Steve Torpey

And we were there in just over 30 minutes.

I had an 80 knot tailwind.

So all of a sudden we're here and the needles that are pointing to where the location of the emergency beacons in the water are basically spun.

All of a sudden we just passed them.

And then we realized we've got to turn around.

And we had somehow flown seven miles downwind of the scene.

So at that point, we had to make our way back to the location of where the survivors were.

Normally, in order to go from 300 feet down to 100 feet, where we will then be able to see the water and see the survivors, we do a controlled approach where we fly 70 knots and we just slowly descend down to 100 feet.

And you do it while you're pointed into the wind.

So I'm pointed at the wind, and I'm flying at 70 knots, expecting to start to descend down to 100 feet.

And I looked at this other instrument that's called a Doppler, and it tells me how fast I'm moving over the ground, not through the air, but over the ground.

And it tells me I'm going backwards.

And that is something I've never experienced before.

And it told me that the wind is much stronger than I had ever experienced.

And I just had to basically speed up and fly forward and gradually creep up on the survivor's location, which we did.

And I remember just laughing at that and mentioning it to Captain Lefevre, and we were both kind of chuckled about it.

and descended down to 100 feet where the needle pointed to, and I could see kind of a blurry mass of reflective tape on the back of the survivor's survival suits.

You could never count the people.

You couldn't see it that clearly.

It was just a blurry mess of rain and wind and sea spray.