Helicopters double up for wilderness rescue
A Great Falls medical helicopter broke down Wednesday afternoon in the Bob Marshall Wilderness while attempting to extract a man who thought he was having a heart attack.
To rescue the man — and the stranded helicopter — required the intervention of the Two Bear Air helicopter from the Flathead Valley and a medical jet from Great Falls.
The 60-year-old man from Alaska had been hiking in the Silvertip Mountain area with his dog. He started texting his son from a GPS-enabled personal locator beacon around 2:40 a.m. Wednesday, saying that he wasn’t feeling well and that he was going to try and take an aspirin and rest.
His last text message to his son was around 9 a.m. and he sent a distress call around 10 a.m. that launched MercyFlight.
Flight Coordinator Nadia Bowen at Benefis Health System in Great Falls received the distress call and used the coordinates from the man’s text messages to create a map with a 30-mile radius of the man’s possible location.
The MercyFlight helicopter from Benefis was sent out and located a hunting camp, where it landed. After medics spoke to the hunters and determined the man was not there, they boarded the helicopter, but it would not start.
Bowen sent a MercyFlight jet to fly above the area; the jet was able to make radio contact with the helicopter.
“We basically found ourselves with the jet,” Bowen said. “From there, we knew that everybody was OK. That’s how we stayed in communication with the crew.”
According to Flathead County Sheriff Chuck Curry, the helicopter had lost a starter generator. At that point, Bowen contacted Flathead County, which dispatched Two Bear Air to assist MercyFlight.
Two Bear Air located the man north of the hunting camp, landed and left a couple of crew members behind while Two Bear flew the patient and a MercyFlight nurse to Benefis.
At the hospital, a mechanic boarded the Two Bear Air helicopter with the necessary parts to repair the MercyFlight chopper. Two Bear then flew the mechanic to the wilderness landing site of the Benefis helicopter.
Bowen coordinated the entire operation, and though she said it was a strange afternoon, the rescue went smoothly.
“It was an odd day,” she said. “Our mechanic is pretty good. He can pretty much fix the helicopter anywhere.
“Everything was totally textbook.”
The MercyFlight helicopter being used Wednesday was a EuroCopter 135 P2 borrowed from Spokane. MercyFlight’s regular helicopter is an EC 135 PR Plus, which has a larger engine, but it was out of service Wednesday for regular scheduled maintenance.
Two Bear Air flies a Bell 429 helicopter.
Curry said that the man, who arrived at Benefis around 3:30 p.m., was in stable condition Thursday.
The MercyFlight helicopter — with all of its crew members and the man’s dog aboard — returned to Benefis at 5:18 p.m. after being repaired.
Reporter Brittany Brevik may be reached at 758-4459 or by email at bbrevik@dailyinterlake.com.