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Watch RAF's Air Sea Rescue team in action
CREWS from RAF Leconfield have winged their way into their station's record books by notching up more rescues this year than any other since 1969.
This morning as dozens of brightly-coloured pins are taken down from a map charting calls to floods in Gloucestershire and sea rescues off Middlesborough, the unassuming team from E Flight, No 202 Squadron can reflect on their many successes, which has seen them run out of room on their official mission board.
But not for long – as it is highly likely the team, whose motto is Semper Vigilate (Always Be Vigilant), will be called out on another mission soon.
On New Year's Eve 2006, as the fireworks were going off, Squadron Leader Donal McGurk and his three-man crew were flying above the River Humber trying to find someone who had jumped into the inky blackness from the Humber Bridge.
Since then it has been non-stop, with 230 call-outs in all, against last year's 146, with crews increasingly being called on to attend road traffic incidents and to search for missing people using their thermal imaging equipment.
And then there were the floods – in Hull, South Yorkshire and Gloucestershire.
Winchman Sgt Jonathan Carrington is the sharp end of the operation, being lowered into some hair-raising situations at the end of a 100ft steel rope.
During the Gloucestershire floods, a man in his 50s – who couldn't swim – decided to take a friend out for a ride on a jetski, dressed in wellies and a Barbour jacket.
The pair soon got in trouble in fast-flowing waters and the man's friend clambered into a tree desperately waving a shirt to attract attention.
Sgt Carrington was winched down to the non-swimmer, who was clinging to the tree trunk, and managed to get a strop around him: "As soon as he got off the tree he just panicked and just tried to use me as a ladder, shoving me under water.
"It was made worse by the fact that we got a winch cable caught in the canopy of the tree.
"It went from bad to very bad rapidly. It was horrendous.
"I ended up inflating my life jacket just to keep the pair of us above water.
"In the end the helicopter pulled the wire free – and he got the b******ing of his life.
"He nearly killed himself, but worse than that he nearly drowned me."
Sgt Carrington has only been at Leconfield 13 months but has seen so many incidents he says they all start to blur together. Some stick in his mind like the day in August when he became entangled – twice – in the rigging of a yacht off the North East Coast near Middlesborough when he was being lowered down to grab a 49-year-old yachtsman. They passed the cliffs later to find the vessel smashed to bits.
He said: "I didn't expect this place to be this busy – it's been a manic year. Before I was posted I was told it was Sleepy Hollow – but it is far from that."
Call-outs maybe anything from rescuing an exhausted surfer at Cayton Bay to being called out to people who have suffered injuries on offshore oil rigs.
But the most difficult jobs are at sea.
Sqn Ldr McGurk recalled the tragedy in Whitby in November where three people died after their 24ft cabin cruiser Last Call capsized.
The lifeboat had picked up the two men, who later died, but was unable to get close in enough to the third member of the party Jill Russell, 48, who was being swept against the rocks.
Unable to secure a strop around Ms Russell because of the swell, the winchman physically had to hold her all the way up.
Ms Russell was airlifted to hospital in Middlesbrough, where she died shortly after arrival.
New Year's Eve for the crew on duty will be the same as any other, with crews expecting the unexpected.
"It's a very practical and pragmatic approach" said Sqdrn Ldr McGurk. "It's just another day and you just never know."
Helicopters have been based at Leconfield, near Beverley, since the 1950s but was only in 1969 that call outs began to be logged.
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Weather for Yorkshire
Saturday 26 May 2012
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