The Perfect Storm

And because they have a wartime mission, the PJs also practice military maneuvers. They parachute into the ocean at night with inflatable speedboats. They parachute into the ocean at night with scuba gear and go straight into a dive. They deploy from a submarine by air-lock and swim to a deserted coast. They train with shotguns, grenade launchers, M-16s, and six-barreled “mini-guns.” (Mini-guns fire six thousand rounds a minute and can cut down trees.) And finally—once they’ve mastered every conceivable battle scenario—they learn something called HALO jumping.

HALO stands for High Altitude Low Opening; it’s used to drop PJs into hot areas where a more leisurely deployment would get them all killed. In terms of violating the constraints of the physical world, HALO jumping is one of the more outlandish things human beings have ever done. The PJs jump from so high up—as high as 40,000 feet—that they need bottled oxygen to breathe. They leave the aircraft with two oxygen bottles strapped to their sides, a parachute on their back, a reserve ’chute on their chest, a full medical pack on their thighs, and an M-16 on their harness. They’re at the top of the troposphere—the layer where weather happens—and all they can hear is the scream of their own velocity. They’re so high up that they freefall for two or three minutes and pull their ’chutes at a thousand feet or less. That way, they’re almost impossible to kill.

THE H-60 flies through relative calm for the first half-hour, and then Ruvola radios the tanker plane and says he’s coming in for a refueling. A hundred and forty pounds of pressure are needed to trigger the coupling mechanism in the feeder hose—called the “drogue”—so the helicopter has to close on the tanker plane at a fairly good rate of speed. Ruvola hits the drogue on the first shot, takes on 700 pounds of fuel, and continues on toward the southeast. Far below, the waves are getting smeared forward by the wind into an endless series of scalloped white crests. The crew is heading into the worst weather of their lives.

The rules governing H-60 deployments state that “intentional flight into known or forecast severe turbulence is prohibited.” The weather report faxed by McGuire Air Force Base earlier that day called for moderate to severe turbulence, which was just enough semantic protection to allow Ruvola to launch. They were trained to save lives, and this is the kind of day that lives would need saving. An hour into the flight Dave Ruvola comes in for the second refueling and pegs the drogue after four attempts, taking on 900 pounds of fuel. The two aircraft break apart and continue hammering toward Tomizawa.

They are on-scene ten minutes later, in almost complete dark. Spillane has spent the flight slowly putting his wetsuit on, trying not to sweat too much, trying not to dehydrate himself. Now he sits by the spotter’s window looking out at the storm. A Coast Guard C-130 circles at five hundred feet and the Air National Guard tanker circles several hundred feet above that. Their lights poke feebly into the swarming darkness. Ruvola establishes a low hover aft of the sailboat and flips on his floods, which throw down a cone of light from the belly of the aircraft. Spillane can’t believe what he sees: massive foam-laced swells rising and falling in the circle of light, some barely missing the belly of the helicopter. Twice he has to shout for altitude to keep the helicopter from getting slapped out of the sky.

The wind is blowing so hard that the rotor wash, which normally falls directly below the helicopter, is forty feet behind it; it lags the way it normally does when the helicopter is flying ahead at eighty knots. Despite the conditions, Spillane still assumes he and Rick Smith are going to deploy by sliding down a three-inch-thick “fastrope” into the sea. The question is, what will they do then? The boat looks like it’s moving too fast for a swimmer to catch, which means Tomizawa will have to be extracted from the water, like the Satori crew was. But that would put him at a whole other level of risk; there’s a point at which sporty rescues become more dangerous than sinking boats. While Spillane considers Tomizawa’s chances, flight engineer Jim Mioli gets on the intercom and says he has doubts about retrieving anyone from the water. The waves are rising too fast for the hoist controls to keep up, so there’ll be too much slack around the basket at the crests of the waves. If a man were caught in a loop of cable and the wave dropped out from under him, he’d be cut in half.

For the next twenty minutes Ruvola keeps the helicopter in a hover over the sailboat while the crew peers out the jump door, discussing what to do. They finally agree that the boat looks pretty good in the water—she’s riding high, relatively stable—and that any kind of rescue attempt will put Tomizawa in more danger than he is already in. He should stay with his boat. We’re out of our league, boys, Ruvola finally says over the intercom. We’re not going to do this. Ruvola gets the C-130 pilot on the radio and tells him their decision, and the C-130 pilot relays it to the sailboat. Tomizawa, desperate, radios back that they don’t have to deploy their swimmers at all—just swing the basket over and he’ll rescue himself. No, that’s not the problem, Buschor answers. We don’t mind going in the water; we just don’t think a rescue is possible.

Ruvola backs away and the tanker plane drops two life rafts connected by eight hundred feet of line, in case Tomizawa’s boat starts to founder, and then the two aircraft head back to base. (Tomizawa was eventually picked up by a Romanian freighter.) Ten minutes into the return flight Ruvola lines up on the tanker for the third time, hits the drogue immediately and takes on 1,560 pounds of fuel.

They’ll need one more refueling in order to make shore. Spillane settles into the portside spotter’s seat and stares down at the ocean a thousand feet below. If Mioli hadn’t spoken up, he and Rick Smith might be swimming around down there, trying to get back into the rescue basket. They’d have died. In conditions like these, so much water gets loaded into the air that swimmers drown simply trying to breathe.

MONTHS later, after the Air National Guard has put the pieces together, it will determine that gaps had developed in the web of resources designed to support an increased-risk mission over water. At any given moment someone had the necessary information for keeping Ruvola’s helicopter airborne, but that information wasn’t disseminated correctly during the last hour of Ruvola’s flight. Several times a day, mission or no mission, McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey faxes weather bulletins to Suffolk Airbase for their use in route planning. If Suffolk is planning a difficult mission, they might also call McGuire for a verbal update on flight routes, satellite information, etc. Once the mission is underway, one person—usually the tanker pilot—is responsible for obtaining and relaying weather information to all the pilots involved in the rescue. If he needs more information, he calls Suffolk and tells them to get it; without the call, Suffolk doesn’t actively pursue weather information. They are, in the words of the accident investigators, “reactive” rather than “proactive” in carrying out their duties.

In Ruvola’s case, McGuire Air Force Base has real-time satellite information showing a massive rain band developing off Long Island between 7:30 and 8:00 PM—just as he is starting back for Suffolk. Suffolk never calls McGuire for an update, though, because the tanker pilot never asks for one; and McGuire never volunteers the information because they don’t know there is an Air Guard helicopter out there in the first place. Were Suffolk to call McGuire for an update, they’d learn that Ruvola’s route is blocked by severe weather, but that he can avoid it by flying fifteen minutes to westward. As it is, the tanker pilot calls Suffolk for a weather update and gets a report of an 8,ooo-foot ceiling, fifteen-mile visibility, and low-level wind shear. He passes that information on to Ruvola, who—having left the worst of the storm behind him—reasonably assumes that conditions will only improve as he flies westward. All he has to do is refuel before hitting the wind shear that is being recorded around the air field. Ruvola—they all—are wrong.

The rain band is a swath of clouds fifty miles wide, eighty miles long, and 10,000 feet thick. It is getting dragged into the low across the northwest quadrant of the storm; winds are seventy-five knots and the visibility is zero. Satellite imagery shows the rain band swinging across Ruvola’s flight path like a door slamming shut. At 7:55, Ruvola radios the tanker pilot to confirm a fourth refueling, and the pilot rogers it. The refueling is scheduled for five minutes later, at precisely eight o’clock. At 7:56, turbulence picks up a little, and at 7:58 it reaches moderate levels. Let’s get this thing done, Ruvola radios the tanker pilot. At 7:59 he pulls the probe release, extends it forward, and moves into position for contact. And then it hits.

Headwinds along the leading edge of the rain band are so strong that it feels as if the helicopter has been blown to a stop. Ruvola has no idea what he’s run into; all he knows is that he can barely control the aircraft. Flying has become as much a question of physical strength as of finesse; he grips the collective with one hand, the joystick with the other, and leans forward to peer through the rain rattling off the windscreen. Flight manuals bounce around the cockpit and his copilot starts throwing up in the seat next to him. Ruvola lines up on the tanker and tries to hit the drogue, but the aircraft are moving around so wildly that it’s like throwing darts down a gun barrel; hitting the target is pure dumb luck. In technical terms, Ruvola’s aircraft is doing things “without inputs from the controls”; in human terms, it’s getting batted around the sky. Ruvola tries as low as three hundred feet—“along