The Perfect Storm

the ragged edges of the clouds,” as he says—and as high as 4,500 feet, but he can’t find clean air. The visibility is so bad that even with night-vision goggles on, he can barely make out the wing lights of the tanker plane in front of him. And they are right—right—on top of it; several times they overshoot the drogue and Spillane thinks they are going to take the plane’s rudder off.

Ruvola has made twenty or thirty attempts on the drogue—a monstrous feat of concentration—when the tanker pilot radios that he has to shut down his number one engine. The oil pressure gauge is fluctuating wildly and they are risking a burnout. The pilot starts in on the shutdown procedure, and suddenly the left-hand fuel hose retracts; shutting off the engine has disrupted the air flow around the wing, and the reel-in mechanism has mistaken that for too much slack. It performs what is known as an “uncommanded retraction.” The pilot finishes shutting down the engine, brings Ruvola back in, and then reextends the hose. Ruvola lines up on it and immediately sees that something is wrong. The drogue is shaped like a small parachute, and ordinarily it fills with air and holds the hose steady; now it is just convulsing behind the tanker plane. It has been destroyed by forty-five minutes of desperate refueling attempts.

Ruvola tells the tanker pilot that the left-hand drogue is shot and that they have to switch over to the other side. In these conditions refueling from the right-hand drogue is a nightmarish, white-knuckle business because the helicopter probe also extends from the right-hand side of the cockpit, so the pilot has to come even tighter into the fuselage of the tanker to make contact. Ruvola makes a run at the right-hand drogue, misses, comes in again, and misses again. The usual technique is to watch the tanker’s wing flaps and anticipate where the drogue’s going to go, but the visibility is so low that Ruvola can’t even see that far; he can barely see past the nose of his own helicopter. Ruvola makes a couple more runs at the drogue, and on his last attempt he comes in too fast, overshoots the wing, and by the time he’s realigned himself the tanker has disappeared. They’ve lost an entire C- 130 in the clouds. They are at 4,000 feet in zero visibility with roughly twenty minutes of fuel left; after that they will just fall out of the sky. Ruvola can either keep trying to hit the drogue, or he can try to make it down to sea level while they still have fuel.

We’re going to set up for a planned ditching, he tells his crew. We’re going to ditch while we still can. And then Dave Ruvola drops the nose of the helicopter and starts racing his fuel gauge down to the sea.

John Spillane, watching silently from the spotters seat, is sure he’s just heard his death sentence. “Throughout my career I’ve always managed—just barely—to keep things in control,” says Spillane. “But now, suddenly, the risk is becoming totally uncontrollable. We can’t get fuel, we’re going to end up in that roaring ocean, and we’re not gonna be in control anymore. And I know the chances of being rescued are practically zero. I’ve been on a lot of rescue missions, and I know they can hardly even find someone in these conditions, let alone recover them. We’re some of the best in the business—best equipped, best trained. We couldn’t do a rescue a little while earlier, and now we’re in the same situation. It looks real bleak. It’s not going to happen.”

While Ruvola is flying blindly downward through the clouds, copilot Buschor issues a mayday on an Air National Guard emergency frequency and then contacts the Tamaroa, fifteen miles to the northeast. He tells them they are out of fuel and about to set up for a planned ditching. Captain Brudnicki orders the Tam’s searchlights turned up into the sky so the helicopter can give them a bearing, but Buschor says he can’t see a thing. Okay, just start heading towards us, the radio dispatcher on the Tarn says. We don’t have time, we’re going down right now, Buschor replies. Jim McDougall, handling the radios at the ODC in Suffolk, receives— simultaneously—the ditching alert and a phone call from Spillane’s wife, who wants to know where her husband is. She’d had no idea there was a problem and just happened to call at the wrong moment; McDougall is so panicked by the timing that he hangs up on her. At 9:08, a dispatcher at Coast Guard headquarters in Boston takes a call that an Air National Guard helicopter is going down and scrawls frantically in the incident log: “Helo [helicopter] & 130 enroute Suffolk. Cant refuel helo due visibility. May have to ditch. Stay airborne how long? 20-25 min. LAUNCH!” He then notifies Cape Cod Air Base, where Karen Stimpson is chatting with one of her rescue crews. The five airmen get up without a word, file into the bathroom, and then report for duty out on the tarmac.

Ruvola finally breaks out of the clouds at 9:28, only two hundred feet above the ocean. He goes into a hover and immediately calls for the ditching checklist, which prepares the crew to abandon the aircraft. They have practiced this dozens of times in training, but things are happening so fast that the routines start to fall apart. Jim Mioli has trouble seeing in the dim cabin lighting used with night-vision gear, so he can’t locate the handle of the nine-man life raft. By the time he finds it, he doesn’t have time to put on his Mustang survival suit. Ruvola calls three times for Mioli to read him the ditching checklist, but Mioli is too busy to answer him, so Ruvola has to go through it by memory. One of the most important things on the list is for the pilot to reach down and eject his door, but Ruvola is working too hard to remove his hands from the controls. In military terminology he has become “task-saturated,” and the door stays on.

While Ruvola is trying to hold the aircraft in a hover, the PJs scramble to put together the survival gear. Spillane slings a canteen over his shoulder and clips a one-man life raft to the strap. Jim Mioli, who finally manages to extract the nine-man raft, pushes it to the edge of the jump door and waits for the order to deploy. Rick Smith, draped in survival gear, squats at the edge of the other jump door and looks over the side. Below is an ocean so ravaged by wind that they can’t even tell the difference between the waves and the troughs; for all they know they are jumping three hundred feet. As horrible as that is, though, the idea of staying where they are is even worse. The helicopter is going to drop into the ocean at any moment, and no one on the crew wants to be anywhere nearby when it does.

Only Dave Ruvola will stay on board; as pilot, it is his job to make sure the aircraft doesn’t fall on the rest of his crew. The chances of his escaping with his door still in place are negligible, but that is beside the point. The ditching checklist calls for a certain procedure, a procedure that insures the survival of the greatest number of crew. That Mioli neglects to put on his survival suit is also, in some ways, suicidal, but he has no choice. His duty is to oversee a safe bailout, and if he stops to put his survival suit on, the nine-man raft won’t be ready for deployment. He jumps without his suit.

At 9:30, the number one engine flames out; Spillane can hear the turbine wind down. They’ve been in a low hover for less than a minute. Ruvola calls out on the intercom: The number one’s out! Bail out! Bail out! The number two is running on fumes; in theory, they should flame out at the same time. This is it. They are going down.

Mioli shoves the life raft out the right-hand door and watches it fall, in his words, “into the abyss.” They are so high up that he doesn’t even see it hit the water, and he can’t bring himself to jump in after it. Without telling anyone, he decides to take his chances in the helicopter. Ditching protocol calls for copilot Buschor to remain on board as well, but Ruvola orders him out because he decides Buschor’s chances of survival will be higher if he jumps. Buschor pulls his door-release lever but the door doesn’t pop off the fuselage, so he just holds it open with one hand and steps out onto the footboard. He looks back at the radar altimeter, which is fluctuating between ten feet and eighty, and realizes that the timing of his jump will mean the difference between life and death. Ruvola repeats his order to bail out, and Buschor unplugs the intercom wires from his flight helmet and flips his night-vision goggles down. Now he can watch the waves roll underneath him in the dim green light of enhanced vision. He spots a huge crest, takes a breath, and jumps.

Spillane, meanwhile, is grabbing some last-minute gear. “I wasn’t terrified, I was scared,” he says. “Forty minutes before I’d been more scared, thinking about the possibilities, but at the end I was totally committed. The pilot had made the decision to ditch, and it was a great decision. How many pilots might have just used up the last twenty minutes of fuel trying to hit the drogue? Then you’d fall out of the sky and everyone would die.”

The helicopter is strangely quiet without the number one engine. The ocean below them, in the words of another pilot, looks like a lunar landscape, cratered and gouged and deformed by wind. Spillane spots Rick Smith at the starboard door, poised to jump, and moves towards him. “I’m convinced he was sizing up the waves,” Spillane says. “I wanted desperately to stick together with him. I just had time to sit down, put my arm around his shoulders, and he went. We didn’t have time to say anything—you want to say goodbye, you want to do a lot of things, but there’s no time for that. Rick went, and a split second later, I did.”

According to people who have survived long falls, the acceleration of gravity is so heart-stoppingly fast that it’s more like getting shot downward out of a cannon. A body accelerates roughly twenty miles an hour for every