Any quips about the "worm" and the "dope on the rope" belie the hazards facing helicopter winching crews involved in air-sea rescues. For Sergeant Ben Heron, however, the "end of the wire" was the only place he ever wanted to be during his career in the Air Corps, writes Lorna Siggins
According to Heron, "You're at the sharp end, dealing with all sorts of situations, and there is the most tremendous satisfaction if things go according to plan." Heron wasn't on the wire, but was winch operator on duty when he received a phone call at Finner camp just before 6 p.m. on September 25th, 1993. It was the ambulance controller at Ballyshannon, down the road. He had received a report through the 999 emergency system that a man had fallen off a cliff at Horn Head in north Donegal, close to the old coast guard station.
Heron alerted the duty crew, Captain Dave Sparrow, co-pilot Captain Mick Ryan and winchman Airman John McCartney, and asked the ambulance controller to pass on the relevant information to the Marine Rescue Co-ordination Centre (MRCC) in Dublin. He also advised the controller to send an ambulance to Horn Head in case the helicopter crew needed assistance with the casualty.
Rescue 110 was airborne at 6 p.m. and flew directly to Horn Head. Heron called up Malin Head coast radio en route. The radio operator told him that the Mulroy Bay Coast and Cliff Rescue Service was on its way there. Within 30 minutes the helicopter was at the headland, and several civilians signalled the precise location; one of those on the ground told the crew that two people had fallen off the cliff. A northerly 15 to 20 knot wind was blowing at the time, with some cloud and good visibility.
The Dauphin helicopter was closing in when Heron spotted a man trapped on a very small ledge about halfway down the cliff face. The pilot asked Heron to "patter" him into a position at the summit of the cliffs. As Sparrow manoeuvred out over the summit, he hit severe turbulence and ran out of power. The aircraft was forced to dive away over the sea.
The pilots decided to jettison fuel; they would need maximum power to hover, and there was about an hour and a quarter left till darkness. Sparrow reduced his fuel load to 400 kilograms. As the helicopter returned, Heron noticed a second person who appeared to be motionless among scree and boulders at the base of the cliff.
The crew agreed that Heron should jump out from a low hover and get more information from the man on the summit. He identified himself as Paul Rintoul; his 20-year-old twin brother Chris and a friend, Peter King, had "gone over the edge of the cliff". Chris was the man halfway down on the ledge, and Paul Rintoul wasn't able to see King.
Heron climbed back on board the helicopter, briefed the crew, and the Dauphin flew a circuit and approached to carry out a detailed reconnaissance of the situation. The helicopter flew in towards the ledge, and they could see that Chris Rintoul was in serious trouble. As Sparrow noted in his mission report, "I could scarcely believe my eyes." It was, Sparrow recalls, "something you'd see in a Roadrunner cartoon, where a character is in the most impossible situation". Rintoul had his back pinned against the ledge and was supporting himself with one foot on a stone, his heels dug into the cliff face, while clinging to several bits of scrub grass on either side of him. Directly below him was a 250-300 foot sheer drop. "He was totally unable to move and could only nod his acknowledgment of our presence." Unfortunately, he could also see the lifeless figure of his best friend Peter King down below.
The aircrew decided to attempt to lift Rintoul off first, as he appeared to be very weak.
There was also the risk that if he fell while the helicopter was attending to King, he would almost certainly hit the aircraft - with horrible consequences. The cliff was so sheer and the ledge so small that Sparrow had to climb about 90 feet above Rintoul to position overhead.
The crew discussed the plan: Heron would winch McCartney to a position level with and just to the right of Rintoul. This "position" was about three foot square, two yards to the right of him. McCartney would have to stay attached to the hoist cable at all times; there was the possibility that the helicopter might fall away, due to turbulence and lack of power.
"For John, it was a hell of a leap of faith," Sparrow says of his winchman. The pilot climbed to position the aircraft some 100 feet above Rintoul, with the co-pilot, winch operator and winchman providing constant patter on the blade and tail clearance from the cliffs to port and directly in front of the helicopter. Sparrow found himself using "unnatural control positions" to maintain a steady height. McCartney was winched out and Heron managed to land him on the earmarked patch, but the winchman couldn't get a firm footing. Clinging to a clump of heather with his right hand, McCartney reached across with his left hand to try and put the strop around Rintoul's arm. Rintoul was terrified. With great patience and courage, McCartney managed to inch the strop on to one arm and partially behind his head.
Back on the aircraft the pressure was almost unbearable. "One mistake would certainly pull him from the ledge," Sparrow remembers. "And we were hovering so close that the radar radome on the front of the Dauphin was virtually touching the rock face, the blades were clearing the cliff top in front by only a few feet and were just four to five feet from the cliff to port." As he wrote in his mission report, "The whole aircraft was vibrating in the turbulence and the flight controls and power were at the limits of travel." Would the scrub and heather hold? The winchman prayed it would as he kept shouting to Rintoul, trying to reassure him. Once the strop was around Rintoul, he then had to persuade him to sit forward to place it correctly and tighten the toggle.
Naturally, Rintoul was very reluctant to risk this; he would loosen his grip. McCartney swung his leg across him to help him feel more secure, and it did the trick.
The winch operator was working hard to maintain the correct tension on the cable, while the pilots were relying on Heron to keep them informed with his constant patter. Once McCartney gave the "thumbs up" signal, Heron "snap lifted" both winchman and survivor from the ledge. The sudden additional weight of both at the end of the cable forced the helicopter to career away to starboard, and it fell downwards from the cliffs over the sea.
"At this point Rintoul became quite distressed," Heron recorded. "Airman McCartney continued to reassure him, and by holding the survivor's head close to his own body he prevented him from seeing just how high above the sea they were." Once clear of the cliffs, Heron winched them both on board at about 200 feet. Both he and McCartney checked Rintoul for physical injuries, found he had none, but realised he was in a very shocked state. They directed the pilots to land beside the waiting ambulance and have him taken directly to hospital in Letterkenny.
The winch crew were only minutes on the ground, dealing with the ambulance crew and local gardaí, before climbing back into the Dauphin and taking off again to recover Peter King. The helicopter flew down towards the cliff base and Heron winched McCartney out with a stretcher on to the rocks below. King was lying on a large, flat boulder. McCartney needed to assess his medical condition, so the helicopter flew out to sea and did a few circuits.
King showed no life signs. McCartney lifted him into his stretcher and set off a yellow smoke flare to let the Dauphin know he was ready to lift. It wasn't the best winching location, and he couldn't move the casualty. The helicopter climbed about 80 feet and moved in quite close to the cliff to reach him. Heron lifted both McCartney and the stretcher bearing King clear, and the Dauphin flew out again over the water and descended. Heron recovered both of them on board at about 50 feet.
The Dauphin advised Malin coast radio and flew to Fanad Head to refuel. It landed at 7.35 p.m. and was airborne again in 20 minutes en route to Letterkenny Hospital. Sadly, King was showing no life signs at all. He was pronounced dead on arrival by the doctor on duty in the hospital's casualty department. The Dauphin returned to Finner, landing at 9.15 p.m.
A month later the Defence Forces received a letter from Alan Rintoul in Belfast. He had written to the General Officer Commanding the Air Corps "to commend the bravery and skill of the helicopter crew" for their rescue of his son, a student at Queen's University.
"My son, Christopher, owes his life to this team, and I would like to pass on my sincere thanks and appreciation from all my family for their actions on that day," he wrote. "Captain David Sparrow, Captain Michael Ryan, Sergeant Ben Heron and Airman John McCartney have been commended to me by everyone who saw their actions on that fateful day. Indeed, talking to local people and the Garda, it is quite clear that they put their own lives at risk and performed one of the most dangerous rescues that any of them had seen or heard of before. I consider that you are a very fortunate man to be able to command such dedicated professionals." Alan Rintoul added that Raymond King, father of the young man who died, "asked to be associated with these comments and to personally thank you for your efforts to save his son."
Ten years after the rescue, Alan Rintoul still wonders why the aircrew never received an award for their efforts. His own father was one of the first helicopter engineers to train with the RAF. "So I do have some knowledge of the efforts that the Dauphin crew made that day, and in an aircraft which was not designed for those conditions." Significantly, his other twin son, Paul, who raised the alarm, had been over the other side of the head when the accident happened. "He was with my dog, and for some reason he sensed that something was amiss and returned."
Alan Rintoul attended the inquest into the death of Peter King. "I remember the winchman describing how he didn't sleep properly for a week afterwards. I found that most impressive - that he could show such courage, and yet admit this also."
The pilots and winch operator were also impressed with the efforts of their colleague, Airman McCartney. "As an experienced operator, I have been involved in several difficult missions, but I have never seen a mission which demanded such professionalism and courage from a winchman as was demanded of Airman McCartney on this job," Heron wrote in his report. And Dave Sparrow said that McCartney had displayed "an exceptional level of determination, courage and skill, coupled with an apparent total disregard for his own life in the execution of this hazardous mission".
Mayday! Mayday! Heroic air-sea rescues in Irish waters by Lorna Siggins is published by Gill & Macmillan, price €12.99
