Back on the mountain.
Now the chopper that has been
flying around waiting for their
crew has now look at the debris
flying around Holy Komoly they
have now come back into station,
which means that the third
stretcher is ready to come up.
And I think we're going
to see that momentarily,
if they're able to get things stabilized,
you'll see you may or may not be able to see,
but there'll be a steel cable
lowered below that helicopter.
There goes more debris.
You would think somebody would
have told these folks by now.
Holy cow. You could also see more people.
Have clumped together there on the ridgeline.
I suspect again, that's people getting
ready to head down off the mountain,
but basically they lower the cable
down the PJ's that are on the ground.
Make sure everything's good to go.
Attach it to the Gurney and then they'll
hoist it up and you'll probably see the
helicopter continue to hover there until
they have the patient safely on board and
then they will scoot on down the mountain,
either landing in the parking
lot or continuing on to one of
the Portland area hospitals.
But this is kind of tricky flying
when you're that close to the.
Edge of the mountain.
Our pilot Brian Sonier is given the nod.
He's a military pilot himself and you don't
have a whole lot of wiggle room there.
If anything goes wrong and
there it is waving off.
So I didn't see anybody go up.
Look out guys we are talking about
things going wrong. God fellas.
Oh my goodness Oh my gosh,
Oh my God, that is horrible.
No good Lord fellas.
Oh my goodness.
OK, there's the hogback you're
watching this live folks.
Ohh,
if only this was a movie you've seen
the helicopter you saw the tail go
into the mountain and it just flew
apart rolling down the hillside.
Oh good Lord
man, that was a 930 ninth Blackhawk Pat.
You can tell about the refueling
probe there. And it obviously lost.
Control and went tail first into Mount Hood
and if this doesn't tell you how
these folks put their lives on the
line every single day, nothing will.
We can only pray right now that those folks.
Are are OK people now running down?
We we do pat, we see them running
down this is this is horrible.
We we've seen this so many
times with with the Pave Hawk.
They hover right there that's
so close to the to the snow on
these type of rescues that's what
they they have to do to safely
get people into the chopper.
This one got a little too close
to the side of the mountain.
Actually what happened? I think.
And and Brian Sonnier helicopter
pilot can perhaps verify this.
You can get into an effect when
you're hovering your your your
chopper and what happens is actually
you will lose lift under the blades.
Now Brian, now he's military helicopter.
You pretty much know what
happened here. Yeah, that
I could see I was looking
through naked eyes here,
but it looked like something
hit the tail that it like said
hit the tail then he lost it.
Torque control and he's in a harbor
and a high power setting so he's he
really needs that tail loader to keep
them stuck over his position and once
he lost that then it went to a sponge.
You could see and they were trying to,
you know reduce the power you could see
he was putting the nose to the bottom.
He was doing everything he could to keep
the nose downhill to keep the tail up
so you could try and reduce power and
do an auto rotation or something and
then look like it just slid around and spid.
Spun in place,
kind of right the snow.
Hopefully there the snow was soft
enough that it kind of soften
that crash up so that they're OK.
And one thing I have to say about
Blackhawks is they're built,
built very securely very strongly.
The struts that hold their tires
are designed to take several genes
of a of a forceful landing,
so hopefully that thing is set up
enough to protect the people inside.
And that's a sad thing to watch.
I mean, one good thing,
I think so far we've seen is
it's it's thank God there's no
post crash fire that's that's
maybe that's a that's a blessing.
We think so that that our folks are in there.
They're they're hopefully OK,
and Brian Pat from your vantage point.
Is there anything you can do with Skype?
Can you get in there closer?
Well, we're gonna we've got this
temporary flight restriction
that's keeping us 3 miles back.
I've asked Brian to see if we can scoot
a little bit over to the left the way
those responsible discarded in there.
It looks to me like.
They don't feel that there's
anything they can do,
so we'll try and come around to
the left of where they are to
see where the fuselage ended up.
Man, whether you're here or down,
we also have another Black
Hawk that has landed here.
At the timberline parking lot.
So hopefully they're going to come up.
Take a look and see what they can do.
They are just receiving word of this
accident at Timberline Lodge this afternoon.
As you can imagine, they.
Our frantic scrambling we were expecting
at about 2:10 this afternoon to have
a news conference from Timberline,
which is the staging area
for the initial rescue.
The climbers into the crevasse.
No word if they're still going to have that,
or if they'll delay that a little
bit as they assess the situation.
But now we have two tragedies this afternoon.
We have 3 climbers.
Dead after falling into a crevasse,
six others injured,
and now we have just seen a rescue
helicopter that has crashed into Mount Hood.