Coast guard pilot: Lt. j.g. Alex Martfeld

“I didn’t have much money, so I didn’t get to do much flying on my own,” Martfeld said. But when he discovered that the Coast Guard Academy sends a higher percentage of students to flight school than the other military academies, he signed on. After completing basic flight training with Navy and Marine Corps instructors, he transitioned to the Sikorsky MH–60 Jayhawk and was assigned to Air Station Astoria, on the Oregon coast.

Around noon during his first search-and-rescue shift, a 600-foot tanker reported three injured men in need of immediate evacuation. The ship was in the middle of a winter storm, rocking in waves 20 to 25 feet high.

“It’s a pretty dangerous evolution, hoisting them up off the ship, because it might put them in higher risk,” Martfeld said. One apparently had broken a femur, and two suffered severe chemical burns trying to help him. The flight surgeon made the call, and Martfeld found himself flying co-pilot with Lt. Cmdr. Chris Carter in a storm.

“Any time there’s a case like that in the wintertime, it’s going to be pretty bad,” Martfeld said. “With a guy like [Carter], with as many hours as he had in the cockpit, he kept a calm demeanor, and he explained every decision he made.” Decisions such as having the captain steer the tanker into the seas, how to hold ship and helicopter steady during the brutal storm, the best location to position the injured sailors on the deck, and how to winch the guys off the deck as if they were riding an elevator. It took just 2.5 hours from launch to loading the sailors in the ambulance on the Astoria ramp.

“It wasn’t too much of an issue,” Martfeld explained. “It’s what you go through flight school to fly helicopters for.” Then he displayed what seems like an uncharacteristic burst of elation: “It was awesome.”