Steve Torpey

It's built like a truck, and it needed to be that night for us.

It goes about 300 miles and then can spend 45 minutes on scene and then fly 300 miles back.

So about a 600 mile radius.

They fly about 180 knots speed.

They can go as high as 13,000 feet, but we rarely do that.

They can hold about six to 10 survivors.

It is very similar to the Navy's Seahawk helicopter and is basically born from the Army lineage of Black Hawk helicopters.

I loved flying it, and I feel like I could do just about anything in that aircraft while I was flying it.

Carrie and I were having a ball.

We were fairly newly married.

We were stationed in Alaska.

Carrie's from a small town in Michigan, so she was very comfortable in a town of 2,000 people.

And Carrie was four months pregnant with our first child that night.

So I had been home with her and fortunately I had not had anything to drink because that would have meant that I couldn't have accepted the mission.

I would have had to disqualify myself.

I think the fact that Carrie was pregnant, maybe I was being a little sensitive to that.

So about nine o'clock is when the phone rang and that's when they called me in.

Well, the first observation I had when I drove to the air station, it's only three miles from my house, and every light in the place was on.

There were people running around and there was all this activity in the hangar.

Hangar doors were open.