Coast Guard Pilot and Rescue Swimmer Discuss Half Moon Bay Rescue


Coast Guard Air Station San Francisco MH-65 Dolphin helicopter pilot Lt. Catherine Schmitz and Petty Officer 1st Class Mikol Sullivan, an aviation survival technician, discuss a rescue operation at Air Station San Francisco, August 21, 2019. The Dolphin crew rescued two people whose plane went down approximately nine miles south of Pillar Point Harbor, Calif., August 20, 2019. (U.S. Coast Guard video)

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Transcript

San Francisco tower alerted us that there was a plane off-shore that had crashed and there were two people in the water.

Yeah, it’s pretty incredible when you hear the call for what we had yesterday, of a downed plane into the ocean. You’re expecting the worst when you come on-scene, and hoping for the best, of course. But, I mean, in that situation, that’s not usually the case.

Definitely ideal search conditions. It was before sunset, it was about 6:30 in the evening. We had great illumination. There was a little bit of cloud cover off the shore, but as soon as we got over to the position of the two people there was no cloud coverage. Relatively calm sea state, so ideal search conditions. We saw the one aircraft circling overhead. We were able to pretty quickly find the two people in the water.

From what we could tell in the air, it looked as though they were fine and they were floating above the water. So at that point we did a harnessed deployment of myself. I swam over to them, talked to both of them, asked them if either of them were injured and how they were doing and if there was anybody else in the water. They were both fine, they had no injuries they said. To have it turn out the way that it did was really awesome. I was stoked and they were in great spirits and it just felt really great and it felt really good once we brought them back and their friends showed up and gave ’em a big hug and how appreciative they were and, yeah, it was really cool.

It’s definitely a team effort. Everyone’s kind of looking at it with a slightly perspective. We all are a very experienced crew, so everyone brings something slightly different and between all of us we were able to evaluate the scene and come up with a really good game plan and then execute it.

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