First Helicopter Civilian Rescue November 29, 1945
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First Helicopter Civilian
Rescue November 29, 1945
"If a man is in need of rescue, an airplane
can come in and throw
flowers on him, and that's just about all."
"But a direct lift aircraft could come in and save his
life
."
Helicopter pioneer Igor
Sikorsky
On November 29, 1945, a Sikorsky R-5 hovers over
a grounded oil barge in Long
Island Sound off Fairfield, CT, to perform the first helicopter hoist rescues
in aviation
history. The rescue site was a short flight from the Sikorsky factory
in Connecticut.
It was half a century ago, the last week of November,
1945, and the East Coast of the United States was besieged by a violent storm,
of rain and snow and exceptionally high tides, all whipped into a frenzy
by near hurricane force winds.
In Lakewood, New Jersey, a chambermaid was crushed
to death when a hotel chimney crashed through the room where she was sleeping.
In Jersey City, a railroad worker was killed when he was blown out of an
open freight car.
In New York, all planes were grounded at LaGuardia
field, many of them sitting like giant ducks in water that had washed in
from Flushing Bay and made half the field a lake. In Boston, 7,000 soldiers
returning from overseas duty in World War II cursed their fate because the
four troopships that held them were rocking in the outer harbor, unable to
dock because of the fierce winds.
And near Fairfield, Connecticut, on a bleak and
wind-tortured reef in Long Island Sound, something wonderful
happened.
Two men stranded on an oil barge and in peril of
being washed overboard were lifted to safety by a hoist on a Sikorsky helicopter.
On that day, Thursday, November 29, 1945, the helicopter entered a new and
promising age.
Joseph Pawlik, captain of the barge aground on Penfield
Reef, off Fairfield, CT, is
lowered to safety from a Sikorsky R-5 helicopter piloted by Jimmy Viner,
the
company chief pilot, assisted by Capt. Jack Beighle of the Army Air Force.
The
Nov. 29, 1945 hoist rescue was the precursor to many thousands of missions
to come.
Helicopters had been used for military, and even
civilian, lifesaving missions during the latter part of World War II. On
January 3, 1944, a Sikorsky helicopter based in Brooklyn was used by the
Coast Guard to fly plasma to injured crewmen of the USS Turner after the
destroyer exploded off Sandy Hook, New Jersey. Later in the year, a helicopter
landed on a sandbar in Jamaica Bay, New York, to rescue a teenager who had
become marooned there, and, on the other side of the world, a helicopter
was used in a combat rescue mission for the first time. An Army lieutenant
rescued the pilot and three passengers of a light plane that had been forced
down behind enemy lines in Burma.
But in those cases the helicopter had landed to
perform the missions. At Fairfield it did not land because it could not land.
Waves were washing over the barge, making a landing impossible. And no boats
could reach the reef because they would be hurled onto the rocks by the waves.
An attempt by men on a small surf boat to get a breeches buoy to the men
on the barge had also failed.
The use of a hoist to lift the two men to safety
was the concluding act of a high drama, played out before a somber group
of people, including Sikorsky employees standing on a beach watching and
hoping, and perhaps silently praying. They knew how high the stakes of failure
might be.
What could have been one more tragedy of the sea
started the day before. In mid afternoon, Texaco barge 397, with two men
aboard, broke adrift from an oil tanker off Bridgeport Harbor and four hours
later, in the dark, smashed onto Penfield Reef off the neighboring town of
Fairfield.
In good weather and at low tide the reef, which
lies a mile offshore, is a pleasant vista of huge rocks known locally as
'the cows" because they look like the backs of a herd of grazing cows. At
high tide, the cows disappear. And in bad weather, in any tide, the reef
is a perilous place.
During the night, the two men on the barge - Capt.
Joseph Pawlik and crewman Steven Penninger - huddled in the cabin and wondered
whether anyone had seen the flares they had set off. As dawn broke, the barge
and the two men seemed doomed. Methodically, giant waves were stripping away
the barge's deck and superstructure.
On Fairfield Beach, a group of townspeople who
had seen the flares joined some policemen, peering at the macabre scene,
as helpless to do anything as the men on the barge. Then someone had the
thought: Sikorsky Aircraft was nearby, in Bridgeport. Maybe ...
"The police called us and said the barge was in
a hell of a shape and asked if we could do anything,' says Jimmy Viner today
at age 87. "I said, 'sure could."
His real first name is Dmitry but he never liked
that and quickly adopted the name Jimmy. Viner even in 1945 was a legend
at Sikorsky Aircraft. He was the salty little guy who at age 15 had followed
his uncle, Igor I. Sikorsky, to America, went to work as one of the first
employees of Sikorsky Aero Engineering Corporation on Long Island, and eventually
became the company's chief test pilot.
A test pilot in the infancy of aviation was a job
that did not promise much longevity but Jimmy Viner did not look on it that
way. He trusted himself. He trusted his uncle. "I never thought of crashing.
If you thought it would go well, it did. You developed faith in the machine.
If you don't have that attitude, you should get out of the business.' He
also had faith in something else. "God was good to me." When the call for
help came, 36-year-old Jimmy Viner yelled for a friend, Capt. Jackson E.
Beighle who was an Army Air Force representative at Sikorsky. They jumped
in the first available helicopter, Jimmy at the controls, and within minutes
were hovering over the crippled barge, where they saw one man come out of
the cabin below and set off a red flare. They dropped a rope with a weight
and a message. They wanted to know how bad it was down there. In a few minutes,
they pulled up the message bag, with a return note. It was very bad. Eight
tanks were leaking. The cabin was full of water. The two men were afraid
the barge would break up.
The two men in the helicopter now knew what they
had to do. Back at the Sikorsky plant was an R-5 helicopter, a model that
first flew two years earlier as an observation and rescue aircraft. The
helicopter recently had been equipped with a hydraulic hoist for experimental
purposes. The idea of pulling someone out of danger by a cable from a helicopter
was a new concept. Only three months before, the Coast Guard held a public
demonstration of the hoist at its helicopter facility at Floyd Bennett Field
in the New York metropolitan area.
But the concept had never been tested in an actual
crisis. Now, unexpectedly, the hoist and the helicopter were going to be
put to the ultimate test. If both didn't function correctly, someone might
die. But if the rescue wasn't attempted, two men might die anyway. There
really was no question.
The first helicopter was quickly flown back to
the plant and the R-5 with the hoist was readied for flight. "We had to get
a rotor blade that had been taken off it and stored but we got it ready in
a very short time,' Jimmy Viner recalls. In a matter of minutes the R-5 was
hovering over the barge, dropping a note that Capt. Beighle had scribbled,
telling the men below to get into the harness that was going to be lowered.
The harness was a simple device that looped under the arms. Each man would
have to hold onto the cable over his head. Otherwise, he would drop out of
the harness.
From left, Jimmy Viner, Sikorsky chief pilot, rescues
Joseph Pawlik and Steven
Penninger, and Capt. Jack Beighle, of the Army Air Force. Penninger and Beighle
demonstrate the rescue harness suspended from the helicopter
hoist.
It worked. The first man, Penninger, was lifted
quickly out of the swirling waters on the barge. But there wasn't enough
room for him inside the helicopter's two-seat cabin. He was transported to
the beach half-inside and half-outside the cabin, hanging onto Beighle while
Jimmy Viner fought the winds.
The experience of the second man, Pawlik, the barge
captain who had observed the tradition of the sea in being the last to leave
his ship, was much more frightening. He was being lifted up when suddenly
the hoist jammed. He was hanging 30 feet below the helicopter. And in that
position, holding onto the cable for dear life, he was transported to shore
in winds so fierce that the sand on the beach was blowing up in
sheets.
It was a sight cheered by the people on the beach
and captured on film by a news photographer. The next day, newspapers all
over the country and the world carried the picture of Pawlik hanging in the
air, heading for safety.
Perhaps it was the timing. World War II, the greatest
bloodbath in the history of man, was over. A new age was dawning which had
to be better, and here was American technology being used to help people.
Perhaps it was because it was a story with a happy ending for a change. Perhaps
it was because the picture of the rescue was so riveting.
Perhaps for all of those reasons, no one could
be unmoved and unaware that something important had happened, that people
trapped in natural or man-made disasters did not necessarily have to die.
In the 50 years since, it is estimated that more than a million lives have
been saved in helicopter rescues, from sinking ships, earthquakes, highway
accidents, from landslides, volcanic eruptions, fires in tall buildings and,
of course, in military conflicts that unfortunately still occur with
regularity.
Today, helicopter rescues are made easier by faster
and more quiet flying machines and many new technological innovations. With
an automated flight control system, a helicopter may actually do much of
the flying by itself, in any weather. The contemporary Sikorsky helicopter
knows exactly where it is at any time and can find any location within its
maximum range by itself. Some helicopters may be refueled in the
air.
Once, the eyes of the pilot were the eyes of the
helicopter. Now, helicopters are equipped with such extended eyes as radar,
low-light television cameras, forward-looking infrared, radio direction finders
and computerized navigation and search capability. A small boat or person
in distress might be spotted briefly in the water but then be lost in turbulent
seas. Today, by the touch of a button in the cockpit, the helicopter will
swiftly bring itself into a hover, insuring that the boat or person will
not be lost. Saving lives is an exact science today.
Modern search and rescue helicopters built by Sikorsky
operate
around the world. A Sikorsky S-76 operated by the Hong Kong
Government Flying Service, performs a hoist rescue next to an
overhanging cliff near the South China Sea.
And even after half a century, there is still a
postscript or two about one of the first, and greatest, steps in that
science.
The first is that Jimmy Viner never again saw the
two men he lifted to safety on November 29, 1945. "I guess maybe I should
have kept in touch, but I didn't.' He did keep in touch with his fellow rescuer.
Beighle later joined Sikorsky Aircraft after he was discharged from the service.
They remained close friends until Mr. Beighle's death six years
ago.
A second postscript is supplied by Sergei I. Sikorsky,
the eldest son of Igor Sikorsky who followed his father into a career in
aviation and retired as an executive of Sikorsky Aircraft a few years
ago.
Fifty years ago, Sergei Sikorsky was a young enlisted
man in the Coast Guard and one of the group experimenting with hoists at
Floyd Bennett Field. When he heard that his older cousin, Jimmy Viner, had
actually rescued two men from a barge in Long Island Sound, he was more thrilled
perhaps than anyone else. He knew a secret about Jimmy Viner and what it
took to go out in high winds, flying close to the water and with the real
possibility that he could wind up in those monstrous waves.
The test pilot, the man known for his fearlessness,
in reality had one major fear, said Sergei Sikorsky. 'He was always terrified
of water. He couldn't swim."
Jimmy Viner, at 87, stands proudly in front of a
Sikorsky S-51 helicopter, the
civil version of the military R-5. Viner performed the first helicopter
hoist
rescue 50 years earlier in an R-5 from the Sikorsky factory in
Connecticut.