We lost our tail rotor!
That's the Hollywood part.
I've seen helicopters crash on tarmacs and different things,
and I haven't seen one explode.
Hey, my name is Dakata Brodie.
I'm a 21-year military veteran.
I served 13 years in the US Coast Guard
as a search-and-rescue-helicopter pilot
and eight years in the Army
as a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter pilot.
Today we're going to look at
helicopter rescue scenes in movies
and judge how real they are.
All right. Tuck them in, boys.
For the Coast Guard, primarily,
we face offshore and going off shores
to effect most of our rescues.
However, the Coast Guard does train
for vertical-surface rescues,
which is what you're seeing right here.
Cliffside, cliff rescues, and everything else.
Just stay perfectly still. I have to stabilize the car, OK?
Hurry!
Rescuer: Car secured.
All right. If that is the hoist hook,
you are in what you call a committed situation.
Every helo pilot would be shaken at this point right now
knowing that the hoist hook is attached to a vehicle
that could fall off.
Not happening. We're not connecting up to any vehicle.
Joby, I'm coming down.
Harrison, you're flying.
So, a pilot going to the back seat?
First of all, you know how much stuff you can knock off?
You could literally turn off both of your engines.
The fact that your vest and everything could snag
and you could flip things off.
We actually had a person turn with their NVGs
sitting on top of their head
and actually hit one of the engines
and knock an engine offline with that.
So, yeah, it's very possible
to actually turn off something inadvertently
just climbing and trying to get to the back of the cabin.
Pilot: Out the door.
Natalie, don't you worry. I'm going to get you out of here!
If I am outside the helicopter,
we have a real bad problem.
As a pilot, I am never outside.
I got you!
Cut it!
Joby, swing!
They were trying to show, like,
the hoist was holding the truck up, right?
The hoist that you have on there about 600 pounds.
So it's not your primary means of holding up anything.
At that point that it was smoking, it was straining so hard.
Now, there is a squib that you could flip the switch
to actually cut and shear that hoist cable,
which is what they were doing at that point.
So somehow they sheared the one cable,
and The Rock and the other person was on a different cable.
I don't know what that is.
I'll say that our helicopter has one cable
that we're going to operate with.
Once that cable gets sheared,
everything is going down with it.
It's not going to happen on so many different levels
on this clip.
This right here is a zero.
Pilot: Where are they?
Tanker's on the way.
Air Force rescue 231.
I don't know why nobody wears NVGs.
Everybody has NVGs on, night-vision goggles on,
in the helicopters. Nobody wears them.
If you have the option of having them on,
yeah, you're going to have them on.
The fuel probe that you just saw,
that's not a standard piece of equipment on helicopters.
There's just certain helicopters
that are either doing some long-range rescues.
Most helicopters do not have that.
Pilot: No!
Your biggest thing at that point is if you miss,
where's that tube that's going that's flowing fuel,
if you're going to cut that thing with the main rotor,
you're talking about damage to the main rotor system.
You'd be in a bad spot at that point.
Looking right now at a lightning strike.
Knock on wood and thank God I've never had that happen.
You risk frying a lot of electronics,
engine-control systems that are on there.
You're hoping that your engines are staying online.
You would probably lose a lot of electronic
AC and DC systems inside the helicopter,
but you should be able to keep flying
unless you got hit in the tail rotor or something.
Every year, the Coast Guard has to do
what's called dunker training.
So we get flipped over in a chair in a pool,
which simulates having to ditch.
You're rolled upside down.
You have to do multiple different egresses
to show that you have the proficiency
to be able to get out of a submerged helicopter.
Every single year, and then every six years,
unless they've changed it, but every six years
you would go to actual school,
where you go through the whole mock-up simulator
of a device going in and rolling over.
So this is a part of the business.
He's got SEAs bottle or HEEDs bottle,
which gives you about two to three minutes at normal breath.
In that mode right there, you have about 10 to 15 seconds
if they're breathing the way I think they are.
But the pure shock of going in
and the water temperature itself
is going to take the breath out of you.
But I do like the realistic aspect
of seeing somebody grab that SEAs bottle
and put that thing in their mouth.
Now, for everybody that flies,
we have emergency jettison handles.
So the normal exits are no longer
going to get you out of the door.
It's too much pressure that's on that door at that point.
So you're literally hitting your emergency jettison
like it's blowing cartridges, and the door pops off.
It just is lifting up the actual door-hinge pins
out of the way so you can create
that full opening at that point.
Anybody's going for that, yeah, you're going to die.
I'd give this one probably about a six.
You can lower me down.
I'll get the two men.
You return and pick us up on my signal.
The theatrics on there is amazing.
They had no business being that close
to a rig that's exploding.
So, we've done multiple rescues in the Gulf of Mexico.
I was stationed at before.
So, flying out to rigs,
rigs typically have burn-offs happening,
but there's always either gases
or stuff like that that's coming off.
So the rigs all have more of escape-type pods and things
for the rig workers to be able to get out
and be able to get off of the rigs,
and then we would effect the rescue from the open water.
To try to go into there again, we're no good to anybody,
and it's so much risk of that flying debris,
shrapnel going through the rotor-blade system.
You're just now a victim.
You're not going to put yourself
or the crew in that situation.
Rescuer: Count five.
Five.
Any standard deployment of the rescue swimmer,
they're just going down.
At that point, you just call it a direct deployment
of the rescue swimmer.
Especially when you're deploying somebody
either to a boat that's underway,
you'll have them down,
you'll have them just off the water or just above.
But to say that you were about to send somebody
through a flame, a blowtorch in essence,
not gonna happen.
Rescuer: One!
When somebody is on the cable,
the hook is actually locked just to prevent any mishap
to where it could inadvertently come open.
For somebody to pirouette
and unhook themself off of the cable
at the same time, that's pretty amazing.
Nobody would be that crazy
to even attempt to put somebody in that situation.
The rescue swimmer would come up
and slap everybody in the helicopter
for even putting them down in something like that.
So absolutely not.
It's completely unrealistic. That's a zero.
Pilot: Swimmers away!
When he jumps from the helicopter,
that's a free-fall deployment of the rescue swimmer.
That is reserved for daytime only,
so we would've only hoisted the rescue swimmer down
at that point, not let him jump from the helicopter.
They're seeing, like, 20-foot swells or something like that.
That means the helicopter is hovering
at least 30 to 40 feet.
You misjudge that swell, that's a four- or five-story drop.
That water turns into a solid real quick,
especially if that was cold temperatures.
I have the ready-for-pickup signal.
Basket is going out of the cabin door.
Basket is in the water.
It's a standard rescue basket.
He's calling for the basket, has the ready-for-pickup sign.
That's exactly what you would hear,
because we're standing by,
keeping our light in the direction of the swimmer,
kind of making sure we always have sight on them.
And as they're getting ready,
you're going to try to place the device
really within about five to 10 feet of them
once they're calling for it.
So very, very real.
Pilot: How we looking on fuel there?
Crew: Bingo, we're at bingo. Gotta go.
We're out of time. We gotta go, Carl.
That "bingo" fuel, that's a real term.
It just means if you leave now,
you will land with a fuel reserve
when you get back at your station.
Anything that's less than there,
you can be at risk of either not making it
to your destination or airport or flaming out.
It's always a race against how much fuel you have.
Go, go! Behind you!
Hurry!
When you're seeing the winds,
that rotor wash, it's beating down on you,
it's a mini hurricane underneath it.
There is no communicating with the swimmer in the water
at that point in time. All hand-arm signals.
That would be insane to think
that you're going to hear a person,
a swimmer in the water underneath a spinning helicopter.
Not gonna happen on there.
Holy s---!
We lost our tail rotor!
The waves out there, that's in the Arctic, kind of,
where I believe that scene was taking place.
20-, 30-foot seas, and even having rogue waves can happen,
but you try to be above that.
The explosion, that's the Hollywood part.
I've seen helicopters crash on tarmacs and different things,
and I haven't seen one explode.
Even in the Army, I saw one take a SA-7
and hit the engine out.
That was the only one I saw that was on fire.
I would give it a seven.
It's the Coast Guard.
They must have picked up the distress call.
Pilot: Swimmers ready. Deploy swimmers.
So far right now, you're seeing pretty much
a legitimate helicopter rescue.
It's daytime. You can free-fall the swimmer in daytime.
Their altitude was good,
where the swimmer could safely go out.
The swimmer's going to have their goggles, everything down.
They're not going to free-fall with their gear up.
They go in the water, they're going to lose all their gear.
So they're going down.
They're going to cover their mask and everything
as they're going in.
The device going down and being placed
about five feet from them in the water,
that's just textbook Coast Guard
rescue-swimmer operations on there.
When you have baywatch,
that's really the LA County's fire department.
They're aka baywatch here in the Los Angeles area.
We hoist with them routinely.
The rescue swimmer could easily
just bring them over to the vessel.
The fire department, they're trained paramedics as well.
Primarily, you're going to try to put people in
with the least-risky rescue method,
which would be to put them on the boat,
unless they had sustained something else
that they needed immediate transport,
bring them in a helicopter
and transport them to the nearest hospital.
But the rescue in itself, that's pretty textbook
for what you could see
if you're going to free-fall the rescue swimmer, yes.
It's a nine, just because of how the rescue swimmer
had his goggles and stuff on top of his head.
I love the precision flying of that.
This is the MH-68 or AW109, the Stingray.
Really what you'll call for HITRON,
which is our helicopters tactics interdiction.
It's a specialized unit that we have that
primarily their focus is interdicting either drug smugglers
or anything else like that in international waters.
Mostly dealing with drug smuggling,
what you'll call a go-fast.
It'll typically outrun a boat.
Your normal cruise is somewhere around
the 120 to 130, 130 knots,
if you really got a good tailwind and stuff like that.
Watch out, he's got a weapon on board.
Bail out! Bail out!
I've never been at HITRON.
I did fly airborne use of force with the Coast Guard.
A lot of times what you're trying to do is
we're going to try to stay outside
of what they have on board of there
and make sure we can at least maximize
the use of our weapons systems.
Coast Guard, take them down.
They went for the kill shots right there.
So, normally they're going to probably
put some stitches in the water.
They say "stitches in the water" because when you see it,
it looks like stitches from the machine gun going out.
That's kind of just to escalate the level
of the use of force at that point
before they try to shoot the engines out
and really are more so trying to just disable the vessel.
That's primarily what they're doing, yeah,
is disabling the vessel.
So I'd give them about a seven.
At any point in time you're committed,
you have something that's attached
to something that can pull you down,
that's just the worst situation for a helicopter, right?
So you're just at the mercy of being on that pivot point
and just completely helpless.
Wet, slippery hand conditions,
trying to hold on to a ladder with adrenaline
and the amount of rotor wash.
It's a mini hurricane down there.
So you're holding on with quite a bit of grip.
So I'm pretty sure you're almost probably
bear-hugging the ladder at any point
just to try to maintain your grip.
We're going to stall!
Cut it now!
Mercenary: We have a job!
Pilot: We're going to die here! I said cut it!
They were actually doing well talking as a crew
for saying get rid of it.
That's a tough call.
It sounds easy to watch the movie and say that,
but that is a really hard call to say shear.
Even when we're getting ready to start
any hoist and rescues, like, "Hey, if this happens,
you'll say 'shear' three times, safety power system
or the flight mech, you race for that shear button."
It was an eight for how dynamic that environment would be.
The stretcher. We call it a litter.
Anytime we're going to use a litter,
we're going to use a trail line to help stabilize,
because that flat plane surface that's underneath
with all the rotor wash that's down below
will really have a good propensity
to have somebody start spinning really quick.
I'm not sure what was causing the pilot to struggle so much.
He's got the whole ship to look at as far as in reference.
Power really wasn't an issue.
It almost looked like they were making the hoist cable
feel like it was somehow taking power away from the engines.
I don't know.
Having a fouled cable or watching
a cable actually birdcage, that part is real.
That can happen, so it could go in there and not be.
You can't let out some more cable at that point.
I don't understand why the pilot was struggling so bad.
I'm not sure.
At this point, what's got a hold of them
is some good bait that's clearly under there
for whatever is eating on them.
So there's no need to take the whole helicopter down.
Shear, shear, shear.
We'll have to preserve the lives of the rest of the crew.
There's nothing else you could do.
This is more of a three.
Please don't shoot the flare at the helicopter.
We see the flare in the distance. Trust us.
If the flare gets on the raft, it'll start eating through.
It's, like, a phosphor material,
so you're shooting hot phosphorus
at the thing that's trying to rescue you.
You're trying to take us down with you
at that point in time.
The flare is meant to be seen, not to be caught.
We just want to see the flare go up
and then find the point of origin
so we can come and effect the rescue.
A lot of times, if we're going out,
it's more likely just one helicopter.
I'm not saying you can't have two.
If it's a longshore rescue as well,
there's a fixed wing asset overhead
that will probably go out and do
really good radar sweeps inside of the area
and try to help us. And they'll also be able
to drop and deliver any type of rescue materials.
Certain helicopters do have radar systems,
so we're trying to either see a blip on the radar,
or we're trying to map the shoreline when we're out there
in really poor weather conditions.
Helicopters have a few different lights.
So, each pilot have their own searchlight,
and then a lot of times you'll operate
with what's called a Nightsun.
So it's just a really powerful searchlight
towards the middle or the back of the cabin.
This right here is probably a 9.5.
Favorite one that I've seen so far
is probably "The Guardian."
It captures the essence.
They're consummate professionals,
and they understand that at any point,
they can be left there.
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