US Coast Guard Rescue Swimmer Gear - Smarter Every Day 279

Okay, that was intense! I'm Destin, this is Smarter Every Day. I want to go back and look at what you just saw and explain what's going on.

This is me, and this is John Calhoun, a U.S. Coast Guard rescue swimmer. He's pulling me towards a helicopter. He puts me in a basket, he steadies the basket until it's lifted up out of the water, and then he drops away. This was part of a training session where I was the person they practice saving. We're going to go into that specific experience in a future video, but today I want to talk about what John Calhoun, that rescue swimmer, has done for the last 20 years.

Coast Guard rescue swimmers, or aviation survival technicians—the technical term—are one of the most elite positions in all military branches. It's possible that you, like me, before this experience, haven't heard of aviation survival technicians. In this video, we're going to answer three questions.

Number one: What is a U.S. Coast Guard rescue swimmer, and how do you become one? It is brutally challenging.

Number two: We're going to go to an air station. We're going to go to what's called a survival shop, and we're going to learn a secret skill that Coast Guard rescue swimmers have. Did not see this coming, but it makes sense if you think about it.

And number three: We are going to learn what is in the kit of a rescue swimmer if they jump out of a helicopter. If you think about it, if you're on a helicopter and you're about to jump out, what kinds of things would you want to have with you to help save somebody and help keep yourself alive?

This continues our Smarter Every Day Deep Dive series of videos into the inner workings of the U.S. Coast Guard. We've learned about how the Coast Guard is set up, how it handles distress calls, and what the Coast Guard does at their stations about their awesome boats and their search-and-rescue strategy and search patterns. I'm really excited to begin to explore the aviation side of what they do: the helicopters, the technicians, the mechanics that keep them running, and the pilots that fly them. There is so much awesomeness to it, but today let's go get smarter every day and learn about the U.S. Coast Guard rescue swimmers.

Okay, I think one of the best ways to understand something is to see it in action. So, to answer our first question—what is a rescue swimmer? What I want to do is look at a bunch of footage that I got from the internet. This is some awesome footage, and because it's so awesome, it feels like a really cool '80s action movie. So I'm going to get my voiceover mic here, and now that I got my voiceover mic, I'm going to ramp up my rad '80s action movie tunes and let's check out some videos.

Okay, here's a good place to start. Here we've got someone stuck on the pylons inside the surf line, and they can't get out. The rescue swimmer deploys, swims over to them, gets them, and pulls them out so they can be hoisted from danger. Now, this is up off the coast of Kodiak, Alaska. There's a disabled vessel with three crew members on board, and they're getting battered around by the surf.

Now, apparently, because the boat was being tossed around so much, they couldn't just hoist the sailors off the boat itself, so they had to jump into the water and inflate their Gumby survival suits and trust their lives to the rescue swimmer who had to get them up into the chopper. All three sailors were rescued. Rescue swimmers don't just save people from the water, so here we are rescuing two trapped surfers from a cliff in Oregon. Here we are again in the Northwest; a young man had fallen partway down a cliff and sustained serious head injuries. The rescue swimmer goes down, brings him up, and begins treating him as they get him on the way to the hospital.

Here, the Coast Guard pulls up another fisherman who fell and broke his foot while walking along a cliff, and another rescue of a woman who got stuck on a cliff. I hate to say it, but it looks like we civilians have some room for growth in our safety decision-making process around seaside cliffs. Who do you call when the rescuers need rescuing? In this case, an aviation crew was called to medevac two injured firefighters who were being surrounded by a fire on a steep mountainside in California. Hovering over a flaming forest that caused heat updrafts on the rotor blades, and with smoke entering the cockpit, the crew was able to thread the needle in a 20x30 ft opening in the tree canopy and extract these wounded firefighters before they were overrun by the flames.

Here's a case from Florida: a boat broke down as they were rushing to flee from an incoming hurricane. The rescue swimmer has to get them in the water and then up on the helicopter, working in 20 to 25 ft waves. Speaking of hurricanes, here we see an aviation survival technician chopping through the roof of a flooded house to get to trapped residents on the inside of the attic. Now, after storms like this, these air rescue teams are often out there working day and night just plucking people out of houses and cars, sometimes while fighting with really fast running water.

What a day! Is it just you? No one else is in the house? In some cases, they've been able to save pets and deliver emergency supplies. They do medevacs from cruise ships, oil platforms, boats. These rescue swimmers and aviation crews are a lifeline for so many people who are out on the water and end up needing critical medical attention. Just to note, they operate in all kinds of weather, from beautiful blue waters down south to the edge of the Arctic up north. Right here, we're looking at a training exercise up in Alaska. I love that this rescue swimmer just climbs up on a stinking iceberg.

So, as you can see, these rescue swimmers, both men and women, are absolute beasts. Okay, so that was a really fun segment. I hope you enjoyed that. I enjoyed using the mic there. So basically, we just watched a lot of superhero footage—it’s people literally saving lives!

So, as you can probably imagine, it's not going to be an easy process to become a Coast Guard rescue swimmer, right? To learn about this, let's go talk to Joe Keef, a rescue swimmer down at Air Station New Orleans, who's training a group of young Coasties who are hoping to become rescue swimmers.

So, once you go through boot camp, a school is like your specialty school. So, in the Coast Guard, you go out to the fleet—any small boat station, a cutter, wherever it might be. These guys got lucky enough to be stationed at this air station, and then when you're at school, that will give you your rate, your specialty skill, and what you'll be—what your job is in the Coast Guard. So these Coasties are in a four-month program designed to prepare them for the rigors of A school, and the one they're going to go to is for rescue swimmers if they qualify.

So we like to do the workouts with them just so that way we know what they're going through and know what kind of level fatigue they're at, and we can tailor the workouts differently to hit different weaknesses or different strengths depending on the day. Then if you qualify, you go to A school. It's a brutal six-month program with a high attrition rate—73%. Less than a third of the people who start are able to graduate. That's one of the highest attrition rates of any program within the U.S. military. Only 15 to 30 new rescue swimmers graduate every year, and there are usually only about 350 rescue swimmers operating nationwide at any moment. It is an insanely elite group of people.

They learn basic emergency medical care as well and become EMTs. After that, they do a six-month apprenticeship program. Then once you're a rescue swimmer, you keep training all the time. The training really never stops. They never stop honing their craft, and they always have to be in top shape.

And this brings me to that secret skill that all rescue swimmers have. They learned this in A school, and to explore this more, I want to go back down to Air Station New Orleans and go to an area just off the hangar where they keep and maintain the helicopters. This is where the rescue swimmers hang out. It's known as the survival shop. This is where John Calhoun and Joe Keith, whom we previously met, are based.

One of the things that people don't know about us is that actually part of our school is sewing. All of us can sew. Really? Yeah, so we repair flight suits—like what the pilots wear. We sew patches on them and stuff like that. And is that the sewing machine over there? Those are sewing machines. Yeah, and we make bags and, I mean, any kind of project that comes up, we're able to sew.

That's awesome! What we're learning here together is that rescue swimmers aren't just the people that go down and save people. They're also responsible for all of the survival gear. This is our day-to-day operations around here. We just take care of the whole station's life support equipment. We do everything from sewing flight suits to inflating all of our life preservers to inspecting the float containers—the floats that actually keep the helicopter up in case of a water landing.

So I'm working on one of the A floats for the helicopter. Basically, this will inflate into a big giant ball, and what we're doing right now is just packing it up, so this big—all this fabric has to go into this little tiny container. This is on the tail rotor assembly, so this will be just after the wheels, a little bit behind the wheels of the helicopter. There’s one on each side, and then these will be the forward ones—so these will be upfront, and these will be in the back.

Everything we do is step-by-step instructions, so it's pretty easy to follow. It's easy not to mess up. So how do you, like, are there pictures of how to fold this thing? Yep, exactly. So we go through here, and it gives us instructions, and then there's references in the back, and we're able to look at the pictures and, you know, from years of experience, gain a little bit of inside knowledge.

Yeah, absolutely, that's crazy. So John, do you inspect what he does, or how does this work? So, yeah, my role in this is I'm a what's called a quality assurance inspector. So as he's going through the steps, I'll actually go along with him and make sure that it's done correctly. So you double-check everything?

One of my favorite things in the world is to get to snoop around in other people's workshops and see how they organize all their tools. Check this out! Is it okay if I open one of these? Do absolutely, yeah. Holy cow, okay, this is cool! This is where we keep all of our stuff that we, you know, how we do our maintenance day-to-day.

It's all that! So you can repair anything here. This is cool stuff, man—survival! Man, this is like a Boy Scout dream come true! Tools, I love so—because you have aircraft, you have to make sure all the tools are in place, kind of thing, correct? Oh, wow, that's awesome. Like, the pilots will come in, and they'll drop off their flight suits, and then, you know, they have their little special requests that they’ll sew for them.

We make the leather name tags as well, so a little bit of a tailor operation. These right here we make—oh, that's you make those here? Yep, like super self-contained. I mean, we have to be able to—there’s one of our airmen; you can film him doing his push-ups!

Every time they come in the shop, push-ups. Every time we come? Why do you have to do 10 push-ups? To get stronger. So just like you, you just walk in the door, do ten push-ups? Perfect answer! He's like, "What are you, an idiot? I'm doing push-ups. I'm trying to get stronger!" Anyway, I love that answer.

The third question that we're going to answer here is what's in their kit. Now remember, rescue swimmers take care of everybody, right? So they're going to have the survival vests for all the air crew, but they also take care of their own survival vest. But think about this for a second—if you had the option to take anything with you when you jump out of a helicopter, and you might have to stay alive in the ocean, what would you choose to, like, attach to yourself?

That's what we're going to find out. John first is going to show us what the air crew has, and then he's going to show us what the rescue swimmer has. Can I see your kit? Like, is this a standard kit? So this is just—so we have the collars removed over there. That's the inflatable part. Uh-huh, that's the life vest.

Okay, and this is what the pilots and the air crew have—it's a standard flare, day and night. This end is the day end, and it emits orange smoke, and then the other end's a night end, and it does a red flare. Oh, so it's two flares in one? Two flares in one, yeah. It's a day and night. Oh wow, so that's—I noticed you're kind of handling that delicately; that's kind of a big deal, right?

Well, we don't want it to go off in the shop. It could cause a, you know, problem for us. The Navy doesn't like it when we have to call the fire department over. On this side, we've got to inspect it anyway, so we might as well pull it all out.

It's just a red pyrotechnic star. So, this is a flare cartridge? Yep, you screw it in. I'm trying to get my focus. You screw that cartridge in, and you pull this down, and there's a firing pin inside of there. Uh-huh, and when you let it go, the firing pin will just fly up. Yep, that is awesome.

And then, you know, some other things we have are just basic, you know, life support stuff—strobe light for at night. This is all for an air crew to use in case of an emergency, an emergency landing in the water. Like if you land in the water? Signal mirror, whistle, this is a webbing cutter.

Mhm, so in case one of the air crew members gets trapped in the helicopter, they can use it to cut their seat belts. This is one of our new EBS; it's registered to our unit, and in case of an emergency, they can kick this off.

Is it like a beacon? That's the same as what do you call the beacon in aircraft? I forget the name of it. The ELT—what does that stand for? Was it emergency location transmitter? Yeah, emergency location transmitter. So is that like the same thing?

Yeah, but it's for personal use, and it's registered to our unit. It'll actually go down and tell you which vest it is, so in case of a crash, we'll get notified, and we can actually go down to who is wearing the vest because we have a sign-out sheet for them, so it gets that specific. Oh, wow! Imagine that—you found yourself away from the helicopter; you’d be able to get a little bit closer using the PLB versus the ELT.

What's the PLB? Personal Locator Beacon. So it'll tell you exactly where you are when you're holding it. Oh wow! So, the ELT, which we talked about earlier, that'll just show you where the helicopter is; this will show you where the person is. Is this a torque screwdriver? Yes, it is. I've never seen one of those!

Yeah, so it'll tell you exactly what the torque is, and this one can go either the right way or go left as well, so these are threaded the opposite way of normal. So, righty-loosey? Exactly! So, are you taking that out? Nope, putting it in.

So what's your— is that chewing tobacco? What's your other? This is just calories in case you're stuck in a raft or something like that for days on end. It's candy and chewing gum, and then this is our desalination kit. Really? Mariner F20?

Yeah, it's used for turning seawater into drinkable water. How does it work? So it's got a membrane on the inside, and it works through, I guess, osmosis? Reverse osmosis? Yeah, so you put the seawater in one of the pouches, and then it's got this syrup; it's for electrolytes basically. So, in case you're stuck in a raft, you need to keep those electrolytes up, but yeah, it takes like 4 to 6 hours to make drinkable water.

H, there's one last thing—that's this, uh, it's just a little knife. Mhm. So everything's tied to you. Everything's tied to you, and this is, you know, that way you don't have to worry about losing stuff—serrated so you can cut stuff, right? And it's got a blunt tip, you know, so you don't stab yourself.

Oh, that's awesome! So what about you guys? So this is our Triton harness. Anytime we're in the helicopter, this is what we wear. This is an accessory hook—it's called a Talon. That's a legit D-ring.

This is what gets attached to the helicopter, so this is what we go up and down with. This is an in-ear—right here, it's a in-ear, they call it a bone mic. It works by pressing against your ear, and it's actually a really effective tool—it's really clear, so you can hear it over the helicopter rotors, correct? This is the radio that it's connected to—just a standard handheld HF radio.

Like when you're talking to these guys up top, are you telling them, like, "Hey, I'm in the water"? You have standard things you say? So normally, we don't—most of our communication is via hand signals. So we have a whole gambit of hand signals that we use to talk to the helicopter, to let them know what we need, what we want, and whatever the hand signals don't cover, we can obviously use the radio. That's awesome!

Did you finally get that thing in there? Yep, wrestled that pig to the ground, didn't you? That's right! So I'm right at the riveting stage of this process, so what I'll be doing—so I get these plastic rivets with metal washers, and now I'll just be riveting down the side, and then we'll tie this up, get rid of the zip ties, and then it'll be ready for the final QA. Lace it up, and then in a few days, we'll put this back on the helicopter.

I've got more videos with the Coast Guard coming up. You got a sneak peek at the beginning, where I participated in a training exercise in Lake Pontchartrain in New Orleans. To qualify to do that, I had to get trained on some stuff, so I got out in the water with Joe, and he totally kicked my tail, and you'll see why in that video. We also got to learn a lot of awesome stuff about the helicopter.

There is so much more I want to show you. As you may remember, I love helicopters. I hope it's clear what I'm doing here on Smarter Every Day. I'm actually making the videos I want to make, which isn't always the type of content that sponsors want to support. I don't want to get into a situation where the tail is wagging the dog. Those financial forces are trying to tell me to make a certain type of content, which is why I'm doubling down on independent viewer support on Patreon.

If you like what I'm doing here at Smarter Every Day, you get it! You see I'm trying to make intelligent, respectful content. Supporting on Patreon is an awesome way to support the channel. If you want to kick in and support my approach to educational content, you can do that at patreon.com/smartereveryday. There's also a link down in the video description.

If you're a patron who's supporting, at the end of this year, I'm going to send out these rad holographic Smarter Every Day JWST Space Team stickers. I love them! This is my attempt to say thank you for sticking with me. Regardless of whether or not you support on Patreon, I'm just so stinking happy that you are taking your time—which is precious—to spend it with me learning this really cool stuff. So, I'm grateful. I truly am.

So thank you so much! Still got a lot coming up on the Coast Guard Deep Dive series. I think you'll enjoy it, 'cause I'm excited about it! Anyway, that's it! I'm Destin, you're getting smarter every day. Have a good one. Bye!