A Bolt from the Blue Page 9
The fast-rope insertion technique was shown in the movie Black Hawk Down, when the rescuers exited the helicopter by sliding down a thick braided rope that almost looks like a pole, using their hands and legs to slow their descent. Fast-roping is primarily used by the military and law-enforcement tactical teams, although some civilian rescue crews use the procedure for rescuer insertion and then a hoist operation or short-haul to extract patients and rescuers.
In heli-rappel, used mostly in wildland firefighting and law enforcement, rescuers employ a friction device to rappel down a rope anchored inside a helicopter. The major disadvantage is that, like fast-rope, it is an insertion-only technique. Even when rangers reach accident victims quickly with these procedures, it can still take two days to move them to a helicopter landing site for extraction, and many wounded climbers can’t survive that long.
The rangers knew that deaths from serious injuries, hypothermia, shock, or loss of blood could ideally be reduced if they not only accessed the victims quickly but then were also able to whisk them off the mountainside to be flown directly to a hospital. The first makeshift short-haul, in which a victim was moved off the mountain while hanging on a rope suspended under a helicopter, occurred in the Tetons in September 1981, when a man from Pocatello, Idaho, plummeted 100 feet while descending the north side of Nez Perce. Rangers climbed to him and treated his head and femur wounds, but they believed he would die in the time it would take them to carry him off the mountain. In desperation, they hooked the climber’s litter to a line hanging from a helicopter, taped the back opening of the chopper shut, and flew him to safety, a maneuver that the Forest Service had not yet approved for its helicopters.
In 1985, Pete Armington (who held Renny’s job before him) joined the Jenny Lake rangers after serving 13 years in Rocky Mountain National Park. Armington was focused on the safety risks involved in mountain rescue, particularly after an especially dicey mission on the Grand’s Petzoldt Ridge in July 1985. In that circumstance, a 28-year-old trail crew member from Yellowstone National Park slipped off a hold and swung about six feet through the air before smashing into the rock face. The rangers traversed the bottom of the route to Glencoe Col, the nook between the spire and the mountain, and several of them climbed about 300 feet up the ridge to reach the injured climber. They packed the patient in a litter and lowered him with ropes to the col. As the pilot flew into the gap, parking the left skid on a boulder and the right skid on air, the rangers cautiously slid the stretcher partially into the opening of the helicopter, where the rear doors had been removed, leaving the litter sticking out the back.
Convinced that there was a way to improve aerial maneuvers, Armington pushed the boundaries of mountain flight. All that summer, he routinely asked the pilots to undertake extreme risks by sidling the helicopter up as close to accident scenes as possible, with rotor blades narrowly missing rocks and white-bark pines, to enable them to perform delicate toeins—where just the front tips of the helicopter’s skids touch down—and one-skid landings. Rangers would then bolt out of the helicopter as it hovered, knowing that one ill-timed gust of wind while they were exiting the aircraft could lead to disaster for everyone. The procedure obviously put the rangers and injured climbers in jeopardy, but it was especially perilous for the pilots who were required to fly while pressed against ridges and mountain faces. In addition, toe-ins and one-skid landings were impossible on the Exum Ridge on the Grand Teton and in other places in the Teton range.
Armington spent the next year investigating ways to make mountain rescue faster and safer, focusing on the short-haul techniques that had been developed in Switzerland in 1966 and adopted by Parks Canada for use in search and rescue in 1970.
Once Armington received approval and funding from the National Park Service to pioneer a short-haul program in the United States, he still needed a pilot willing to experiment with mountain air rescues. He found that pilot in Ken Johnson, a retired Army warrant officer who had spent his last duty as part of the 54th Medical Detachment at Fort Lewis, Washington, where he flew military helicopters for air ambulance and rescue work. Johnson gained the immediate respect of the rangers on an operation where he toed in on top of the 12,804-foot Middle Teton and allowed a ranger to step first out onto the helicopter skid and then directly onto the mountain, shaving hours off the rescue. From there, it was only a matter of degree for him to agree to fly human cargo beneath his ship.
The objective in short-haul rescue is to transport rangers or survivors (or sometimes both simultaneously) a short distance as they dangle from a long, static, fixed-length rope or cable, usually 0.4 inch thick, beneath the helicopter. The huge benefit of the procedure is that it severely cuts down on the time a pilot is compelled to remain in a precarious position. On the downside, however, the technique demands a tremendous amount of training for both pilots and rangers and can generally only be attempted in idyllic weather.
Unlike fast-rope and heli-rappel, where rescuers can only be inserted into an accident scene, short-hauling allows rangers and victims (and equipment) to also be extracted from the site. Depending on the gravity of their injuries, patients are either extracted from the scene while clipped into a protective harness known affectionately as a “screamer suit” or are packaged into a litter.
In the Tetons, a 100-foot line is the standard, but depending on the rotor clearance needed from cliffs and trees on each specific rescue, a 150-foot or 200-foot rope can be used instead. It generally becomes more difficult for a pilot to judge depth perception with the longer ropes. In certain circumstances, however, such as a rock wall jutting out at exactly 100 feet above the accident site preventing the helicopter from getting close enough to the mountain at that elevation, the spotter and the pilot will request a longer line.
In a short-haul procedure, as in other rescue techniques involving a rope suspended from a helicopter, the helicopter never lands. As opposed to a winch-and-hoist operation, however, in a short-haul rescue, the bottom, or hook, end of the rope is unable to be raised or lowered. With short-hauling, neither the rescuer nor the patient ever enters the helicopter. This is a disadvantage of the technique in that if the weather suddenly takes a nasty turn while a ranger is hanging under the helicopter, that ranger cannot be pulled up into the aircraft. In that case, either the ranger continues to dangle on the end of the line while the pilot orbits and waits for the weather to clear, or he remains on the rope while the pilot returns to the location where the aircraft took off and places him back on the ground.
In exchange for their participation in these incredibly dangerous rescue techniques, the rangers must endure being referred to around the park as “the dopes on the ropes.” In more discreet parlance, the rangers, as well as the injured parties extracted from a scene, are considered “jettisonable human external cargo.”
The Jenny Lake rangers first officially experimented with the short-haul system during training exercises in the summer of 1986, learning how to package a patient in a stretcher for exposed flight and how to connect a stretcher to a fixed line below the airship. In July of that summer, they put their preparations to use in the first sanctioned short-haul rescue in the Tetons.
Nicola Rotberg, 21, of Lexington, Massachusetts, was working in Yellowstone National Park that summer and came to the Tetons with five friends to climb Mount Moran via the Skillet Glacier route. One of the more identifiable peaks in the range, at 12,605 feet, the monolithic Mount Moran is on the west shore of Jackson Lake.
Only four members of the group, including Nicola, reached the peak. While the climbers were descending the glacier’s snowfield, Nicola tumbled down the steep slope and darted out of sight. A few minutes later, one of her friends also slid out of control down the mountainside. Both women soared over a 200-foot rock island, but Nicola’s friend was killed when she fell into a deep crevasse, while Nicola randomly landed on a snow ledge, badly bruised and bleeding internally. When her friends reached her and realized that she was still breathing, they carrie
d her broken body down the mountain a couple of thousand feet, then climbed down to the shore of Jackson Lake to bring a rescue team back for her.
Pete Armington got the call at about 8:30 in the evening and knew that the rangers were going to be racing daylight. Ken Johnson flew to Lupine Meadows, keeping the helicopter running as he tore off the doors, and three rangers, including Renny Jackson and Dan Burgette, scrambled onboard.
Dan acted as spotter while Renny and the other ranger helirappelled from the helicopter, landing just a few feet away from Nicola, who was severely hypothermic. In the dusk, the pilot couldn’t see the hand signals he had practiced with the rangers in training, so Renny extemporized by guiding Ken via radio.
Renny packaged their patient into the litter, then clipped the litter into the rope. As the helicopter flew away with Nicola swinging far beneath it, he stood back to witness the first official short-haul operation in the park’s history.
Nicola was successfully resuscitated at the hospital. Her core temperature was 82 degrees when she arrived, however, making it clear that she would not have survived a night on the mountain had the rangers not short-hauled her to safety.
For the next few years, the rangers conducted rescues using that same combination of heli-rappel and short-haul. In heli-rappel, however, the pilot was forced to spend minutes hovering while the rangers climbed down the rope and disconnected the friction gear, a situation referred to as loitering in the dead man’s zone. In contrast to heli-rappel, short-hauling keeps the helicopter’s hover time to an absolute minimum—mere seconds sometimes—a critical consideration given the often erratic wind conditions that exist along the high Teton peaks. The rangers pushed the point that it was quicker and arguably safer for them to arrive on the scene at the end of the rope than to slide down it, and they began using short-haul for insertions, too.
There are only seven programs within the National Park Service that use short-hauling, and only three—Grand Teton, Grand Canyon, and Yosemite—that use it with any frequency. A few companies in the private sector in the Tetons and California employ the technique as well.
Every summer, representatives from other national parks come to Jenny Lake to rate the short-haul program, observing both proficiency tests with a set of expectations outlined in writing, as well as rescue scenarios involving “typical” terrain. The bulk of short-haul training at Jenny Lake occurs in May, at the beginning of the summer season, but in the rare instance when a 28-day period goes by in which a short-haul hasn’t occurred in the field, the government exclusive-use helicopter contract sets a requirement of additional training.
No rangers or patients have been killed or hurt during short-hauling in Grand Teton National Park, but there was a fatality while using the procedure in Yosemite, in which a rescuer and an injured climber in a litter hit a tree, killing the patient.
The worst short-haul accident in American history happened on July 21, 1995, on the Hawaiian island of Oahu. A Honolulu Fire Department McDonnell Douglas 369D helicopter searching for a missing hiker in the Koolau Mountains crashed, killing the pilot and two rescuers suspended in a net 50 feet below the aircraft. The National Transportation Safety Board determined that the probable cause of the accident was loss of aircraft control resulting from the pilot’s inexperience and poor judgment in flying into adverse weather conditions in mountainous terrain with an external load and no spotter.
At elite programs like the one at Jenny Lake, the risk management is fastidiously calculated to reduce the chance of failure. There is no such thing as a small mistake in the short-haul technique. If any one thing, or series of things, goes awry, the potential for the entire process to go fatally, catastrophically wrong is essentially 100 percent.
While research efforts have been made to address the inherent risks in the procedure, the technique remains vulnerable to tragedy on a grand scale. Richard Sugden, a pilot of fixed-wing and rotary-winged aircraft, developed a parachute system that can be incorporated into the short-haul system to give the rescuer a chance to survive an emergency situation such as mechanical failure of the helicopter. Sugden presented his idea of a short-haul escape emergency parachute system, known as SHAPE (for Short-Haul escAPE), at an interagency short-haul conference. While the helicopter pilots at Jenny Lake were uncomfortable with the idea of flying with a parachute that might open inadvertently and cause a crash by effectively putting brakes on the helicopter, the state of California purchased the system, as did the federal Department of the Interior for use in transporting law-enforcement officers.
There is no doubt about the level of intricacy involved in mountain flight and rescue. The weather is a constant wild card. Snowstorms can occur even in summer months. Wind patterns can turn in an instant. If a pilot experiences an onboard emergency or equipment failure while in a hover, there may be no time for him to recover. The combination of the environment at extreme altitude and the scope of the terrain often forces a pilot into unexpectedly complex maneuvers and delicate landings. It is said that mountain pilots are not born, but go through a process of creation. Fortunately for the climbers stranded on Friction Pitch in the summer of 2003, Laurence Perry had gone through that process more spectacularly than most.
Born in 1953 in Kent, England, Laurence left home at age 15 to seek adventure. Never losing the essence of that thrill-seeking boy, Laurence has spent the rest of his life crafting nothing but one exploit after another for himself. In his early 20s, he was a trooper in the Army, then wandered around Australia and North America. He worked at the Swindon Outdoor Center in Devon, teaching courses in rope handling, climbing, exploring underground caves, and sailing. He signed up for the voluntary reserves of the Special Air Service in England (akin to American Special Forces). He was an instructor in both canoeing and kayaking on the L’Ardeche River in France.
He then traveled to Newfoundland and Labrador, finding work as a radio helicopter operator at the Grenfell Mission (a medical and religious mission that helps provide food, clothing, and medical care to poor people), where his duties also included outpost nursing and loading aircraft. After that, he did a stint as an Outward Bound instructor in western Canada. He was a commercial diver. He also dabbled in various positions at a radio control tower and a weather observation center and briefly held a position as a medic in the oil industry. To that point, he had only worked in proximity to the flight industry. He had yet to fly.
Laurence obtained his commercial helicopter license with the aid of some very individualized instruction—he was the only student in a 12-week class. His father had been particularly mechanically inclined, and it became evident in week one of the course that Laurence was phenomenally spatially aware. The confluence of good genes and mad natural talent made for one sensational pilot. Although on a few occasions he would fly other forms of aircraft, mostly borrowed from friends, it was helicopters alone that held Laurence’s interest. He was fascinated by everything about them, gripped by the sensation of flying them, at home in the rhythmic deafness created by their rotors.
The main problem with a helicopter-flying obsession is that helicopters can’t really be rented and flown as a hobby—a licensed pilot has to either buy one or commit to flying them commercially. Once Laurence found a position as a helicopter pilot, which took eight months, flying helicopters was the only job for him.
Of course, within that seemingly narrow scope, he did manage to work at virtually every job in existence that involved piloting that particular aircraft. He took clients heli-skiing. He flew for an archeology group whose expeditions included musk ox counting, polar bear tagging, and wolf culling. He piloted one of billionaire Paul Allen’s private helicopters. He fought forest fires, where he gained his first experience with long-lining. He traversed grids in the high Arctic exploring for uranium, transporting the element in a special rack attached to the outside of the aircraft. Although that project took place in the days before global-positioning systems and navigation is an arena that Laurence does not identify as a
strength, he somehow managed, as he says, to “roar up and down.”
In Alaska and British Columbia, Laurence flew clients on a search for hard rocks, including lead and zinc. He worked avalanche-control at several ski resorts, transporting ski patrollers over the slopes while they flung bombs down into the snow to set off avalanches. He also flew avalanche-control operations along a 40-mile access road leading to a copper mine. He obtained additional practice with long-line work while flying a logging helicopter in Canada. He flew with a huge diamond drill onboard his aircraft to allow drill crews to secure core samples in their quest for gold. He circled back to long-lining while flying helicopters at several ski resorts, including Blackcomb in Whistler, where he received his initial exposure to mountain rescues and medical evacuations.
Laurence’s first job as a pilot had been limited to four months, after which he had the winter off and then moved to another job entirely. Now decades into his career, that pattern of relatively short bursts of intense assignments has never varied. Laurence thrives on the independence, the coming-and-going-as-he-pleases aspect of working as a contract pilot.
Mountain rescue is hands down the most challenging, dangerous, and satisfying area of flying Laurence has ever done. After getting the feel of it for a few months at the Canadian ski resorts, he found himself drawn to what he terms the “magic of the mountains,” and he built fast, comfortable friendships within the mountaineering community. These were his kind of people, passionate adventurers whose level of swashbuckling skill and high-functioning expertise matched his own.
It was while heli-skiing in Alaska that Laurence met an old-time Vietnam pilot who raved about the advanced mountain-rescue work being done in the Tetons. Confident that his long-lining talent and experience would be an ideal fit with the Jenny Lake program, Laurence headed to Jackson, where the climbing rangers were having a hell of a time finding a pilot who was both willing to do the work and able to pass the ridiculously precise proficiency tests.