Rescue Up North

Posted 28 October 2012

TAGS:

Photo by TSgt. Shannon Oleson

Two Alaska Air National Guard pararescue jumpers, or PJs, MSgts. Roger Sparks and Brandon Stuemke, made a late night parachute jump from an HC-130P King personnel recovery aircraft 160 miles north of the Arctic Circle on 28 October 2012 to evacuate a severely ill fifty-eight year old woman. The HC-130 crew, assigned to the 211th Rescue Squadron, the Alaska Air National Guard unit at JB Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, first ferried an HH-60 Pave Hawk helicopter crew and two additional PJs to Eielson AFB, near Fairbanks, where the HH-60 was pre-positioned. The HC-130 crew flew Sparks and Stuemke to the cabin and deployed flares to illuminate their jump. The two PJs treated the woman for eighteen hours before she could be evacuated.

Comments

U-2 Articles
U-2 News
U-2 Video
U-2 Photos

View All Articles

U-2 Anniversary
7/16/2015
For sixty years, the U-2 Dragon Lady has been America's eyes, ears, and nose in the sky. Code One looks back at the U-2 program on the anniversary of its first flight.

U-2 Pilot Describes Earliest Missions
4/30/2015
Vito’s mission took him directly over Moscow and its extensive network of newly built air defenses, which ringed the city in three concentric circles at twenty, forty, and sixty miles from the city center.

Today's U-2 Fleet
9/14/2014
The end of U-2 production in 1989 marked the beginning of a host of evolutionary upgrades.

U-2 Factoids
9/13/2014
Facts, figures, and other essential details about the U-2 Dragon Lady.

Interview With U-2 Stats Keeper
9/12/2014
Reliability maintainability, and supportability lead engineer, tracks statistics for the U-2 program.

U-2 Life Support In Palmdale
9/8/2014
Mark Schroeder has had the responsibility of prepping, maintaining, testing, and inspecting survival equipment for U-2 missions.

U-2 Early History
2/15/2002
The U-2 reconnaissance aircraft, though designed and developed in great secrecy in the 1950s, has somehow never fully emerged from the shadows even though it has outlasted one successor, the SR-71 Blackbird.

View All News