...Briley began asking rescuers about his wife, but no one inside knew where she was. He said he began “shivering so hard it hurt” due to the ocean water and wind from the helicopter.
After some time, the Coast Guard picked up Fuddy and placed her beside Briley. He feared the worst when he noticed her brown hair, which looked identical to his wife’s.
Briley was asking for his wife...and she wasn't there because she had been flown to the hospital, leaving her partially inflated life vest behind...with one spent and one still filled cartridge, which the rescuers labelled Fuddy.
By contrast, the other helo, that actually carried Ms Fuddy, had her her identification card and one of the crew showed it to Bruce Briley, thus, both he and the USCG crew knew who they had in their helo, and it wasn't Bruce's wife.
Your conjectures are totally without support!
Regarding FH's statements about giving and inflating the Briley's their life jackets before they left the cabin, those are shown to be false by the visual evidence in post #526. Combined with the other false stories FH was known to have promulgated, see post #281, for example, FH's self-aggrandizing stories have zero credibility.