It's done in a swimming pool, usually with 10-15 trainees and at least two instructors.
You're put in a helicopter mock-up with seats, aviation style seat belts, small windows with pop-out capability - if you can unlatch and hit them hard enough.
You're flipped over in this thing, and subsequently under water. With your seat belt fastened, upside down, and an incomprehensible amount of water jacked up your nose in the process.
You do a silent 5 count while you are upside down and dizzy underwater, holding your breath. Because you wouldn't want to pop out in record time, get your head above water, and have the still spinning helicopter blades decapitate you.
After your 5-Count, you unlock the seat belt. If you inflate your air vest at that point, it will pin you against the underwater roof of the passenger compartment, and you will drown.
So you pop out a window, release the seat belt, swim out - and live. Unless the water is on fire from ignited aviation fuel, but there is a technique to survive that, too.
You do this multiple times, sometimes pretending you are in an inner / aisle seat, and you have to feel your way to an escape window, and pop out through that - if the guy in front of you has already exited the mock-up.
Instructors are there underwater with you to drag you to the surface, if you look like you're panicking, and about to drown during training.
Once the instructors are happy that you've mastered all this, they blindfold you - because you may crash at night, and you have to be able to do all of this by feel. And so you repeat the process several more times, each time blindfolded.
This is about the LEAST amount of fun you can have in a swimming pool for at least two hours. But this training has been proven to save lives. I just pray I never have to do it for real - 80 miles offshore in the Gulf of Mexico!
If you've never had this type of training, realistically, you have practically no chance at all to survive a helicopter crash into water.
Good write-up. Thanks.
I have never had the pleasure of taking the training myself. I just heard the horror stories. But people who take it know that if they don’t take it, they will not survive a helicopter ditching into water, so they take the training.
Thanks for all the great first-person details.