MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – A 79-year-old cruise ship passenger found unresponsive Dec. 16 is back on land following a high-risk overnight rescue by the California Air National Guard's 129th Rescue Wing.
The wing was contacted the night of Dec. 16 by the U.S. Coast Guard District 11 about a possible rescue mission aboard the Ruby Princess cruise ship, 130 nautical miles southwest of San Francisco.
An HC-130 Combat King II aircraft from the wing's 130th Rescue Squadron redirected from a training exercise around 8 p.m. to put eyes on the cruise ship and get real-time coordinates and weather information. Meanwhile, pararescuemen and helicopter crews were activated at Moffett Air National Guard Base for the mission by the Air Force Rescue Coordination Center.
“We got retasked in the air and there was no flinching,” said U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Mike Baker, one of the HC-130 pilots. “We just turned left and executed because we’ve trained for this multiple times. That rehearsal and that practice makes it so you don’t struggle to do the mission when it comes up.”
Baker and his crew established communications with the cruise ship and circled overhead until a helicopter could arrive.
With offshore winds picking up and a waning crescent moon providing little to no illumination, an HH-60W Jolly Green II helicopter from the 129th Rescue Squadron flew to the ship in a layer of fog that lay between the ocean and the clouds.
Using night-vision goggles to navigate the darkened airspace, pilots reached the ship just after midnight, hovered over its Lido Deck and lowered three of the wing's pararescuemen to take over medical care from the ship's doctor. Less than an hour later, the woman was hoisted onto the helicopter and flown to the Regional Medical Center in San Jose for further treatment.
U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Ben Copley, an HH-60 helicopter pilot, credited the wing's thorough and persistent training as a key factor in the high-risk mission's success during limited visibility and degrading weather conditions over the ocean.
"There's a reason we fly 1,200 hours a year in this helicopter to train," Copley said, touting the variety of daytime and night training scenarios pilots, special missions aviators and pararescuemen complete. "It all prepares us. We couldn't do that unless we did all the little building blocks first."
"We trained to find the boat. We trained to shoot an approach, to hold a stable hover, to hoist the PJs [pararescuemen] off the boat. We trained to do it all on night vision goggles," Copley said. "We don't train to do it inside a fog bank."
He said the wing received sufficient medical certainty early on to make a judgment call about how quickly they needed to reach the woman, despite the weather being beyond what they could legally train in, but within approved operational parameters.
"The mission was approved as a high-risk mission going out the door, which is pretty rare for us," Copley said. "This person was probably going to die today if they didn't get picked up."
Located in the heart of Silicon Valley at the southern end of the San Francisco Bay, the 129th Rescue Wing is home to a triad of rescue capabilities, including rescue aircraft, helicopters and Guardian Angel pararescue Airmen trained for combat rescue in contested environments. At its home station, the unit is the military’s only West Coast rescue wing and conducts high-risk, long-range maritime rescue missions in coordination with the U.S. Coast Guard.
The mission marks the rescue wing's 1,170th life saved.
2nd Lt. Michael Goggins contributed to this story