An HH-60G Pave Hawk helicopter taxis before a mission Oct. 1, 2010, at Kandahar Airfield, Afghanistan. Airmen of the 26th Expeditionary Rescue Squadron conduct combat search and rescue missions as well as transporting injured military members and civilians for medical treatment. (U.S. Air Force photo/Tech. Sgt. Chad Chisholm)
Maj. Russell Cook taxies an HH-60G Pave Hawk helicopter during a mission Oct. 1, 2010, at Kandahar Airfield, Afghanistan. Major Cook is a pilot with the 26th Expeditionary Rescue Squadron. (U.S. Air Force photo/Tech. Sgt. Chad Chisholm)
by Senior Airman Melissa White
451st Air Expeditionary Wing Public Affairs
10/7/2010 - KANDAHAR AIRFIELD, Afghanistan (AFNS) -- By signing in to their shift, they know the first mission is theirs. Ready to leave in moments with barely a second to spare, the crew is notified at the last minute to stand down, prolonging the suspense as they attempt to relax. However, relaxation is hardly an option when a simple beep of the paging system could indicate a life on the line, causing them to scramble for a mission.
This is the story of the 26th Expeditionary Rescue Squadron, composed of HH-60 Pave Hawk helicopter aircrews who support the rescue mission here. They are referred to as Pedros -- a call sign that started in the Vietnam War and remains in use today for Air Force medical evacuation crews in Afghanistan.
Their mission is easy enough to understand, but the task is challenging: work as a team with the pararescuemen, or PJs, to conduct day and night personnel recovery operations or medical evacuation missions in hostile environments.
"I was really excited when I found out about this deployment, because we're in a very busy area," said 1st Lt. Sky Jensen, a 26th ERQS co-pilot. "I've already been out on more than 250 missions. We're staying busy with the high operations tempo to support an important mission." Lieutenant has been deployed on this mission since June.
The lieutenant represents one part of a four-person aircrew: pilot, co-pilot, flight engineer and aerial gunner. The aircrew is supplemented with two or three PJs, or personnel recovery specialists who are trained to extract, treat and evacuate injured personnel in high-threat environments.
"Our job is to take the PJs to the fight," Lieutenant Jensen said. "When we come into work, we hope we don't get called out on a mission. But if someone needs our help, everything else we're doing just stops and we head out; it's kind of like a firehouse."
Because the members of the 26th ERQS are called only when lives are on the line, these Airmen hope they will have little work throughout the day. When duty calls, though, the team is willing and ready to apply their unique rescue skills.
Behind the two pilots sits a flight engineer, whose primary responsibility is to ensure that all systems are performing smoothly on the HH-60.
"It's nice to be called on to save someone's life," said Senior Airman Franz Workman, a 26th ERQS flight engineer. "It stinks that someone's having a bad day because they're hurt ... but at least we're giving him a chance to continue having bad or good days by helping to save his life. I wouldn't change a thing about my career. I joined the Air Force right out of high school and I didn't really even know much about the flight engineer career field, and now we're out here saving lives. I never dreamed in a million years that I would be doing something like this."
As a flight engineer, some of the job responsibilities include aircraft systems familiarization and operation, running preflight inspection checklists, communicating with the PJ crew, lowering the hoist and ropes for them, calculating the aircraft's available power to determine if there's enough power to hover and even operating a gun on the aircraft.
The HH-60 is equipped with two .50 caliber machineguns mounted on either side of the helicopter. These are the domain of the aerial gunner, the fourth and final member of the aircrew.
"We're the weapons system expert on the aircraft," said Tech. Sgt. Dan Sipel, a 26th ERQS aerial gunner. "The aircraft is the actual recovery tool, and we're the defensive tool to protect our aircraft and the PJs as we go into a landing zone to recover people, especially when we fly into hostile territory."
Unlike other medical evacuation assets used in Afghanistan, the HH-60 helicopters of the 26th ERQS are not marked with a red cross. This allows the aircrews and PJs who fly on them to act as legal combatants while engaging in rescue operations.
Airman Workman described a typical mission as "very hectic, very quick, and pretty much like controlled chaos." But, he added, the crew works together as a team to complete the mission of saving lives while keeping the aircraft, and those on board, out of harm's way.
"The nature of our job is very grim, especially when it involves injured military members, civilians or, even worse, children," Sergeant Sipel said. "But we're doing our best to get the PJs to them so we can bring them back within the 'golden hour,' and give them a chance to live."
The "golden hour" refers to the passage of time between when a medical call is received and when the patient is dropped off at a suitable medical facility.
When the mission is complete and they return to their haven to await the next call, this crew knows that they have fulfilled their duty, so "That Others May Live."
