Fatal Storm (18 page)

Campbell was beginning to see the yacht far less frequently. He’d been in the churning ocean for 30 minutes, but to him it seemed like just 10. It was just then that he thought he heard the sound of a helicopter above the roar of the wild weather. He noticed a flare being lit on
Kingurra
’s deck and when he looked up to the heavens there was a helicopter hovering close by.

“Next thing they cruised away,” Campbell recalls. “My heart sank. For the first time I was starting to think I was nearing the end of my endurance; that I might have just another 10 minutes of energy left.”

Soon after 4pm on December 27 the Victoria Police Air Wing departed Melbourne’s Essendon airport in response to an AusSAR request to join the Sydney to Hobart search
and rescue operation. Senior Constable Darryl Jones was the pilot, Senior Constable Barry Barclay the winch operator and Senior Constable David Key the rescue crewman. Jones guided the chopper into Mallacoota to refuel and once scrambled and back in the air, AusSAR advised them of the coordinates for
Kingurra
and accordingly, the location of the search area.

The 160km/h tailwinds pressing the twin-engine French-made Dauphin chopper were the strongest Darryl Jones had encountered in 12 years of flying with the Police Air Wing. It meant their speed across the ground was an amazing 205 knots (390km/h). As they neared the coordinates they were met by rain showers and continuous sea spray and a cloud base ranging from 600 feet to 2000 feet. They were 65 nautical miles (125 kilometres) to the south east of Mallacoota. Wave height, wind, rain, low cloud and a horribly confused ocean made it near impossible for the crew of Police Air Wing to locate
Kingurra
and positively establish a search area. Jones commenced an expanding circle search pattern, turning to the north first. Just as the turn began Barclay spotted a red flare slightly ahead and to the left.

Jones accelerated towards it and within seconds Barclay called out that they were about to overfly the yacht. The helicopter was slowed as much as possible, the desire being not to lose visual contact. Barclay then made radio contact and Police Air Wing was advised that Campbell was approximately 300 metres to the west of the yacht. They tracked to a position about 300 metres upwind of
Kingurra
and shortly after Barclay spotted an orange life ring which he thought contained the crewman. It was empty. While looking at the ring Key saw a man waving his arms about 400 metres east of the life ring and 600 metres upwind of the vessel.

They immediately prepared for a winch and reconfirmed their planned actions discussed during a briefing en route to the search area. Jones took up a 100-foot hover over the survivor and Barclay commenced winching Key down to him. Key noticed the man was floundering in the water and was submerged a number of times as he was being winched towards him.

“I was trying to tread water using one arm while waving frantically with the other,” recalls Campbell. “I was screaming ‘Hey, I’m over here!’ Then I thought to myself, that’s a bit stupid. They can’t hear you. Just keep waving. They hovered over me and then I saw the guy coming down the wire. I was trying to swim towards where he was aimed the whole time. I remember the pilot did a phenomenal job by putting who I now know was David in the water very close to me. I swam hard for maybe 15 or 20 metres towards the harness he was holding out. It was a beautiful target.”

Darryl Jones held the extremely tricky 100-foot hover above Campbell without a single reference point. Barclay, who was relaying Campbell’s movements over the internal communications, confirmed that he would have to pay out a large amount of winch cable to ensure Key’s safety in such a large swell. Jones then looked ahead towards the grey horizon and was horrified by what he saw – a mountain of water coming out of the murk straight for the chopper. He shouted to Barclay he was initiating an immediate climb to avoid being hit by the wave.

“Go ahead!” Barclay shouted back as Jones hauled his machine another 50 feet into the air. The chopper’s radio altimeter, which displayed the height above the ground or water, confirmed that the crest of the wave passed just 10 feet underneath. Key, who was in the water, was confronted by the same monster.

“I hit the water, then when I managed to break the surface, I was in a trough and saw a solid vertical wall in front of me. It was a 90-foot wave. I was sucked up the front of it then the buoyancy of my wetsuit took over and I was tumbled back down its face. I was driven under the water for 10 or 15 seconds before coming out at the back section of the wave. I was completely disorientated and had swallowed a large amount of seawater. I felt like I was a rag doll. I was hit by another wave and driven under the water once more.

“Then, as I came to the surface, I was looking straight at Campbell. He was just a few metres away. He had a blank look about him and was ashen-faced. We started to swim toward each other. I grabbed him as we were hit by another wall of water and I held on to him as hard as I could as we were both pushed under. He was a dead weight; he had no buoyancy vest on and no strength. When we re-surfaced again I placed the rescue harness over his head then put his arms through the strap as he was unable to assist me.”

Just then the pair were hit by yet another big wave. Key realised the winch cable to the chopper was wrapped around his leg. If the chopper moved or the wire went tight he might as well have his leg in a guillotine. He quickly wriggled his leg free then signalled to Barclay that they were ready to be pulled out of the water and winched to the helicopter. The rescue should then have been complete – but it wasn’t. As they approached the helicopter the winch froze, leaving them stranded just outside the door. When he saw that Campbell was exhausted, Barclay placed him in a bear hug and dragged him into the helicopter. Key then made his own way inside.

Campbell had sustained a broken nose and jaw, facial cuts and lacerations and was suffering from severe
hypothermia. Key and Barclay lay on each side of him to transfer body heat and to try and stop shock setting in.

Back in Mallacoota Campbell was transferred by air ambulance to hospital for treatment. His parents were roused from sleep at 2am by CYC General Manager Bruce Rowley. They looked at each other stunned. This was the second time one of their sons had defied the clutches of death. John Campbell’s brother, Clarke, had survived a climbing accident in America a few years earlier where some of the party had perished.

The story of the amazing rescue of American John Campbell after he was lost overboard from
Kingurra
took on a dramatic new dimension some months after the event. It emerged that the Victoria Police Air Wing helicopter, with an exhausted and injured Campbell prone on the floor, went perilously close to ditching into the wild seas while battling extremely strong headwinds on its way back to shore.

Eventually, with bright red fuel alarm lights flashing a dire warning that the chopper was on its last gasp of fuel, the pilot, Darryl Jones, made a desperate life-or-death lunge at the first available landing spot and made it – just!

It’s a story that brings graphic new emphasis to the heroism shown by the helicopter rescue crews involved in this disaster, a heroism that prevented this sporting event from becoming the world’s worst sporting tragedy, one where the death toll could easily have been beyond belief.

A decade on Darryl Jones remains with the Victorian Police Force, but now he’s piloting a highway patrol car and not a helicopter. “I flew until February 2001, then I got diabetes,” said Jones. “Unfortunately that meant I couldn’t hold my position as a pilot any more. However, as it turned out I was lucky to be in the Police Force
because that meant I was then able to secure a ‘special consideration’ transfer to the highway patrol. Otherwise I’d have been out of a job and on the streets looking for work.”

Jones’ efforts in 1998 led to him becoming the only pilot in the 30-year history of the Victoria Police Air Wing to receive a Valour Award. To this day his memories of the rescues he executed at the controls of the chopper are indelible, but it’s the dramas that came after Campbell was plucked from the ocean that remain the most vivid.

Jones recounted: “As soon as we knew we’d actually located him [Campbell], I said to the blokes, ‘Look, we’d better do this as quick as we can. I need to make sure we have as much fuel as possible for the leg home’.

“We put Keysie [David Key] on the wire and lowered him to the water. That wasn’t easy to start with because of the strength of the wind. Everybody thinks, ‘Oh yeah, no worries, we hang him out on a wire and he goes straight down, vertically’. But in that sort of wind he’s like a rag doll on the end of a string – he’s blowing out behind the chopper. Barry [winchman Barry Barclay] said to me on the intercom that he couldn’t get Dave close to Campbell so wanted me to move the aircraft forward and fly through to the target – and that’s when the big wave that everyone talks about arrived on the scene.

“We were holding a 100 foot hover at the time, and the RADALT – the radio altimeter – was telling me that we then had 90 foot waves going through below us: each time one went under us it showed 10 foot on the RADALT. But this time, when I looked ahead as I began to fly forward, all I saw was this massive wall of water coming at us. There was a huge wave building in the windscreen, and I said to Barry, ‘Play out some cable, I have to climb’. He said, ‘OK, no worries’, so I climbed up
to 150 foot on the RADALT, and when this ‘thing’ went underneath us the needle was showing 10 foot. Now Keysie says it was a 90-foot wave, and I can only say from what I saw on the RADALT, it was a lot bigger than that.

“It was a mountain of water and we actually dragged Dave straight through it – it was so huge and came at us so suddenly there was no way we were going to get him up and over it. If there was a plus, it was that we made the experience a little bit quicker for him because we pulled him through.”

The experience for Key continued to be quite terrifying when he surfaced. He couldn’t see the helicopter, and for an instant he was sure it had crashed – taken out by the wave. The crew of another race yacht which, unbeknown to the chopper crew, was nearby was also convinced the chopper had gone in.

“Apparently there was another yacht almost below us at the time,” said Jones. “We did not see it but we found out six months later that the crew saw us in the hover and going into the rescue. Then they saw this mountain of water build up and come at us, and all they could say to themselves was, ‘They’re gone’. They were absolutely convinced we had crashed, until they saw our little helicopter still flying in the air after the wave had gone past.”

With Campbell having been secured in the rescue harness and being winched up to the helicopter it was safe to assume that the worst was over, but that wasn’t the case. “In 14 years working with the Police Air Wing I’d never had a winch freeze, but that’s what happened during that recovery,” said Jones. “We got them a few feet below the aircraft and the winch froze – just stopped working – and we knew immediately that if we couldn’t get them into the aircraft then we were in serious trouble. I kept flicking the mission switch on the unit that supplies
power to the winch in the hope that it would spark up, and after five or six tries it kicked in, so Barry was able to grab them. We found out a couple of days later, when the engineers checked the winch, that there was nothing wrong with the unit – the problem was that with so much moisture in the air the power supply to the winch was shorting out.”

With Campbell aboard and the chopper door closed, Jones set a course for the nearest airport, Mallacoota. His calculations revealed that in the prevailing conditions the chopper had 80 minutes of fuel remaining, and according to the GPS, the flight time back to Mallacoota was 40 minutes. “That was fine, but of course the GPS didn’t allow for the extremely strong headwinds we were experiencing. From the moment we headed for home I was doing what all pilots do, watching all my gauges, and after a while I noticed that I’d flown for about 40 minutes, and the GPS was still telling me that I had 40 minutes to get back to Mallacoota. Basically it meant that while our airspeed was 120 knots there were times when I had ground speed of about five knots – we had a 115 knot headwind!

“At that stage we were still over a very rough ocean. I could see land about 25 kilometres ahead, but even so I was starting to sweat a bit about fuel. I knew it was getting low, and sure enough, a short while later the solid red low-fuel warning lights came on, and then not much longer after that the red alarm lights started flashing and the emergency horn came on. So, suddenly, with these lights flashing in my face, and almost empty fuel tanks, I’m thinking, ‘Maybe we won’t make it to land’.

“I was doing my best to wean the chopper by pushing the collective down to reduce the power requirements until I started to lose a bit of air speed, then I would just tweak it back up to get back to speed. I was lowering my power requirements but keeping my air speed up, just to
stretch out as far as possible what little fuel was left in the tank.”

By now Barclay and Key sensed something was wrong, simply because Jones had gone quiet. That was confirmed when one of them looked over Jones’ shoulder and saw that the “low fuel” warning light was on, and the fuel alarm light was sending a message no pilot wants to see. The professional experience Key and Barclay held told them there was then no reason to say anything to Jones; they just communicated amongst themselves about the problem, knowing that there was every chance they would be ditching the chopper, and when that time came they would have to be ready to go. Their preparation involved putting John Campbell back into a harness, then taking out three safety straps and hooking themselves and the liferaft together. There was nothing more they could do then but wait for Jones’ call to abandon the aircraft.

“I was trying to work out when would be the best time for me to put the aircraft into the water,” Jones said, “and when would be the best time to say to the crew, ‘That’s it, guys. Prepare to get out’. My plan was to get down as low as I could so they could jump into the water. Getting them out before I ditched would be much safer for them because that way the three of them would at least be together and with the liferaft.