Mike Corey

You said you were having a quiet night with your wife.

Can you paint the picture of just what life in general was like for you back then?

So the phone rang.

And then when you got to the base in Sitka, what was the situation that you were briefed on?

What did you learn at first?

Right.

And you had to wait for that first helicopter to come back before the next crew could take off.

Why was that?

Because you had heard that they didn't get any of the survivors.

So if there was no survivors in the actual aircraft, why is there an ambulance coming?

And for the man who had heat exhaustion, I imagine that'd be quite difficult to get in Alaska at night.

So what happened there?

Wow.

So stressful to say the least.

And as the new night vision goggles, the ones from the first chopper get transferred to your chopper, the third one, you head out.

How are you feeling taking off, getting yourself into the thick of it all?

And just to clarify that, so the pilot's not doing the hoisting himself, but he has a better view of where the basket's going to go on the right side of the plane where the hoist is so he can navigate the plane so that the mechanic in the back can actually do a lot of the manual work of lowering the basket down and handling the survivors when they come up.

You and your crew took off from the Coast Guard base in Sitka and began flying out into the storm to find the fishermen, which is about 120 miles away.

Around 15 minutes into the flight, an alert went off.

What was it?