When a U.S. Coast Guard helicopter crashed in Alaskan waters last week, its impact spread far beyond the Kodiak air station where the crew is based.
On the North Olympic Peninsula, Coast Guard Cmdr. Tom Farris said a prayer.
Petty Officer Dan Sweetser wondered: “Do I know them?”
And later, when the crew was recovered safe and sound but the picture of the helicopter’s washed-up wreckage made the Peninsula Daily News’ front page, Lt. Dan Leary explained to his two shocked, young sons that his close friend, the pilot of the crashed aircraft, was OK.
“It really hit them,” Leary said of his boys, ages 7 and 8.
“It also makes us realize this is a dangerous business we’re in, and we need to be constantly vigilant.”
An aviation brotherhood
In the Coast Guard, whose size is often compared to that of the New York City Police Department, the approximately 4,100 men and women in the agency’s aviation side share what Sweetser calls a brotherhood — and an understanding of what can potentially happen on the job.
Farris, Sweetser and Leary are all in the air aboard Coast Guard helicopters regularly as personnel stationed at Air Station Port Angeles.
Farris, who is the operations officer, and Leary pilot the three orange HH-65 Dolphin helicopters at Ediz Hook.
Sweetser, a flight mechanic, operates the Dolphin’s hoist that lifts people from the water or from boats aboard the aircraft in search and rescue missions.
The helicopter that crashed Wednesday into the stormy Bering Sea while rescuing the crew of the powerless Selendang Ayu soybean freighter was a HH-60 Jayhawk, which is used in some of the same types of missions as the Dolphin.