 About the series: As the attention of the world in August turned to efforts to rescue four survivors of a Western Alaska plane crash that left former Sen. Ted Stevens and four others dead, a separate effort was under way to save five people trapped on a glacier some 300 miles away. With a mountain storm raging, the men of the Alaska Air National Guard's 210th, 211th and 212th Rescue Squadrons would go to extraordinary lengths to rescue a pilot and four tourists. This is their story.
|
Part III: After 21 hours spent in exhausting and perilous travel to cover only four miles on the storm-ravaged, crevasse-mined Knik Glacier, Alaska Air National Guard pararescue specialists Maj. Jesse Peterson and Tech Sgt. Chris Uriarte finally reached Don Erbey's downed airplane last August, but Master Sgt. Al Lankford and Tech. Sgt. Angel Santana were nowhere to be found.
At the crash site, Peterson and Uriarte determined quickly that the five people huddled in the wreckage of the downed Piper Cherokee 8,500 feet high in the Chugach Mountains would survive. None of them were seriously injured. The intact fuselage of the airplane provided a good shelter. And the guardian angels of the 212th Rescue Squadron, PJs as they are commonly known in Alaska, were equipped and prepared to babysit the group for days if it took that long for the blizzard savaging the high country to blow itself out.
Now, the worry for Peterson and Uriarte was about their colleagues. Wandering around blind in blowing snow near the coordinates of Erbey's crash the night before, the duo had agreed on a plan to split with Lankford and Santana in order to cover more ground. The PJs' global positioning satellite receivers put them on top of the crash site, but they couldn't find the plane. GPS is usually accurate to within 50 to 100 feet, but that was not good enough in a storm that cut visibility to 10 feet or less.
Two groups, they all knew, could search more area than one. So, Peterson and Uriarte, roped together in case of a crevasse fall, wandered away from the similarly roped Lankford and Santana. They were quickly out of sight and out of touch. The PJ's had lost radio contact due to wet batteries.
Once Peterson and Uriate found the wreckage, they thought they might be able to signal the others with old-fashioned means, but that proved almost laughable. "We tried launching flares," Peterson said. "We tried smoke." Mother Nature scoffed at the efforts. The flares and smoke disappeared into the white maelstrom swirling over the glacier.
Lankford and Santana, who were within a quarter-mile of the plane, never saw a thing. They had no clue that Peterson and Uriarte had found the downed airplane. So they continued wandering the rolling terrain of the glacier. Around midnight, they finally just gave up.
"Al made the call that maybe we should bed down," Santana said.
Finding a way home
Lankford had the most Alaska experience of all the PJs. Santana wasn't going to debate Lankford's suggestion. They pitched their tent and crawled inside. They were within shouting distance of the downed aircraft, but with the winds still roaring on the glacier, shouting was a worthless exercise.
Lankford and Santana wouldn't find the plane until the next day. At daylight the following morning, they broke camp, skied up a hill, and from there "we see the aircraft, and we see Jesse," Santana said. Or, more accurately, the 5-foot, 6-inch-tall Santana saw the plane and Peterson. The 6-foot, 7-inch-tall Lankford still had his head up in the storm. He didn't see anything. Santana suggested the big man crouch down and take another look; visibility was better below the clouds.
"We were ecstatic," Santana added.
Finally, everything seemed to be coming together. The search party from the 212th had been reunited. They had the survivors of the plane crash under their care. The storm appeared to be starting to break at last. Visibility had improved, according to Peterson, from less than 100 feet to a quarter-mile. All they had to do now was arrange an "extraction," as he called it. This is PJ jargon for "a ride home."
Peterson and Lankford were on the radio making the preparations when they learned that over the course of 24 hours their situation had changed radically. Another storm far to the west had contributed to another plane crash. Three-hundred-fifty miles away, a single-engine deHavilland Turbo Otter had gone down near Dillingham, killing five, including former U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens and Dana Tindall, senior vice president for one of the state's most influential businesses, General Communication Inc. Four others, including Sean O'Keefe, the former director of NASA, had been seriously injured and were being medevaced to Anchorage.
The date was Tuesday, Aug. 10. Lankford broke the news about the Stevens crash. It had temporarily taken precedence over the Knik rescue. Knowing everyone was safe there, Kulis Air National Guard Base at Elmendorf near Anchorage had decided to divert the C-130 Hercules flying top cover at Knik and the Pave Hawk helicopter there across the state to aid in the second rescue now under way.
Lankford warned Erbey it might be day before anyone could get them off the glacier. Erbey took that in stride, but was heartbroken about the news that Stevens had died. An Alaskan for more than 30 years, and a diesel mechanic at Elmendorf Air Force Base, Erbey was familiar with Stevens' long advocacy for stationing the 210th, 211th and 212th Rescue Squadrons in Alaska.
"It was due to him that the PJs had what they had to come and get us,'' Erbey said.
'It was just surreal'
A former Army Air Force pilot and a staunch advocate for Alaskans, Stevens long argued that saving the lives of his constituents in the wildest, most remote corners of North America on a regular basis was the best training the PJs could get for their combat mission of saving downed pilots. Now, as one group of PJs scrambled to save the four survivors of the Stevens crash, another group tried to calm a group of Knik Glacier campers somewhat rattled by the noticeable disappearance of rescue assets.
"It was then we realized it was quiet outside," Texan Mary Jan Lantz recalled. Gone was the comforting growl of the C-130 high overhead. It had so long been audible in the lulls between the storm's wind gusts, a sound the visiting Lantzes from Galveston at first mistook for jet aircraft. "I had to tell them that's no jet; that's the wind going through the peaks," Erbey said.
The Lantzes eventually came to distinguish the jet-like roar of the wind from the rumble of a C-130. "We could hear it circling and it was good you could hear somebody up there," Mary Jan recalled.
Absent that C-130 and the Pave Hawk helicopter that had flew in coordination with it, rescue coordinators were trying to arrange alternative transport. The Rescue Coordination Center at Elmendorf first called on Alaska State Troopers to make a try. A trooper helicopter pilot made several attempts to reach the glacier encampment only to be turned back by bad weather. The pilot finally gave up and went back to the Palmer airport. So the RCC next called on a pair of Alaska Army National Guard UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters returning from a mission in Fairbanks. Erbey heard the big black birds come thump-thump-thumping up the glacier late in the afternoon.
Uriarte said he and Peterson first spotted the helicopters about a half-mile down glacier and watched them come on. "They did a hover check out about 300 or 400 meters from us," Peterson added. "Then they did a 180, and one just sort of fell out of the sky."
According to the official Army National Guard report, one of the helicopters touched down and then tipped over. But it looked more like a crash to the observers on the mountain.
"It was just surreal," Uriarte said. "They went from being a helicopter to metal on the glacier in a second."
"You fear the worst when you see something like that," Peterson added. The PJs instinctively started running toward the wreckage to see if there was anyone alive and needing rescue.
"Thank God, by the time we got there, people were climbing out of the fuselage," Uriarte said. Miraculously, no one had been seriously injured.
"We did a pretty good assessment," Santana said. "They were fine, just in shock."
The same might be said for just about everyone on the glacier at that point. The number of crash victims had just gone from five to eight, with four PJs now storm-trapped with them. But the Black Hawk crew was at least better dressed than Erbey and the Texans had been; there was survival gear aboard the crashed helicopter; and the PJs had managed to locate and retrieve some supplies air-dropped in the area in an earlier and failed attempt to supply the underdressed, unequipped plane-crash survivors.
At least this time everyone would be in better shape for what was expected might be a long stay. This assessment, however, underestimated the skill and tenacity of the men who fly the Air Guards Pave Hawks, a sister-ship to the Black Hawk outfitted for aerial refueling. Aerial refueling capabilities give the Pave Hawks a long range and a huge linger time over a rescue scene. They can hunt and search for hours to find a break in the weather.
Three or four hours after the Black Hawk crash, they found such a break. Once again, helicopters came lumbering up the glacier. The conditions were still bad, the light so flat and deceptive the Pave Hawk crew brought along a load of spruce boughs they could toss out onto the glacier as they worked their way toward the wreckage of Erbey's plane. The dark green boughs marked the transition from glacier to sky.
"They really pushed the envelope to get up there," Peterson said. The visibility was bad and the air thin. Because of the latter, the crew elected to take out only Mary Jan and her two sons, 22-year-old David and 27-year-old Patrick to keep their load light. Even then, the departure was dicey. It was nerve-wracking to watch the Pave Hawk as it slipped down the glacier, unable to gain more than 20 or 30 feet of altitude above the ice. Uriarte said he actually found himself shouting, "Get up! Get up!"
Eventually, the helicopter did. It had three of the four Lantzes back in civilization within a hour. Everyone else would wait a day and then leave in a mad rush. "It was about 11 o'clock that next morning when two more helicopters were able to get up there," Peterson said. Everyone threw together gear as fast as they could, crammed it into the helicopters and scrambled aboard.
The Army would return days later to retrieve the crashed helicopter. The Lantzes would by then be safely back home in Texas, having survived an Alaska adventure far bigger than they wanted.
From getting along to the blame game
Erbey's plane was eventually flown off the glacier, too, and written off as a total loss. That marked the end of a string of bad luck that started with a favor for a friend. Erbey volunteered to take the Lantzes on a free flightseeing tour only to end up in a butt-puckering storm that caused him to crash land and total his father's Piper Cherokee. He was lucky to survive, but his passengers were not happy with him when he discovered the plane lacked a survival kit. It had apparently been taken out when the airplane was cleaned.
After the crash and while awaiting rescue, Erbey said, everyone managed to get along OK, but the relationship quickly deteriorated after the rescue. Mary Jan blames Erbey for the accident. Erbey admits he misjudged the weather, but he did manage to crash-land the plane on the glacier with no real injures to anyone other than himself. He hit his nose hard on the dash of the plane and will have a scar to remind him of the accident forever, and he's still apologizing to his father for destroying the airplane.
The PJs, meanwhile, are quietly giving thanks they, too, got out of this one OK. Flying low over the glacier in the helicopter after that extraction, they looked down at the ground they'd covered with a sense of amazement. The glacier was a maze of crevasses. It was hard to believe they'd made it through without falling in a single one.
"I was fine with the crevasses," Peterson would add later, shaking his head, "but that serac hanging above us ... with the terrain sloping down at about 50 degrees to a crevasse? It was the most challenging part. It was trying."
A lot of this rescue was trying, but the PJs are reluctant to make make too much of it. "There were four of us on the glacier," Peterson said, "but there were seriously hundreds of people behind us working on this." All of them -- pilots, navigators, maintenance men, air-traffic controllers and others -- were part of the rescue. The five "saves," as the rescue squadrons keep track of the Alaskans retrieved alive from the wild, really belong to a big bunch of people. All of them, the PJs said, deserve credit. Some of them just missed out on the truly scary parts.
"We got a real taste of Alaska," Uriarte said, and happily everyone came back alive.
"It was pretty traumatic," Mary Jan said months later by telephone from her office along the warm Gulf of Mexico, "but those guys were pretty awesome."
It is one feeling the Lantzes and Erbey still share.
"They risked their lives to save us," he said. "I can't say enough about those guys."
Contact Craig Medred at craig(at)alaskadispatch.com.