The Old Guard

On our WEB SITE, we placed a description of what has been reported as the fastest helicopter rescue on record (ref: VIETNAM THE HELICOPTER WAR by Philip D. Chinnery, pg 166).

“Surprisingly, the record for the fastest save of the war is held by a HH43F assigned to the 37ARRS, 41 ARRW DaNang AB. "Pedro 61" flown by Lieutenants Bill Latham and his co-pilot James Moulton. On 23 November 1972, while on a local flight, they monitored a "Mayday" from an OV-10 FAC. To their surprise, the aircraft impacted several hundred yards in front of them and the pilot in his chute floated down toward a paddy. "Pedro 61" followed the chute down and SGt McCoy jumped out and dragged the pilot back to the helicopter. Total elapsed time from ejection to rescue was one minute and thirty seconds.”

One of our subscribers has challenged this record;

Steve, a while back you published a story of a Pedro rescue that was declared not much more than a minute to complete and return to base. We-e-e-ll maybe, here's my challenge to that. Jim Rodenberg and I were on alert at NKP, Thailand circa April 1965 when a call came there was a shot-up Navy A-1 headed our way. He had a damaged landing gear or so the pilot thought? We launched and there he was at about 3000 ft more or less; he had a huge hole in his wing where one of the main gear [used to be], so he elected to fly close to NKP and bail out. We flew formation with him a short while, watched him push back the canopy, climb out and over the edge he went.

We circled him as he descended [You can tell he is Navy by the deep blue color of his eyes] and we landed right beside him. No PLF was necessary for he landed in the lower branches of a tree about 3 ft off the ground; he merely unstrapped, stepped out of his harness and right into the ass-end of our HH-43. He was buying us drinks at the club in less then 5 minutes and that includes shutting down the engine.

How about that for a potential record??

Jay Strayer, Col, USAF(ret)

USN Pilot floats down with NKP in background

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