Interesting Call
I am a bit over half way through my 14 day tour. The fog was closing in on three sides of the airport and I went to bed thinking we would get fogged in and have a quite night. Then just before midnight we get a page to head east to hoist 6 hikers off of a ridge. Apparently they had gone for a hike and as it got dark they lost the trail and got stuck. This was all happening about 35 miles east of us in the Japatul Valley, east of San Diego. I didn't get much more information than  that and the immediate thought that I had was about how much fuel I should have, but the 412 is heavy enough that you have to be careful about fuel loads. I had added a bit of extra fuel earlier in the day for another flight that we had scheduled but had fallen through. So I decided to go with what we had. Once we arrived at scene we had to locate the victims, locate an area to bring the victims to after we hoisted them out and then arrange for the police to get to that location to handle that end of things. Our first bit of luck was that the cops had already located and set up at a good landing zone so after locating that site we reconfigured the aircraft into a hoist configuration and flew back the the ridge line to start hoisting these people out. Watching the fuel, I knew we needed to get this done as quickly as we could and we came up with a plan to accomplish that as well as making a back up plan in the event we ran low on fuel and couldn't make it back to base. Breaking policy a bit (I like to call it improvising) we decided that we would close the normally open left rear sliding door to prevent somebody from falling out, have the medic bring up one victim, seat belt him in and the  send the medic down to get a second victim and go to the landing zone and drop two victims off at a time. That cut us back to only having to return to the landing zone three times with the victims. With the landing zone being about 5 miles away, that saved us a bunch of time. Another time saver was doing the hoist at 50 feet instead of the normal 150 feet. Doing that you blow the daylights out of the people on the ground but you can do the hoist faster. All of the hoist operations went off like clock work and we got all 6 of the victims out within about 45 - 50 minute. The total flight time for the mission ended up being an hour and a half which I think is pretty fast. After dropping off the last of the victims, we started for the base before the victims had even walked over to the cop car and I pedaled as fast as I could to get back. Now the low fuel light comes on in the 412 at about 420 pounds of fuel remaining. That light came on when we hit a 1 mile final and we landed back at base with 410 pounds of fuel which is as close as I care to take it (I normally am on the ground at about 500 pounds of fuel). But it was a good call, and it was a first. I don't know of us ever doing 6 hoists in a day let alone on one call. Fun stuff!
- posted by mike @ 7:44 PM