Cover story
The Flying Dolphin
By Kyle Stock
Photo by Alan Hawes
Coast Guard helicopter crew members (from left) Jeff Jacobs, Mike Conell, Jason Booher and Corey Braddock meet before a training flight over Charleston Harbor.
If you’re in trouble on the water, these are the folks you want to see. Meet your guardian angels.
The air feels like water. The water feels like a cloying bath. And the white of the beach stings the eyes more than the salt.
A bright orange machine swoops down the shoreline, a 45-foot, 6,000-pound dragonfly. Every head on the shore languidly tilts back. The kids jump and splash and wave. The adults stare enviously, thinking of the breeze up there.
Then it’s gone — quick as summer. Leaving only a high-pitched humming whine, not even the thwop thwop thwop that you hear on TV.
It looks like fun. Like freedom. But it’s work. In the past five years, the crews in Coast Guard choppers flew about 650 missions out of Charleston.
The machines, technically named HH-65 Dolphins, are “planes,” not “birds.” They cost about $9 million and the Coast Guard has almost 100 of them, all of which come with “George,” an autopilot system that allows both pilots to keep their eyes out of the cockpit much of the time, searching for lost or distressed victims.
Six of the Dolphins are based in Savannah. Every morning at about 10, a crew of four jumps in one and flies it to a hangar at Charleston Executive Airport on Johns Island, passing a similar hunk of orange hardware heading south. Two pilots, a flight mechanic and a rescue swimmer, all ready to rescue at sea from Beaufort to Wilmington, make up the crew.
Fishermen have heart attacks. Shrimpers get stuck in pluff mud. Playboys inadvertently clean the bottom of their yachts on the jetties. In South Carolina, you don’t have to have any kind of license to drive a boat. And then there is hurricane season.
“It’s kind of like being in the fire department. You never know what you’re going to see,” says Lt. JG Jeff Jacobs, one of about 22 pilots stationed in Savannah. “It seems like it’s always at night and always inclement
weather. And in the summer, you just plan on flying all day.”
A lot of the calls are flare sightings. Orange and red flares are considered signs of distress, and the Coast Guard checks them all out. Like cops responding to burglar alarms, most of the time it’s nothing, but they never know.
At any given time, the Johns Island crews have to be able to be in the air within 30 minutes, so they don’t roam far. They can make it to the grocery store and about three restaurants. But they typically stick close to the hangar. In Savannah, they all have desk jobs, so the Charleston detail affords time to shoot hoops, play a little X-box and catch up on e-mail.
The Coast Guard also is big on preparation, encouraging its personnel to stay well-oiled with training flights if nothing else is going on. The Dolphin is relatively cheap to run. In an hour, it might burn about $300 in fuel, compared with a fighter plane, which may swallow about $4,000 in the same amount of time.
On a recent Sunday, four of the Savannah-based crew head out to sharpen their skills. They cram in disposable earplugs, pull on one-piece orange survival suits, yank down their helmets and hop into the “plane.”
“How do you guys feel about leaving the door open?” asks Lt. Corey Braddock.
Braddock, 34, is originally from South Dakota. He spent eight years flying Black Hawk helicopters in South Korea and jumped to the Coast Guard four years ago, surrendering some rank for a chance to sleep at home every night — well, almost every night. The other bonus is the machinery. He says the Black Hawk compares to the Dolphin as a Dodge pick-up compares to a Corvette. With 2,000 hours at the yoke, Braddock exudes a focused nonchalance and seems to almost wear the helicopter.
Michael Conell leaves the door open. Conell, the flight mechanic, is another dry-land guy. A native of Oklahoma, he started his service on a boat and scrapped into the sky.
“It wasn’t fun, I knew I wanted to go AET,” Conell explains, referring to the Coast Guard’s Aircraft Electrical Technician training.
Photo by Alan Hawes
Coast Guard rescue helicopter crew members (left to right) Matthew Laub, Cale Bradley, Robin Stolz and Ryan Allen sit in front of their Dolphin HH-65C helicopter after rescuing a missing kayaker about 5 miles off Fripp Island this spring.
Though his slight build and fine features belie his 27 years, Conell is shrewd and more austere than either pilot. He scurries around the inside of the helicopter like a ping-pong player: flipping switches, checking seat belts, tightening hardware and plugging in radios.
The big orange machine rolls out onto the runway and is suddenly airborne. It doesn’t get louder. It doesn’t shake. It simply lifts into the air like a glass being cleared from a table. With the door open, it feels like getting away with something, like a kid on a boat dragging his feet in the water.
In seconds, the Dolphin is banking over dolphins, flashing like dropped dimes in the Intracoastal Waterway 50 feet below. It banks over Kiawah Island and heads up the coast at a leisurely 120 knots, roughly 138 miles per hour.
“Bird off the front.”
The helicopter makes a quick tilt to the right and then levels.
That’s Jacobs. A native of Virginia, the only saltwater kid in the crew. Jacobs came up through the Coast Guard. Officer school in Connecticut, then 100 hours in a “fixed-wing” plane.
With only 600 hours in a helicopter, compared to Braddock’s 2,000, Jacobs already has a great rescue story: A scuba diver who surfaced 70 miles off of Edisto Beach with his boat nowhere to be seen. The Dolphins looked for him all day and all night before Jacobs flew right over him on his way home.
“We were almost out of gas,” he recalls. “We just popped down into a hover, yanked him out and made a beeline.”
Jacobs and Braddock cruise over Folly Beach, the route that engenders such envy from the tide-tugged masses. They loop around Fort Sumter, skirt the USS Yorktown, do an about-face near the paper mill in North Charleston and split the towers of the Cooper River Bridge like a perfect, hovering field goal.
In minutes, the helicopter is hovering over the harbor and Conell is throwing out “Randy,” a weighted dummy that stands eerily erect in the water.
As Randy bobs, autopilot “George” holds it steady at 15 feet.
Jason Booher, the rescue swimmer, pulls off his helmet and yanks on his snorkel, mask and fins. He scoots past Conell and hangs his legs out of the open door.
Booher doesn’t say much. He grew up in Kentucky and never considered himself a waterman.
“Swimming wasn’t my thing,” he’ll tell you. But when he put in for training, Booher found that he was comfortable in the water. When the rotor-wash was whipping the surface into a froth and panicked boaters clutched at his head, he was strangely calm.
“It’s worth the wait,” Booher said.
Photo by Alan Hawes
Rescue swimmer Jason Booher jumbs out of the helicopter hovering about 15 feet above Charleston Harbor.
He works out incessantly, which makes sense, because he’s the guy that gets left behind if there isn’t enough room in the helicopter.
Conell unbuckles the belt around Booher’s waist, thumps him twice on the shoulder and shouts something in his ear. Booher freezes, staring at the water for a moment. Maybe he’s praying. Maybe he’s running through a mental check-list. Whatever he’s doing, it doesn’t take long. He disappears.
In two seconds, Booher is crawling through the wind-whipped water towards Randy, languidly cranking each arm like a bullpen pitcher starting his warm-up.
Hanging out the open door, Conell lowers a cable and directs the pilots: “Easy forward and right. Right 15. Right 10. Right 5. Hold.”
Booher hooks himself on the dummy. Conell presses the button to winch up the cable.
“Prepare to take weight. Taking the weight. Clear back and left.”
The crew do variations on this drill four times. At one point, they fly off from Booher and he virtually disappears. At just 100 feet, he’s hard to spot until he pops a canister of red smoke. A crowd quickly forms,
“Heck, I’d come out and watch, too, if I was in a boat,” Braddock says.
Back at the hangar, tattered, sun-bleached life jackets line the walls, each of them scribbled with black marker giving terse details of disaster averted.
“Going Deep:” 22’ Hyrdo Sport overturned 18 miles from Charleston. 3 lives.
“Super Suds II:” 5/18/06. 5 lives.
“Still Crazy:” 9/16/06. 1 life.
“M/V Missla:” June 25, 04. 3 lives, 1 dog.
In the past five years, Coast Guard helicopters flying out of Charleston saved 84 lives and “assisted” another 225 people. For Braddock, that beats ferrying troops around South Korea.
“Your job is to fly a helicopter along the beach, and you get to help people,” he says. “Coast Guard aviation is the best-kept secret in the world, as far as I’m concerned.”
That’s certainly what it looks like to all of us suckers bobbing in the waves.
Kyle Stock is a reporter for The Post and Courier. Reach him at 937-5763 or kstock@postandcourier.com.
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