Jayhawk Endurance

[Chesty Morgan]

Hi Guys,

I've just caught 5 minutes of Deadliest Catch on Sky. It was showing a U.S. Coast Guard rescue in the middle of the Bering Sea.

Part of the search involved a U.S.C.G Jayhawk from Kodiak Island which flew for 7 hours, into a head wind, to the search site and then conducted a search (didn't say how long for) and then, I presume (the programme finished at that point), flew back to Kodiak. Assuming maybe a 1 hour search and then a 5 or 6 hour trip back that's flight time of 13 or 14 hours or thereabouts.

Is that figure accurate or were they perhaps using a bit of poetic licence? I was pretty impressed, to say the least, with that kind of endurance especially as the film didn't show any external tanks.

[Ian Corrigible]

If the story involved last March's rescue of 42 fishermen from the Alaska Ranger, the Jayhawks and Dolphins involved in the operation were refueling on a Coast Guard cutter during the rescue, hence the extended time on station.

The Jayhawk's standard mission radius is 300nm (with 45 min on station), or 6 hours endurance.

I/C

[Um... lifting...]

Those range figures are correct. While I've been away from Uncle Sam's Confused Group for a while, the 60J was typically configured with two externals both on the left-hand side. You can find photos on airliners.net (they're copyrighted, so I won't post them here).
Photos: Sikorsky HH-60J Jayhawk (S-70B-5) Aircraft Pictures | Airliners.net (http://www.airliners.net/photo/USA---Coast/Sikorsky-HH-60J-Jayhawk/0928445/M/)
The downside to this is that the Seahawk variants weren't engineered to continually carry full externals as were some of the other Hawks, especially with all the weight on the left side, so there were numerous transmission decking cracks. A third external can go on the right, but it interferes to some degree with winching, so it's seldom used.
HH-60s seldom land on Coast Guard cutters (helidecks are small, and HH-60s have dreadful landing visibility), so they generally will HIFR using a fitting in the cabin floor with a saddle yoke arrangement winched up from the ship.
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[M609]

Saw it myself last week. You might have noticed that they refuelled several times on one of the western Aleutian Islands. They allso changed crew on the helo, I guess they flew them ahead on the C-130?

[Um... lifting...]

M609-
Never worked up there myself... but had friends who did, in Kodiak and Sitka. The distances are epic. I have a letter from a friend of mine (back when people wrote letters) detailing a case in the W. Aleutians. They'd take one crew out of Kodiak and fly the aircraft to Cold Bay or Dutch Harbor (370 and 520 nm respectively), land and refuel, and precisely as you say, a C-130 would drop a second crew to go prosecute the case and the Herc would proceed ahead to search and drop rafts and other such business until the helicopter arrived.
During certain seasons there would be detachments out in the Aleutians to keep the response times down to only a few hours. I seem to remember he did a couple detachments in Shemya, which isn't in Russia, but you can almost see it from there.
There are pretty continually a couple cutters in the Bering or the Gulf of Alaska and they take a severe beating.

[widgeon]

Nice to see the deck crew applauding the pilot in the clip :)

[Chesty Morgan]

Thanks for the replies. It wasn't the Alaska Ranger rescue (can't remember the name of the ship now). I don't remember seeing any sort of refuelling although that may have been left out of the filming.

Still a great effort all round.