If All Else Fails, the Air Force Rescue Flight Unit Takes Over

Cold, wet and shivering, Amanda Duclos and Joann Ruddach huddled in the dark on Mt. Spokane, hours after they had ridden their snowboards out of bounds from a ski area.

The Ski Patrol, their families and others spent hours searching unsuccessfully for the 14-year-olds as night fell and temperatures dropped below freezing.

It was about 12:20 a.m. when the girls heard the distinctive whomp, whomp, whomp of an Air Force UH-1N Huey helicopter of the 36th Rescue Flight from Spokane’s Fairchild Air Force Base.

A hundred feet above the trees, Maj. Randy Kelly and three crew members peered into the darkness through night-vision goggles. The Huey’s sophisticated Forward-Looking Infrared Radar, which scans for sources of heat, was not working properly, so it was strictly a visual search.

As Kelly banked to make a right turn to top a ravine, he saw movement out of the corner of his eye at the edge of a small clearing.

It was Amanda and Joann, screaming, jumping and waving their arms.

Within minutes, Kelly set the helicopter down in the clearing--not much wider than its 50-foot-diameter rotor blades--and flight medic Master Sgt. Patrick Kern was wading through waist-deep snow to reach the girls. They had become the 584th and 585th “saves” of the rescue unit since its founding at Fairchild in 1971.

The unit, which is attached to the Air Force Survival School, trains for such mountain operations as part of its civilian search and rescue mission in an area from the Cascades in Washington to the Rockies in Montana.

The helicopters are used specifically for finding lost hunters or skiers, and are not the type the military uses to extricate soldiers from combat situations, Kelly said.

Since 1956, when the National Search and Rescue Plan was published, military people and equipment have been available to assist local and state agencies in life-or-death emergencies. Each mission is authorized by the Air Force Rescue Coordination Center at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia.

Last year, the center answered 7,333 calls for assistance and authorized 2,821 missions in the contiguous 48 states, spokesman Capt. John Murphy said.

The center has cooperative agreements that the military will respond only after state and local authorities have exhausted all their resources, Murphy said.

Air Force search and rescue crews have been involved in notable missions in past years, including two in 1999: the search for John F. Kennedy Jr.’s downed airplane off Martha’s Vineyard and tracking the private jet flying on autopilot in which golfer Payne Stewart died.

More recently, military aircraft participated in mercy flights, carrying human blood and organs to hospitals in New York City and Washington when civilian flights were grounded after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Murphy said.

Air Force helicopters and aircraft also are used for medical evacuations when no commercial transportation is available, a person’s life is in jeopardy, and time is critical.

Air Force helicopters are used extensively in rescues of civilians, mostly skiers, hikers and hunters who get lost in the mountains, but also searches for downed pilots or Alzheimer’s patients and children who wander away from home.

In the case of Amanda and Joann, searchers worked about seven hours before the Fairchild crews arrived.

Although the girls had a cellular telephone, searchers were unable to determine their location before the batteries failed, Joann’s mother, Karla Ruddach said.

“We have unique equipment that no one else has,” flight commander Lt. Col. J. Matthew Lyons said. The four helicopters are equipped with infrared radar, called FLIR, and 250-foot hoists.

Their primary purpose is to support operations of the Air Force Survival School here, which trains Air Force flight crews in techniques for surviving and evading capture after their planes are downed in remote or hostile areas.

“The training missions we fly for the Survival School have a direct application to civilian uses,” Lyons said.

The 14-year-olds visited the flight’s headquarters April 11 to thank Kelly and his crew for saving their lives the previous weekend.

“This is why we fly helicopters,” Kern said.

When they were rescued, the girls’ body temperatures had dropped to 95 degrees, but they were able to go home after being warmed and checked at the Mt. Spokane Ski Patrol. They took all the fuss in stride.

“We really didn’t think we’d be there that long,” Amanda said. “We really didn’t think they’d call out the Air Force.”