06/24/02 - HURLBURT FIELD, Fla. (AFPN) -- Local residents might have heard an AC-130 gunship flying around for hours June 14, but the aircraft was not in the area for training, at least, not routine training.
A gunship crew from the 4th Special Operations Squadron here helped local law enforcement officials find two 19-year-old jet skiers who were stranded near Pensacola, Fla., in East Escambia Bay after their jet ski quit working.
The call for help came June 13 at about 10:30 p.m. EST from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, according to wing command post officials.
“Sometimes we get these calls and we can’t be much help,” said Tech. Sgt. Patricia Simms, who was the senior controller on duty that night. “There were young people out there, so we really wanted to do this. Fortunately, there was already a gunship crew in the air preparing to go to a local range for training, so we were able to send them to search.”
Before arriving, the aircrew did not have much information about the incident.
“When we got there, we realized it was a big deal,” said Maj. Chet, the aircraft commander. “The jet skiers had been in the water for hours. It was going to be like trying to find a needle in a hay stack.”
Until the gunship arrived at the search area around 11 p.m., the search for the stranded skiers was being done by a helicopter equipped with a spotlight that illuminated about 20 feet of water at a time, the major said.
“It would have been pure luck if they’d found the jet skiers,” he said. “They had a lot of area to search, and they couldn’t see much of it at one time.”
The commission’s command post gave the crewmembers the last known coordinates of the jet skiers, and the crew initiated a spoke-pattern search from that point, said the major. Using the gunship's sophisticated electronic equipment, including an infrared sensor and low-light television, the search area increased to about the length of a football field, said the major.
After about two-and-a-half hours of searching, the infrared sensor operator saw the skiers in the water.
“We had spent so much time looking and at some points we wondered if we would ever find them,” said Chet. “When we did, there was a sense of great satisfaction.”
With the skiers located, the aircrew directed a Coast Guard boat to the area for the rescue. After the skiers were safe with the Coast Guard, the crew relayed their success to the command post.
“We were ecstatic,” Simms said.
The satisfaction of a job well done was not the only thing the crew got from the search. The training was great too, said Chet.
“It’s better to see real-world stuff, to see how we’d really look for someone in a vast expanse, than to do in-house training,” he said. (Courtesy of Air Force Special Operations Command News Service)
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