Florida crew recounts ‘miraculous’ Atlantic plane rescue with fuel low | US news
A military rescue team in Florida has spoken of the “quite miraculous” survival of all 11 people it rescued from a plane crash in the Atlantic Ocean, and their own struggle to get to safety with five minutes of fuel left.
Members of the 920th rescue wing, based at Patrick Space Force base not far from Cape Canaveral, raced Tuesday to reach passengers and crew in rough seas. They had emerged from a small Beechcraft twin-propeller plane that crashed into the water off Florida’s east coast, about 80 miles east of Melbourne.
When their rescuers arrived aboard a Combat King II transport plane and an HH-60W Jolly Green II helicopter, the survivors (all Bahamian adults) had been crammed into the only small life raft they had for nearly five hours. There was no sign of the plane or any debris, and first responders said the passengers would have had no idea help was on the way.
“I don’t know anyone who survived by ditching in the ocean,” Major Elizabeth Piowaty, the pilot of the transport plane, said at a news conference at the base on Wednesday.
“And the way I see it, it’s pretty miraculous that all these people survived and then all got on the rafts together.”
Over almost an hour and a half, the helicopter crew used a crane and basket to make nine lifts through rough seas to get all the survivors aboard and then fly them to waiting ambulances at Melbourne airport.
Lieutenant Colonel Matt Johnson, who was piloting the helicopter, explained that by the time the last person on the raft was removed, the plane had only five minutes of usable fuel left for the rescue operation.
He told reporters the moment was “bingo time,” a military term for “difficult times when we have to leave the scene and come back because we’re running low on gas.”
He said his helicopter was capable of in-flight refueling “if we exceeded our bingo fuel and ran low” but that the operation would delay getting survivors to shore, some of whom needed immediate medical attention.
“We didn’t need to do this yesterday, but we were ready to go,” he said.
Piowaty said the approaching storm increased the urgency of the search, which was initiated by an alert from the emergency beacon that activated at the time of the plane’s impact and was detected by the U.S. Coast Guard.
It was reported that the plane was on an internal flight between Marsh Harbor islands of the Bahamas and Grand Bahama when it crashed into the water. The cause of the sudden emergency is being investigated.
Air Force Capt. Rory Whipple, one of the crew members winched onto the life raft, said the survivors were “physically, mentally and emotionally distressed” unaware of any possibility of rescue after being in the ocean for so long.
“They didn’t even know we were coming until they were right above us,” he said.
“So you have to imagine the emotional injuries that go on there and not knowing if someone is going to save them. But that’s our job. We have the best job in the world, we do our best to bring everyone home on someone’s worst day.”
Olympia Outten, one of the survivors, was a passenger on the plane with her son and nephew. He said the pilot went off course in stormy weather, ran out of fuel and the plane had to land at sea.
“I was trapped, I had my seatbelt on, my son was saying, ‘Mom, go,’ we had to get out,” she said in an interview broadcast on CNN on Thursday. Then he started crying. His son helped free him, and when he fell into the water, he was saying to himself, “God, save us, let someone see us,” Outten said.
He said the survivors were elated when the US aircrew, who were providing water rescue training in the area, responded to the plane’s signal. The swell was increasing to 1.5 meters and storms were approaching by the time the survivors were rescued. There is no official statement yet regarding what caused the plane to crash.
