PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Rescue Swimmer vs Winchman Helicopter Rescue Question
Old 5th Jan 2010, 03:06
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Um... lifting...
 
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Having flown USCG helicopters for a couple decades, we did both, and used several other methods, too... free-fall makes for the best video, though. What the editor chooses to show isn't necessarily representative of reality.
Distances tend to be greater in US waters than in those of the UK, making hypothermia extremely likely during the aircraft transit to the scene, so many survivors lose the capability of self-rescue. That's one of hundreds of reasons for the genesis of the USCG Rescue Swimmer program. There are thousands of pages of published text on the subject... far too much to go into here.
Um... lifting... is offline