Rescue of the Bounty: Disaster and Survival in Superstorm Sandy (25 page)

Wes steered the plane toward the coast.
Are the sailors alive?
he wondered.
If they were in the life rafts, why didn’t they fire a flare?
He tried to push a disturbing thought out of his mind:
Did we just witness the deaths of sixteen people?

Lieutenant Commander Steve Cerveny had had a long night. The Jayhawk helicopter pilot had begun his day at Air Station Elizabeth City at 8:00 a.m. Sunday morning as the ready aircraft commander if he was called upon to fly. It was a quiet day up until Sector had notified him of
Bounty
’s problems in the evening. He and Duty Officer Todd Farrell immediately learned all they could about the vessel and its predicament. At 9:30 a.m. Steve figured he better get some sleep just in case he was called upon to fly, and he left Todd at the operations desk to monitor the situation.

Around midnight Steve called Todd Farrell to get a quick update on
Bounty.
He was told the sailors still thought they could keep the situation under control until morning, but that Wes McIntosh was heading out on the C-130.

Steve tried to get a little more shut-eye, but now his mind was racing, anticipating the sound of the SAR alarm at any moment. The slim, forty-three-year-old pilot, with a touch of gray in his hair, had over twenty years of flying time and had been around long enough to sense that
Bounty
might be in bigger trouble than its captain realized. After all, the ship was in the path of a hurricane that Steve had heard meteorologists begin referring to as Frankenstorm. With Steve’s type A personality, he could not simply go back to sleep and block out the possibility that he might be flying into a hurricane at any second.

Steve’s career as a helicopter pilot began in the navy when he started flight school in 1992. After almost ten years flying for the navy he transitioned to the coast guard, where he began flying the HH-60 Jayhawk, a ten-ton, sixty-five-foot-long helicopter, used for long-range rescues. Air stations such as Elizabeth City, Kodiak, Mobile, and Cape Cod all have Jayhawks, while other stations have the smaller and shorter-range Dolphin helicopter.

Steve was one of the pilots who flew multiple rescues over several days when Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005. Then, in 2010, Steve had needed to be rescued, after an awful crash on board a Jayhawk. He was the aircraft’s copilot and was traveling over a remote, mountainous region of Utah after providing security in a joint US-Canadian operation for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, British Columbia. Snow was falling during the flight, and some was sticking to the aircraft, forcing the pilots to activate the anti-icing mechanism. As they increased altitude over higher terrain, another coast guard helicopter flying in tandem with Steve’s disappeared into a cloud bank. Somewhere in front of both aircraft was a ridgeline that the pilots knew they had to fly over.

The commander was flying the helicopter from the left seat, and Steve was in the right. As the commander tried to gain additional altitude to crest the ten-thousand-foot ridgeline, the Jayhawk was not responding. Steve called for more airspeed, realizing the anti-icing mechanism was robbing them of power. But the aircraft was sluggish and the commander had no choice except to turn away from the mountaintops. Banking hard to the right, both men were horrified to see the tops of trees emerge from the clouds just a few feet in front of them. The rotors clipped the trees, and in a split second the giant steel bird lurched to a stop and plummeted sideways, crashing through splintering pines and into the snow.

When the helicopter finally came to rest, Steve felt a searing pain shooting through his leg. He looked for the commander, who should have been in the seat to his left. Instead, he saw snow. Steve released his safety harness and tried to stand, then noticed the lower part of his leg was turned inward at a forty-five-degree angle and blood was seeping through his pants.

The commander’s head popped out of the snow, but he, too, was injured, and both men were trapped in the steaming, hissing aircraft that could ignite at any moment. In the rear of the helicopter, basic aircrew member Gina Panuzzi was critically hurt with severe internal injuries. Luckily, rescue swimmer Darren Hicks and flight mechanic Edward Sychra were relatively unscathed and started pulling the injured from the wreckage, which was scattered over hundreds of feet, including up in the trees.

The accident had happened so quickly that no emergency call could be made, and the lead helicopter pilots that had been in front of Steve’s aircraft didn’t know it had gone down. Now, the five survivors were in a race against time; their injuries and hypothermia would sap their strength and soon snuff out their lives.

Flight mechanic Edward Sychra used his cell phone to send a text message to the flight mechanic of the lead helicopter, who texted back that they were alerting authorities and were going to land as close to the crash site as possible. Meantime, Steve’s open compound fracture was causing excruciating pain, and the rescue swimmer did his best to help by using a tree branch as a splint. Steve thought to himself,
Well, I’m responsible for getting us into this jam, and maybe now God is going to help us get out of it.
Despite his pain he felt a calmness come over him, and his thoughts turned to the more seriously injured Gina Panuzzi. He knew she needed medical attention immediately.

A short time later the lead helicopter returned, but the Jayhawk was incapable of hovering at that altitude. Pilot Steven Bonn flew to a lower altitude and lightened the aircraft by dumping fuel and equipment. Then he returned and, in an amazing display of skill, somehow guided the helicopter down into a confined opening in the woods, just a couple hundred yards below the crash site. A MedFlight helicopter also landed nearby, and the injured were whisked off to Salt Lake City. Snowmobilers arrived on scene and took Sychra and rescue swimmer Hicks down off the mountain.

When Steve was identified as one of the injured, authorities called his mother. The pilot’s mother had the same feeling Steve did on the mountain: that her son would pull through. The date of the accident—March 3—was significant to her. This was the day her infant daughter had died years earlier.
God’s not going to take two away,
she told herself.
Steve is being watched over and will be fine.

Steve did pull through, but he wasn’t fine. He had surgery on his leg, and afterward his orthopedic doctor warned him that the damage was so serious he could still lose the limb. After a month on his back in the hospital, a second surgery was performed, which included bone grafts and the bitter news that he might not ever be able to put weight on his leg and his flying days were likely over.

While recuperating Steve went over the rescue events and counted several things that had had to go precisely as they did for him and the others to survive. First, they landed in an incredible nine feet of snow, softening their impact and reducing the risk of fire. Second, in hundreds of miles of woods they crashed just two hundred yards from a clearing. And third, pilot Bonn managed to maneuver his helicopter into the opening despite it being difficult to hover at such an altitude. Steve considered several other factors, such as had the accident happened at night, they would likely not have been found until morning. He thought how pilots like himself who fly into dangerous situations need confidence, but how in the big scheme of things some factors are beyond control, and how faith can get you through the toughest of times.

For the next several months Steve directed his energy into physical therapy, and with each step he began to realize he might someday fly again. Approximately a year and a half after the accident, in October of 2011, Steve was behind the controls of a Jayhawk and throttled the helicopter off the tarmac and into the sky.

•  •  •  

Now Steve was lying awake, wondering what was happening aboard the tall ship
Bounty
. He didn’t have to speculate for long. At 3:00 a.m. Todd Farrell called him and asked him to come into the Operations Center because Steve might have to fly out to the ship and drop pumps. Copilot Jane Peña had also been alerted, and all three reviewed the situation with Sector.
Bounty
had not yet capsized, but Wes McIntosh on the C-130 described brutal conditions at the distress scene. That the captain of the vessel thought the crew could hang on until morning suggested to the Operations Center that
Bounty
’s situation was not acute, though potentially volatile. Weighing the safety of their rescue teams against this information, they decided the risks of flying immediately were just too great. But Steve and Jane were ready to fly instantly if the situation changed.

Because Steve had been on duty since 8:00 a.m. the prior morning, a fresh crew would be called in to fly at dawn if
Bounty
stayed afloat that long. Farrell made the calls. Then just a short time later, Sector called and relayed the urgent message from Wes that the people on
Bounty
were abandoning ship. That call changed everything. There was no time to wait for the new crew, no time to wait for safer conditions at dawn.

The SAR alarm sounded its whooping warble, and rescue swimmer Randy Haba and flight mechanic Michael Lufkin ran to the Operations Center to join up with Steve and Jane. Steve explained what was happening with
Bounty
, then described the extreme conditions at the accident scene. He asked each crew member if he or she felt alert enough to do the mission, knowing that all of them were near the end of their twenty-four-hour shift. They responded positively and raced to their helicopter, which was already out of the hangar, fueled, and ready to go.

Michael Lufkin and Jane Peña had only done a couple of rescues and were glad to have been paired with veterans such as Randy and Steve. Lufkin, a tall and lanky twenty-five-year-old, had been in the coast guard for five years serving in different roles, but had only been a qualified flight mechanic for seven months, and it would be his job to raise and lower the cable and help guide the pilots during the hoists. Randy’s life would literally be in his hands because Michael, not Randy, controlled the movements of the cable when the rescue swimmer was on the other end. Lufkin would also be responsible for hoisting survivors, which was usually done by basket. In his work, timing was everything; he would need to factor in the wind and the waves to get the swimmer in the sweet spot of the back side of a wave, with just enough slack in the cable to allow the swimmer to maneuver. He would want to avoid putting Haba in the middle of a breaking wave where he could get buried.

As Lufkin sat in the helicopter’s cabin during liftoff into the darkness, all the various hoisting scenarios were going through his mind. He would need to combine quickness and strength in many of the procedures, such as dropping the swimmer into the sea, bringing the hook up, attaching the basket, and getting survivors into the helo as quickly as possible. Fortunately, Lufkin was a natural athlete and had the coordination required. Still, he had never flown into any weather remotely like Hurricane Sandy, and with possibly multiple survivors in the water, it would take every bit of concentration and endurance he could muster. Prior to launching, when he first heard that
Bounty
was taking on water, Michael went online and investigated the ship’s website. On it was the path of the ship with the hurricane not far away, and for a brief moment he wondered what in the world the vessel was doing out there. But he pushed the thought out of his mind and tried to learn as much as he could about the ship and its crew. He knew for certain he didn’t want his swimmer or the basket anywhere near the ship’s masts. Should the cable become entangled in the rigging, it could pull the giant helo right out of the sky.

The pilots flew at an altitude of three thousand feet, using a strong tailwind to propel them at 170 knots. Off Cape Hatteras they slowly descended and reduced speed. Steve ordered his crew to “goggle up,” meaning to don the NVGs, so they could see the water, which came into focus at about three hundred feet in altitude. Squalls of rain and wind gusts began rocking the Jayhawk, and a couple powerful gusts made the helo rise and fall unexpectedly by as much as fifty feet. Through their headsets the on-scene C-130 pilot, Peyton Russell, was updating them, and they knew conditions would deteriorate with each passing mile. Michael Lufkin paid particular attention to the talk about the many strobe lights blinking in the water. He knew they would be searching, and fuel could become an issue, making quick hoists imperative. Lufkin reckoned that not only would a second helo be needed immediately, but most likely a third, considering that up to sixteen survivors could be scattered around the capsized
Bounty.

Jane Peña, who sat in the left cockpit seat, had already started making fuel calculations to establish their bingo time: the moment they absolutely had to leave the accident scene to make it back to land with the fuel left. She used a computer to enter the route of their flight, the wind, and other factors to help calculate the fuel being used. Most important, the return flight would likely be directly into strong headwinds. She wanted to be certain that the calculations were accurate, so she also kept a pad of paper nearby to manually record fuel burn rates to make sure the computer calculations were in line with her own. She had the responsibility to continually update Steve on their fuel status as they approached bingo.

The thirty-one-year-old copilot with short brown hair had been a bit on edge when they were flying at three thousand feet in the pitch dark, but now that she could see the ocean through her NVGs, she felt fine. Water was her element, and just seeing it had a calming effect. As with Michael Lufkin, this was her first major SAR case, and she knew she would be learning from Steve Cerveny, a top pilot, and felt glad for the opportunity. She had done a medical evacuation off a ship and rescued stranded kayakers from a sandbar, but flying into hurricane conditions to hunt down individual strobe lights and hopefully extract survivors was a bit more challenging.
This is what all those hours of training and studying were for,
she thought, remembering her long and difficult quest to become a pilot.