For the U.S. Coast Guard's search and rescue (SAR) business, 1978 was a boom year. Nearly 78,000 SAR events transpired during those 12 months-an annual total never approached since then-with more than 100,000 SAR aircraft sorties flown overhead these emergencies. One Lockheed HC-130 Hercules mission west of Alaska's Aleutian Islands on a stormy autumn night was arguably the year's most memorable. No other 1978 SAR sortie ended with survivors ashore in Siberia at a Soviet Navy hospital, candidates for indefinite confinement behind the Cold War's Iron Curtain.
On Thursday, 26 October 2006, seven of the eight members of the crew on that mission assembled in Hangar 55 at the Coast Guard air station in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. On a dais in front of an American flag so large it could have been the backdrop for the opening scene in the movie Patton, each of the seven men-all well into middle age, the eldest having just turned 60-received a medal for his part in that life-saving rescue nearly 30 years before and almost half the world away. The audience included five of the nine men alive who owed their lives to this crew.
The day's forecast had been for rainy weather. Instead, high barometric pressure brought with it Carolina-blue skies, and the morning was beautiful. Sunlight flooded the three big turboprops parked in the open beyond the hangar's gaping doors, directly behind the formations of men and women standing in ranks to observe the ceremony. The center aircraft of the three on display was the oldest Hercules in the service's inventory. Just out of overhaul and gleaming in like-new Coast Guard livery, this was CG 1500, still operational almost three decades after flying the flight being honored that morning.
The veteran transport looked as if it had just rolled off Lockheed's Marietta, Georgia, production line. In fact, CG 1500 was built in 1972 and delivered the following year to the Coast Guard as that service's 17th Hercules. By the time of the ceremony, CG 1500 had almost 22,000 hours logged in its digitized logbook. Just after 0900 on 26 October 1978, when Lieutenant (j.g.) Bill Porter eased the same plane's nose from the runway at Naval Station Adak, Alaska, and banked east for a routine flight home to Kodiak on the third day of a Bering Sea fishery patrol, CG 1500 had only 3,300 hours of airframe time recorded-in pen-and-ink on paper pages.
In their seats at one end of the hangar, while listening to flattering speeches of admiration and appreciation for what they'd done, the men of what was once Porter's Kodiak-based aircrew were transported back in time to that day in the North Pacific.
Alpha Foxtrot 586 Splashes into the Sea
At 1430 in the afternoon, 15 U.S. Navy Sailors ditched their Lockheed P-3 Orion into the ocean, with a re-flashing fire in the number one nacelle threatening to burn through the port wing. Navy Alfa Foxtrot 586 splashed into 30-foot seas almost exactly midway between the United States and the Soviet Union, two nations embroiled in a political face-off that defined relations between them as a zero-sum game. The four-engine Orion hit the water, skipped, and sank three or four minutes later under huge waves spun up by a storm in the western Bering Sea.
Working furiously, the aircraft's crew managed to launch two of the three rafts on board from the dark, flooding cabin, but all the other emergency equipment sank. The off-duty flight engineer, Petty Officer Butch Miller, went down in the plane, too, unconscious or already dead and probably still belted into his seat. The aircraft commander, Lieutenant Commander Jerry Grigsby, was the last man into the water. From atop the floating Orion-one wing gone, the four nacelles torn off, the fuselage broken in two places; all of it sinking fast-he counted his crew and then slipped over the side heading at first for the larger raft and then for the smaller. Swimming desperately, he failed to reach either of the rafts, despite the other survivors' efforts to paddle one to him.
Cold-Water Rescue
The rest of the crew shared the rafts: 9 crowded the 7-man raft, 4 sat under the limp cover of the larger, 12-man unit-all clustered hip deep in cold salt water waiting numbly for rescue.
As Porter and his crew neared Kodiak, Coast Guard SAR headquarters in Juneau diverted the aircraft because of the emergency in progress. Turning around, Porter flew back to Adak to top up his tanks, landing at just after 1700. He took off an hour later, carrying 12 hours of fuel and heading west at maximum cruise speed out beyond Attu, the most remote island of the American-owned Aleutians. From first takeoff that morning to final landing the next day, CG 1500 spent 17 of 24 hours in the air.
Unlike most open-ocean search-and-rescue attempts, the problem was not in finding the survivors. During the hour-and-a-half that AF 586 had limped toward an airfield while coping with a propeller overspeed and four successive nacelle fires, the crew accurately reported their position many times to the ground, continuing reports until seconds before ditching. Soon after arriving at these coordinates, the first aircraft overhead-a Shemya-based Air Force Boeing RC-135, diverted from an intelligence-collection mission-spotted both rafts.
The problem was to get the crew out of the water before the cold killed them. Two H-3 helicopters with rescue swimmers on board left Elmendorf Air Force Base with a C-130 escort to do just that. But the trio were forced back by weather before they got to the end of the island chain. The solution was a ship . . . or nothing.
When AF 586 ditched, the nearest U.S. Coast Guard vessel, the high-endurance cutter Jarvis (WHEC-725), was in port at Adak. Once under way-she left the refueling pier so fast her helicopter was stranded ashore-the Jarvis was hundreds of miles and two days steaming time away from AF 586's rafts, separated from them by a winter tempest that soon churned up 50-foot waves and 75-knot headwinds in the Bering Sea. (At one point, the Jarvis was making good only four knots through high seas toward the downed P-3.) Even before the Orion hit the water, Coast Guard headquarters in Juneau was searching for another rescue vessel.
Soviets Turn To
That search finally succeeded, but only after an urgent overnight plea from the State Department in Washington triggered a quick, cooperative response from the Foreign and Defense Ministries in Moscow. The Soviet trawler Mys Sinyavin-full of fish from the Bering Sea and until then on the way to her homeport on Sakhalin Island-was the crew's only hope. No other vessel was close enough to reach them in time. Moscow instructed the Mys Sinyavin to reverse course and assist in rescuing the Americans.
Porter arrived at the ditching site at 1938 that evening and relieved the second aircraft there, AF 586's squadron mate now low on fuel and forced to head back to land. In total darkness and beneath rain and snow showers stacked five miles high, CG 1500 spent the next several hours at a few hundred feet altitude circling above two unseen rafts and following the drift of a buoy dropped into the water to mark the ditch site.
Sometime before 2200, CG 1500 managed to raise contact with the Mys Sinyavin's radioman. In carefully articulated English, Porter urged the ship to proceed to help his friends in the water. The vital business of leading the fishing vessel to the scene began with this halting exchange. For the next two hours CG 1500 flew a large, low-altitude racetrack between the ship and the downed Sailors, marking Mys Sinyavin's course toward AF 586's life rafts by dropping a string of flares into churning, 30-foot seas.
Exposure Takes its Toll
While CG 1500 flew overhead, conditions in the rafts deteriorated quickly and tragically. Around midnight the two youngest Navy aircrew members, Airmen Rich Garcia and Randy Rodriguez, died from exposure. For Friday's first few minutes the other 11 Sailors were still alive-barely. In rubber rafts afloat on violent seas, awash in 40-degree water, and under blowing rain and snow, the last of the living would almost certainly be dead by sunup unless rescued first. Petty Officer Jim Brooner died next, just about the time that the trawler's search lights became visible on the horizon.
Barry Philippy, the 1500 crew's navigator and a first class petty officer then, remembers the climax this way:
I was looking out the cockpit front windows when I saw the ship, no more than two or three miles away, and in the beam of its searchlight on the water was a silhouette of a raft with what looked like two human figures sitting upright. This is the first time I'd seen any evidence of what we were there for. . . . I was absolutely amazed that the rafts were actually there. Bill was whipping that C-130 around like playing with a toy, maneuvering to keep us as near to the action as possible; this time a 60-degree turn to the right, standing on a wing. I was looking out the right side window behind the copilot at the navigational light on the wingtip and wishing it were light outside so we could see the other raft. Just then, from straight below us, a green flare rose in the blackness right from the water. It lost momentum and faded into nothing just a few feet from the wingtip. What a sight. There was the second raft!
This mission, he said later, was the most important thing he ever did.
Around 0100 Friday, 27 October, the Mys Sinyavin's motor whaleboat began to lift ten Americans and the bodies of three others out of the ocean.
In Search of a Runway
With the trawler's whaleboat picking up survivors on the surface below, CG 1500 was able to leave station around 0200, its crew elated and exhausted. Shemya's single runway, Porter learned during the climb-out, was now closed because of crosswinds; Amchitka's airfield had long since been shut down and couldn't be reactivated in time. So CG 1500 headed for Adak for the second time that day, with just enough fuel, maybe, to get on the ground. More than two hours later, Porter landed and rolled out on Adak's Runway 18 after circling to land off a radar approach to 23. He had perhaps 6,000 pounds of fuel on board-enough for another approach if he had needed it, but not enough for much else.
Nearly a year after CG 1500 shepherded the trawler to the rafts and made the survivors' rescue possible, Porter reminded his former commanding officer of an apparent injustice. Crews of the Air Force and Navy aircraft who had preceded his plane to the SAR site had received air medals. Only his crew had been neglected; no award recommendation to headquarters in Washington, not even a personal greeting on landing at Kodiak; nothing.
Righting a Wrong
"I think your crew on CG 1500 that night deserves nothing less as we were the ones who saved ten men," Porter wrote from Hawaii, his new duty station. "My crew and your men deserve more than that, Captain. Again, each time I think about that case I get emotionally involved just remembering how exceptionally well your men performed that night."
No answer came to that first appeal, and as people left Kodiak in the normal course of events and rotated to other assignments, the Coast Guard forgot the ditching of Navy Alfa Foxtrot 586 and CG 1500's dramatic mission above the rafts that night. Once the trickle of articles in aviation safety magazines, a short, breathless feature story in Reader's Digest in September 1979, and a piece by Porter in Alaska magazine three months later timed out, almost everyone else forgot, too.
Navy Orion aircrews didn't. The remarkable survival of ten men afloat in the North Pacific became a part of squadron lore in both fleets and of survival training lectures ashore. Until then, no one who'd flown maritime patrols from Iceland, Newfoundland, or the Aleutians had believed that anyone could survive an open-ocean ditching in winter weather. Cynics had joked that ditching should be at the P-3's redline airspeed, 405 knots. That way the aircraft would shatter on impact, killing all on board instantly so nobody would suffer. Now everyone knew you really could live through a ditching, and marveled at it.
Bill Porter didn't forget, either. Through a short Coast Guard career and a long one as an airline pilot, he continued to brood about the lack of recognition and to prod his former commanding officer with letters. More than 20 years after the mission, the Office of Aviation Forces at Coast Guard headquarters in Washington finally stirred, reanimated by another appeal for recognition. On reflection, the office's chief offered Porter a consolation prize: a letter of commendation to every crew member signed by some Washington admiral. "The consensus among C-130 drivers," he wrote without identifying any, "is that although it was a great effort and a long day for the aircrew, it is not uncommon for C-130 aircrews in that region to perform similar feats. However, I am interested in recognizing them anyway with a letter signed by an aviation flag officer here at headquarters . . . the letter would recognize their efforts 25 years back." Piqued at hearing the crew's achievement diminished, Porter quickly turned down the offer. He recalls saying, "Tell him to pound sand."
Last Ditch Effort
Porter didn't quit. After coming home from an AF 586 survivors' reunion in late 2004, he transmitted a last, exasperated appeal in the blind by email to his former CO. "Let me remind you that all involved in the rescue of these airmen received recognition except your men," he wrote. "We received nothing in what was probably the best C-130 mission in the Coast Guard. I'm not sure why that happened, but you should make that right. . . . What gives?"
And then, finally, satisfaction. After years of inexplicable silence, the admiral reviewed the flight's history, reconsidered, and submitted a belated recommendation to service headquarters. It was swiftly approved by the then-Vice Commandant Vice Admiral Terry Cross.
The Coast Guard calls such years-after-the-fact acknowledgment of exceptional service a "vintage award." The implication is that by some mysterious chemistry the time delay has improved the event, as it does the taste of wine or cheese. If so, everything about this ceremony was "vintage." For Porter, just months earlier out of the cockpit for good, the event was especially sweet. His letter-writing campaign had finally succeeded.
Anthony Miconi, on board CG 1500 for a loadmaster check ride, and Dan Millot, a utility boat crewman riding the aircraft on leave-but pressed into service during the night-received Coast Guard Commendation Medals. Together with Bill Porter, the other crew members, copilot Rick Holzschu, navigator Barry Philippy, Radioman Ray Demkowski, and Observer Ken Henry, got the Air Medal. (The day of the award ceremony the flight engineer, Daryl Horning, was on Kodiak. His Air Medal was presented by the air station's commanding officer a few days later.) Their decorations were presented by Vice Admiral Vivien Crea, Vice Commandant of the Coast Guard and at the time the senior female officer on active duty in the four military services.
The Air Medal is awarded in the name of the President for superior airmanship, for "meritorious achievement while participating in aerial flight" in the formal language of the citation. The first woman Coast Guard aviator and a C-130 pilot herself, Admiral Crea knew better than most what "meritorious achievement in flight" in the big turboprop could mean-she had thousands of pilot hours in the type, and was quoted as saying loyally, it's "the best airplane ever built." Her connection to CG 1500's star turn, however, was even closer than that. When CG 1500 took off from Adak for Kodiak in late October 1978, then-Lieutenant Crea was stationed at Coast Guard Air Station Barbers Point, Hawaii. The next year, Crea and Porter were stationed there together, where Porter helped check her out as an aircraft commander in the Hercules.
A Long-Overdue Apology
Porter's former commanding officer at Kodiak spoke at the ceremony, too. Rear Admiral Bob Johanson spent most of his few minutes on the dais at Elizabeth City apologizing for the long delay. Caught up in nostalgia and satisfaction, no one there seemed to mind. Maybe aging had improved the event.
The tragedy of the five men lost aside, the story ended remarkably well. Thanks to CG 1500 and a successful SAR operation that involved many other people and aircraft, ten of AF 586's crew lived through a ditching none could expect to survive. The Soviets released their surprise visitors unharmed, in fact unquestioned, after only a week of ritual diplomatic maneuvering. A few days later, the survivors landed at Naval Air Station Moffett Field, their home base, and began the rest of their lives.