Rescuers Stranded: Chopper Down in a Snowstorm

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0:33It's just after 8.30pm on November 12th, 1996. In the far northeast corner of Canada, the wild coastline of Newfoundland and Labrador is in the teeth of a fierce snowstorm. White flakes swirl through the frigid darkness, borne along on icy gusts. Beneath the tempestuous sky, the ocean is a freezing black void. Furious waves throw themselves against the rocky shore, where powdery snowdrifts pile up like sandbags. The wind shrieks.

1:11But gradually, a different sound surfaces above the roar of the elements, a pulsing thrum. Moments later, a helicopter emerges from the turbulent grey clouds and sheeting snow, lit up with red and green navigation lights. The aircraft battles its way through the squall, lurching through the air like an injured bird as it's buffeted by the gale. It jerks and judders, a thin mechanical whine issuing from its trembling fuselage. From his seat behind the pilot, flight engineer Scott McCoy stares anxiously out of the small window. There isn't much to a view. You've got anti-collision lights. You have navigation lights.

1:58Things are flashing, so as they're flashing, they're picking up the snow coming into your face, and it gets thick enough that you can't see through it. The pilot transmits a nervous message through the radio. He's going to try and land somewhere on the shore so they can wait out the storm on solid ground. He begins an uncertain descent through the layers of cloud and snow. In the back of the cabin, Scott hauls open the cargo door so he can call out visual cues. His harness strains taut as he peers into the darkness. Suddenly, the helicopter lurches, throwing him off balance. That's when he sees them.

2:42The chopper's green navigation lights reflecting on the convulsing, white-capped waves. Scott stares in horror as the sea rises up towards them, closer than they ever imagined, the rotor wash blasting a crater in the water's surface. He shouts down the radio to the cockpit, telling the pilot to pull up. But the helicopter is only going one way. They didn't have enough power to maintain the aircraft in level descending flight. we got to a point where we just basically ran out of air below us, and the aircraft started dropping out of the sky.

3:34Ever wondered what you would do when disaster strikes? If your life depended on your next decision, could you make the right choice? Welcome to Real Survival Stories. These are the astonishing tales of ordinary people thrown into extraordinary situations. People suddenly forced to fight for their lives. In this episode, we meet Scott McCoy. In 1996, the 37-year-old flight engineer is part of a four-man Canadian Air Force team called out to rescue a fisherman in a critical condition. But as they urgently try to reach the ailing man, the weather closes in, and the crew are forced to battle the elements in a desperate bid to stay airborne.

4:15And when they run into trouble over the icy Labrador Sea, Scott and his companions will find themselves in dire straits. All of our major survival gear was still in the chopper. Now the cabin was underwater, our locator beacon was in the chopper. All your gear is soaking wet full of water and you're freezing. The water's one degree, and I'm underwater before I can even really take a breath. When the helicopter meets the fierce cold of the water, the men will be faced with a series of threats. Drowning, hypothermia, death by exhaustion. Stranded, they'll need to draw on all their training, resourcefulness, and teamwork if they are to stay alive.

4:59The question is, will the rescuers be rescued in time? We had to figure out, okay, what are we going to do? Because nobody knew where we were. Nobody knew that we had crashed into the water. I'm John Hopkins. From the Noiser Podcast Network, this is Real Survival Stories.

5:38It's morning, Tuesday, November the 12th, 1996. In the small community of Happy Valley, Goose Bay, in central Labrador, it's business as usual. Snow falls intermittently from an iron-gray sky, settling on parked cars and crystallizing on the roofs of the wood-clad houses that line the residential streets. The temperature hovers around zero degrees Celsius. Situated on the shores of Lake Melville, the small, secluded settlement is surrounded by breathtaking scenery, sprawling spruce forests overlooked by imposing mountain peaks and interspersed with hundreds of tiny lakes and feeder streams. But despite its scenic isolation, Happy Valley Goose Bay is far from quiet.

6:27The residents here have grown used to the rumble and roar of aircraft as they come and go from the Canadian Air Force Base on the outskirts of town. Established in the Second World War, CFB Goose Bay proved central to the development of the surrounding area, and it maintains an important role in the region today, used both as a military base and a civilian airport. The snow-covered grass around the airfield is crisscrossed by a series of gleaming black runways, watched over by the neighboring forest. Servicemen and women buzz around sleek military aircraft, stamping their feet to knock the snow from their boots.

7:06Inside the base, an alarm sounds. A search and rescue call has just come in. People scramble to action stations, gathering the information and equipment they need to undertake the mission. Among them is 37-year-old Sergeant Scott McCoy. Within minutes, he's tramping across the tarmac to an awaiting Griffin helicopter. The brisk autumn chill whipping through his short, dark hair. I did the job as a flight engineer, which is basically the mechanical expert on board any plane that he's qualified on. Yeah, we just got a call that there was somebody that was in trouble out at sea. At the time, I was on standby with the search and rescue.

7:49we were directed to fly up there and take care of business. An Inuit man is in distress on board a fishing trawler near Resolution Island, a large uninhabited stretch of land in the Arctic archipelago. The man has collapsed with a bleeding ulcer and urgently needs to be evacuated. From Goose Bay, it's a journey of over 450 miles and will require a number of stops on the way to refuel the helicopter. If all goes to plan, the griffon will reach the trawler in about nine hours. The four-man crew climb inside the chopper, slide on their helmets, and secure their safety harnesses. Other controls are 27-year-old pilot Karim and 25-year-old co-pilot Wade.

8:35Behind them on the right is Scott. To his left is 35-year-old Andre, a skilled search and rescue technician known as a SAR tech. The crew prepare for takeoff. For Scott, these pre-flight routines and rituals are second nature. He's been in the Air Force since he was 19, virtually half his life. But that wasn't always his plan. My father, he was Army at one time and had retired prior to me being born. Dad was a bit of a hard nut to get by sometimes. He was very military in his ways and so me joining the Armed Forces was not on my top 10 list. As a child and teenager, Scott was more interested in football than flying.

9:24I was playing at an elevated level and I went over to England when I was 13. And I actually met up with all the Manchester United players at the time. You know, Georgie Best, Bobby Charlton, you name it, Alex Stepney, Willie Morgan, and all these players that were playing at the time for Man U and had an interview with the Manchester Evening News and I was front page on the sports section there as an up-and-comer at the time. And I continued to play high-level soccer here in Canada until such time that I joined the armed forces. Scott maintained a love for soccer, but it wasn't where his professional path ultimately lay.

10:07Rather unexpectedly, he did end up following in his father's military footsteps. In 1978, at the age of 19, slightly adrift and unsure of his direction, a chance encounter shifted everything. When I graduated from high school, I wanted a break from schooling. So I just really didn't know what I wanted to do. I was walking downtown in my city at the time and saw a recruitment sign and I stopped in to talk about it. And the recruiting sergeant that was in there was somebody I grew up with years earlier. We had a little chat and he told me all about it. And so he said, all I had to do was go through an aptitude test and see where I might fit in.

10:49And so I said, well, yeah, I can do that, you know, just for the heck of it. Things moved quickly from there. Within weeks, Scott was enrolled in the Air Force and undergoing basic training, a first step that would shape the rest of his life. The basic training was run around and take orders and see how well you did it. If you could follow orders and then do what you had to do, then it was very easy to get through. But when I finally got to my trades training, that's when I really started to enjoy it, getting into the aspects of the theory of flight and just aircraft in general. Scott began his career as an airframe technician.

11:26Then he reclassified to flight engineer. For a time, he was posted to CFB Gagetown in New Brunswick, one of the largest military bases in Canada. It wasn't until I got there that I got on my flying course and went through the operational processes to learn that aspect of the job. So now I had the skills to look after maintenance-wise, and when I finished the course, I had the skills to be able to advance them in the operational means. Over the past two decades, Scott has racked up many hours of flight time in all sorts of challenging conditions. He has plenty of experience under his belt, and today he's going to need it.

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14:39Shortly before 11am, the Griffin helicopter takes off into the dull grey sky above Goose Bay. But only ten minutes into their nine-hour journey, a mechanical fault forces the crew to return to base for repairs. After the squadron's technician fixes the problem, Scott and his three companions are able to head back out just before 1pm. This time, everything runs smoothly. Their first port of call is the tiny town of Nain, 230 miles away. Nestled on the rugged coastline, it's the northernmost permanent settlement of the province and is accessible only by sea or air. Beyond it lies the sweeping breadth of the Taungat Mountains, more than 18 ,000 square miles of towering peaks and glacier-carved fjords, roamed by caribou, wolves, and polar bears.

15:34Whilst refueling in Nain, Scott and the others take the opportunity to grab something to eat. It may be a while before they have another chance to consume anything substantial. By the time they set off again, darkness is falling, the world sinking into shadows. The Griffins' crew don night vision goggles, which tint the sea and sky in a strange luminous green. But soon, the chopper's crew are battling more than just the darkness. We were heading straight north along the coast. The weather started coming in a little bit, so we did have to climb to get over it because the mountains up there are pretty high and rugged, 2 ,000 to 3 ,000 feet.

16:18As the griffon climbs and approaches the northern tip of the Labrador Peninsula, where the land falls away into the icy swell of the sea, the weather worsens. Soon, ghostly white flurries are swishing around the aircraft. We noticed that the snow was starting to pick up, so the aircraft commander made the decision at that point to land because it didn't look like we were going to have great visibility. So we landed and we actually shut the aircraft down and we put all the plugs and covers and everything on because we thought we were going to be there, you know, probably for the night, or at least until the weather had cleared.

16:59The pilots radio their backup aircraft, a C-130 Hercules plane from Nova Scotia, to explain the situation. While time is limited to get to the ailing fishermen, they can't risk traveling any further when the weather is like this. The crew hunker down to wait out the storm as snow and wind batter the grounded griffin. To everybody's surprise, they don't have to wait long. The weather cleared probably in about an hour. So the aircraft commander made the decision because we were going to have to refuel again at Kilinick Island. So he says, well, we might as well take off and get ourselves there and see how things look.

17:46At around 8.30 p.m., the pilots fire up the propellers once more. The griffon judders into life and rises into a surprisingly clear, star-studded sky. But, in their haste to set off, neither the pilot nor co-pilot informs the backup plane that they're flying again. As far as everyone else knows, the griffon's crew are still waiting out the storm on solid ground. As they begin the short journey to Killinick Island, just off the northern tip of Labrador, Scott stares out at the wild, windswept terrain below them, searching for potential landing spots, just in case the weather suddenly deteriorates again.

18:27It's best to be prepared. Rugged expanse is sparse and uninhabited, broken only by the numerous inlets and lakes that pepper the region. But then Scott spies something else, a small shack peeking out between the craggy, snow-covered rocks. Such structures aren't uncommon so deep in the wilderness. They tend to be used by hunters and fishermen seeking shelter from the elements or a bed for the night. When we flew over, I kind of just made a joke, eh? You know, making things light. I said, wouldn't that be funny if we had to use that at some point? Not thinking that that would ever come to be. Even while doing serious work, the team tried to keep things jovial.

19:14The atmosphere is relatively light. But then, within just minutes of taking off again, it all changes. Without warning, the griffon suddenly finds itself in the heart of a fierce snow shower. Ferocious winds buffet the aircraft, and thick white flakes pelt its windshield, dazzling the crew as they reflect off the chopper's flashing lights. The flurry has come out of nowhere. There's no telling how long it might last, or how much worse it could get. The biggest thing with it is it gets thick enough that you can't see through it. So you lose your visual acuities when you're down low. You might not be able to see the ground.

20:01Soon, the griffon is enveloped in a pale, swirling mass of cloud and snow. The helicopter gropes its way through the whiteout. Low on fuel, it's unlikely they'll be able to climb above the storm front. Besides, going too high in this weather is dangerous. The thing is about going up in snow showers or any kind of snow, you can get into what's called an icing situation. So now the aircraft can get covered with ice, the blades can get covered with ice, because we didn't have any what's called anti-icing capabilities or de-icing because it's unpressurized as the helicopter. It doesn't fly above 10 ,000 feet, so you generally wouldn't need that.

20:41The only option is to go down, to try to get below the cloud line. The helicopter descends jerkily through the gale. Pummelled by wind and snow, it eventually emerges out of the cloud layer. But visibility isn't much improved. We got back into the showers even at the low level. So that's when the pilot decided he wanted to land. Caught between the squalling sky above and the roiling Black Sea below, the Griffon's crew have limited options. Then, the pilot points to a thin strip of land on the other side of the inlet that they're flying over. For a few seconds, it's just visible between the snow flurries.

21:24And then it disappears into the blizzard. With little other choice, the pilot makes a beeline towards the vanishing coastline. If he can just make it across the water and land the chopper, they can wait out the storm in safety before continuing their journey. In the back, Scott hauls open the cargo door so he can call out visual cues. The roar of the snowstorm thunders into the cabin, the bitter wind stinging the men's skin. Though they're only a few hundred meters from the shore and safety, a single miscalculation could end in catastrophe. The pilots, basically, they were going off of visual cues, but ended up not having very good visual cues.

22:11They didn't have enough power to maintain the aircraft in level descending flight to get to the point where they wanted to go. And what happened was we got to a point where we just ran out of basically air below us and the aircraft started dropping out of the sky. Alarm fills the cabin as the griffon plummets through the air, unable to pull up. On board, stomachs lurch and blood rushes to heads. If you're in an elevator, as soon as it drops to go down some levels and you're not ready for it, it just catches you. It just gets a hold of you and you notice it in a real hurry. And that's what happened.

22:54I felt a drop. And then as we were descending, I noticed that the nav light on my side, which was colored green, you could see it on the water. And you should never see it on the water. You know what I'm saying? Scott shouts into his radio, urging the pilots to pull up before it's too late. The dread in the air is palpable. For a few seconds, the helicopter manages to hover above the sea, mere feet from the seething mass of the foam-flecked waves. It looks as if disaster might have been averted. Then the griffon's tail smacks down against the water. Its massive rotor blades flex and flail. Nobody has a chance to react.

23:38The griffon starts spinning uncontrollably before pitching over to the left. Scott is thrown violently across the cabin, as the aircraft rolls. Tons of frigid water cascade into the chopper, engulfing the four men in a matter of seconds. At that point, I'm underwater and I'm trying to get away from the aircraft. To do that, I have to be able to release my harness. So I'm reaching for that and I can't get a hold of it because now I'm suspended in the water, my motion stopped. And so at that point, I thought I was going to die.

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26:22it's late evening november the 12th 1996. off the coast of northeast canada the glacial black waters of the Labrador Sea are churned by a vicious gale. Twisting, twirling eddies of snow fill the air as the wind howls its sinister song. There, amidst the turbulent waves, something gleams. Bobbing in the dark water, several hundred meters from the rocky shore, is a half-submerged helicopter. The aircraft's nose is plunged beneath the sea's surface, Its tail juts gracelessly towards the storm-roiled sky. The cabin is flooded with freezing seawater. Inside, four men are trapped, struggling desperately to undo their safety harnesses before they drown in this icy darkness.

27:16In the back of the cabin, Sergeant Scott McCoy tries to implement his military training. It was called RUIT, Rotary Wing Underwater Escape Training. And whenever you did that training, it was in a pool, the water was warm, it was light out, everything controlled. You even had divers down there just in case you panicked. So now you're in a real-life situation. The water's one degree, and I'm underwater before I can even really take a breath. Submerged and disorientated, Scott grapples to free himself in the murky chamber. Fumbling with shaking, freezing fingers, he gropes for the harness clip. His movement's increasingly frantic.

28:02Seconds tick by. He's running out of oxygen. Lungs were burning. They were on fire. They were burning so hard. He yearns to take a breath. But if he inhales, he'll flood his airwaves with water, and it'll be over. and then there is a huge stroke of luck and it was right then that my head actually popped into an air pocket and the chopper now was sitting nose down and because we were light on fuel the tail was able to sit into the air as the nose was sitting down in the water and it created an air pocket in the back of the cabin of the helicopter and my head somehow found that air pocket Scott inhales deeply inside the tiny gap of air, filling his body with oxygen.

28:56But it's only for a moment before he plunges back underwater. This time, he composes himself, finds the clip of his harness, and releases himself. He scrambles underwater, desperately trying to escape the sinking helicopter. Flails in the gloom, searching for an exit. Ahead, there's a hole in the cabin where a window has been blown out by the water pressure. Scott seizes his chance and swims through it. Me thinking that the helicopter's probably sinking, I wanted to get out of it as fast as I could. And to my astonishment, when I got out of it, I broke the surface of the water within maybe a second or two.