapping on the ceiling, he will say later, it feels like he’s sitting on a jackhammer.

On the ground, Lt. Glen Jones, the watch captain, starts calling in reserves. Those boys, he thinks, are flying into trouble.

It’s 7:52 p.m., Jan. 30, 1998, and the air base is on red alert. Fifty minutes earlier, the Coast Guard received a satellite-relayed distress signal originating from the Fairweather Grounds.

Adickes and his three-man crew have no idea what type of ship is in trouble. They don’t know if anyone is overboard or for how long. And they can only guess how bad the weather is out there.

In the jaws of the storm, 150 miles from Sitka, five fishermen in neoprene survival suits are bobbing in 80-foot seas. They’re gasping for air, throwing up salt water. Their boat, the La Conte, is at the bottom of the ocean.

It’s so dark, the survivors will remember later, that they can’t see their hands.

The skipper, Mark Morley, yells again, weakly: “Sound off!”

Everyone responds but David Hanlon.

“Daaave!”

“Help!” Hanlon’s voice is faint. “I can’t keep my head up!”

Hanlon’s survival suit is too big for him, and its inflatable collar has failed to fill with air. He’s swallowing water, losing consciousness. William Mork grabs Hanlon under the armpits and pulls him up so that his head rests on Mork’s chest.

Mike Decapua is taking the waves blind; in his haste to zip his hood, he let his long hair flop over his eyes.

Morley is in bigger trouble: He bounced off the hull jumping ship and tore a hole in his suit below the right knee. The 38-degree water is getting inside. He’s shaking, jerking.

Robert Doyle wraps his arms and legs around Morley.

“Bobby,” the skipper says, “I ain’t gonna make it.”

Doyle turns the talk to children. Time at sea has split up his marriage, but he has two boys. Morley says he’s going to be a father in seven months. He plans on marrying his fiancee this summer. Can’t wait to see his child.

A wave, snarling and foaming at the lip, is standing over them. The last thing Doyle remembers seeing before it hits is its barrel, big enough to park a Winnebago in.

Doyle pops up first, followed by Morley, Mork, Decapua.

Where’s Hanlon?

“Dave?”

No response.

“Daaave!”

Later, the survivors won’t be sure how long they kept calling his name.

Mork asks the question on all their minds. “Are the Coasties coming, Bob?”

“Sure they are,” says Doyle, who spent 12 years in the Coast Guard.

Huddled, heads bowed, they pray aloud. Then another comber barrels toward them. They turn their faces away and take it.

Flying Into the Mouth of the Storm

Snow and sleet glaze the wind screen of the Jayhawk. Even with his night-vision goggles, Lt. Dan Molthen, the co-pilot, can’t make out the ragged ocean from 700 feet.

Adickes switches on his direction-finder, hoping to pick up a hit from the Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon, or EPIRB, the distress signal beaming from the Fairweather Grounds. He tries to raise Sitka base on his radio. Static.

They’re on their own, flying through whiteout into the mouth of a powerful arctic storm.

The H-60 Jayhawk is the Coast Guard’s most sophisticated helicopter. Powered by twin 1,980-horsepower engines, it can cruise at 140 knots and hit “dash” speeds of 180. It can fly 300 miles offshore, hover 45 minutes and return with a safe fuel reserve. Its computer can fly and land the aircraft, and its Global Positioning System can receive data simultaneously from four satellites, making navigation a snap.

Under normal conditions, that is.

The helicopter bounces from 1,800 feet to 900 feet to 1,500 feet to 800 feet--in 15 seconds. Adickes tries to find clear air, climbing as high as 4,000 feet, but it does no good.

Fifty minutes into the flight, the direction-finder detects a weak signal from the EPIRB. The trouble, whatever it is, must be just below.

Adickes does a 180-degree spin, turning his nose straight into the head wind. At that moment, he will say later, he feels the full force of the storm. Each gust is a giant hand shoving them backward.

The helicopter shudders. Its nose lifts and pitches. Piloting becomes a matter of brute strength. Adickes and Molthen seize the joysticks with both hands. The Jayhawk had roared past the EPIRB in a half-second. With engines at full power, it takes 25 minutes to crawl back to it.

Sean Whitherspoon, the flight engineer, throws open the jump door to a blast of snow and ice. Molthen flips on the floodlights, which throw cones of light down from the aircraft’s belly.

A Ray of Hope in the Sky

Below, the fishermen are looking for a sign of hope.

Doyle spots it--a bright flashlight in the sky.

“Heeey!” He waves, his arm feeling like it has a 50-pound weight attached.

From above, Whitherspoon spots silvery flashes--the reflective tape of survival suits.

Molthen’s skin crawls at the thought of how cold those people must be. He’s trying to approach zero airspeed, establish a 100-foot hover above them.

But everything is jumping around the cockpit: Binoculars, flight manuals, maps. The dials on the instrument panel are a blur.

The few times the aircraft steadies and Molthen can read them, the instruments make no sense, he will say later. The altimeters tell him his altitude is zero, then 100 feet, 20 feet, 110 feet.

Out the spotters’ window, swells and sky coalesce into one black mass. Vertigo makes Molthen vomit into his lap.

Whitherspoon and Richard Sansone, the crew’s rescue swimmer, heave out three saltwater-activated flares. They’ll burn for 20 minutes, providing reference points in the darkness.

And then it hits.

A wicked gust, upward of 120 knots, sledgehammers the helicopter. When Adickes regains control, the 21,000-pound aircraft has been blown backward a half mile.

Whitherspoon peels himself off the rear wall, looks out the jump door and gasps. Swells are cresting 5 feet below the belly of the helicopter.

If a wave catches the tail, the Jayhawk will spin into the sea and sink.

“Up! Up! Up!”

Adickes and Molthen pull the joysticks as far as they’ll go and the aircraft lurches skyward.

Fifteen minutes of bucking and pitching, and the Jayhawk is again above the flares. There’s no way Adickes is putting his swimmer, Sansone, in the water, so he tries lowering the rescue basket.

Whitherspoon pays out the steel cable and stares in shock as the 40-pound basket gets whisked backward at a 45-degree angle.

Adickes and Molthen peer out at the flares, rising and falling on the swells. Suddenly one flare disappears. The pilots figure it’s slipped behind a wave. They’re wrong. It is riding the crest of a huge wave looming over the helicopter.

The men in the water see exactly what’s happening.

They’re behind the flare, bobbing on the crest of the mountainous wave, looking down in horror at the rotor blades of the helicopter spinning below them.

Lt. Glen Jones is worried, and he should be. The Jayhawk helicopter he sent from Sitka station at 8 p.m. hasn’t been heard from since it penetrated the southern edge of the storm. That was almost an hour ago.

The watch captain knows he won’t be getting any help soon from the C-130 search-and-rescue planes at Kodiak station, the Coast Guard’s biggest, on the other side of the Gulf of Alaska. That air base is buried under an avalanche of snow.

So he’s called in a crew that has already worked a full day to fly another Jayhawk out to the Fairweather Grounds: Lt. Cmdr. David Durham, the pilot; co-pilot Lt. Russell Zullick; flight mechanic Chris Windnagle; and rescue swimmer A.J. Thompson.

This group has a more difficult mission than the first. The signal from the ship in distress is more than two hours old now, and time is running out for any survivors struggling in the 38-degree water. And they also have to look for a potentially downed helicopter and its four-man crew.

At 9:35 p.m., the helicopter lifts away from the pad. No one inside says anything.

One hundred and fifty miles away, over the Fairweather Grounds, the first rescue helicopter is barely airborne, hovering in the troughs of the mountainous seas.

It is so dark and the sky is so clogged with sleet and snow that Adickes, the flight commander, doesn’t see the immense swell looming before the Jayhawk or the survivors riding atop its crest.

“Jesus, Bill!” co-pilot Molthen shrieks, pointing frantically over his head through the wind screen’s bubble. “Take us up!”

Adickes’ reflexes take over. He yanks the nose of the helicopter upward and leftward and hits the engines.

The turbines moan, the rotors squeal, but the helicopter feels as if it’s moving in slow motion. They hear the wave’s crash just below them and see clouds of white spray as the Jayhawk shudders upward.

Adickes checks his instruments and decides he’s reached his limit. They’ve been on scene for an hour and 20 minutes and his crew hasn’t been able to get the rescue basket closer than 40 feet to the survivors, who are too exhausted and afraid to swim to it. The flares his team tossed into the raging seas are sputtering out. The hoist cable that lowers the rescue basket is ruined, frayed by constant chafing against the side of the helicopter.

Molthen is dizzy and retching from the aircraft’s jackhammering. His flight mechanic, Whitherspoon, is shaking from exhaustion and vertigo and is losing feeling in his left arm from hypothermia.

They’ve lost communications, and the fuel gauge is dropping. Adickes is only minutes from “bingo,” the point at which the helicopter doesn’t have enough fuel to return to base.

“It’s time to go,” he remembers whispering into the mike on his headset.

No one responds. They are trained to save lives under conditions no one else dares to challenge.

The Jayhawk labors skyward and, against vicious head winds, turns for Sitka. Whitherspoon pulls the jump door closed, sits down on the floor and goes into convulsions.

“Rich, man,” says Whitherspoon, “I can’t stop shaking.”

Richard Sansone, the rescue swimmer, starts Whitherspoon on water and saline and pulls a thermal bag over him to raise his body temperature.

They huddle there in the indigo cabin light, trying not to think about the people they left behind.

The second rescue helicopter is 15 minutes from arriving when a call comes over the high-frequency radio. The caller identifies himself as the captain of Alaska Airlines Flight 196, a commercial jetliner en route from Anchorage to Seattle.

“Coast Guard . . . We’ve received a radio transmission from one of your sister helos . . . H-60 Jayhawk . . . Flight commander Adickes says they are aborting mission and returning to base. . . . They report four to five people are still in the water, over.”

Lt. Durham rogers the message. The first helicopter is all right. Their job has just gotten easier.

Still, Windnagle, the 34-year-old flight mechanic, is sweating and thinking about his family. Ninety minutes ago he had a pizza in the oven and was watching a Disney movie with his wife, two boys and baby girl.

Now he’s in pitch darkness, getting hammered by the floor and ceiling of a Jayhawk as it hurtles into a powerful storm. He’s never been on a high-seas rescue in six years of Coast Guard duty, never flown in zero visibility and killer wind shears.

Durham’s adrenaline is pumping. “Let’s get there fast, people,” he remembers saying. “This thing will probably be nothing.”

Mariners’ Hopes Fly Off Into the Night

But it is something. Durham, 38, had been piloting helicopters since graduating from the Coast Guard Academy in 1982. He’d flown in Alaska for more than three of those years and thought he’d seen ugly weather.

Until now.

He’s cruising at 300 feet beneath a heavy cloud cover, backing winds are pushing the aircraft into a 200-knot sprint and rain bands are swinging across his path like slamming doors.

When his direction-finder hits on the EPIRB distress signal, indicating they’ve arrived at the scene, Durham swings the helicopter. But instead of heading back, it sails north as if skidding on ice.

To fight off the head winds, Durham will say later, he has to “crab” the helicopter, swinging the nose and tail back and forth like a scampering crustacean. It takes them 25 minutes to return a half mile.

Durham and Zullick, his co-pilot, take turns steering through a cloverleaf search pattern. For 45 minutes they find nothing.

Then, from the jump door, flight mechanic Windnagle sees something twinkle. It must be the strobe light from the EPIRB.

The survivors are clustered around the strobe and what looks like a fish float. They’re drifting so fast that Zullick has to reprogram his instruments every few minutes just to keep up.

Windnagle shouts to his pilots to establish a hover. Durham tries to edge the helicopter down, but his altimeters are swinging 180 feet in a matter of seconds.

“Hey, Russ,” he hollers to his co-pilot, “are we going up or down?”

Out go five flares. They hit water and burst to life a half mile upwind of the survivors. Windnagle pitches out the basket, and it flies back to the rotor tail. He winches it back in, trying again and again to get it down to the water near the survivors.

After seven tries, the closest he can drop it is about 30 feet from the strobe light. Later, he will say it was like “dropping a clothespin into a milk jug from a tall building.” He’s frustrated, delirious from vertigo.

After 20 minutes, the flares sputter out. Durham’s not sure, but he figures they’re close to not having enough fuel to return to base.

“What do you think?” he asks his co-pilot. Zullick just nods.

It’s 12:49 a.m.--five hours and 47 minutes since the La Conte sank. With each minute, the chances rise sharply of those men drowning or dying from hypothermia.

Durham takes the Jayhawk up to 300 feet and veers back to base.

Two hundred feet below, Robert Doyle and his exhausted crew mates watch their hopes clatter away.

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To be continued next week.

Editor’s note: This story is based on interviews with 11 Coast Guard helicopter flight crew members involved in the rescue; three members of the ground crew; Coast Guard spokesmen in Juneau, Alaska, and Martinsburg, W.Va.; the surviving crew members of the La Conte; Jesse Evans, who found the remains on Shuyak Island; the two Alaska state troopers who recovered the remains; and two forensics experts at the Alaska State Medical Examiner’s Office in Anchorage. The story also draws from the 523-page record of the Coast Guard’s inquest into the sinking of the La Conte.