They are on-scene ten minutes later, in almost complete dark. Spillane has spent the flight slowly putting his wetsuit on, trying not to sweat too much, trying not to dehydrate himself. Now he sits by the spotter's window looking out at the storm. A Coast Guard C-130 circles at five hundred feet and the Air National Guard tanker circles several hundred feet above that. Their lights poke feebly into the swarming darkness. Ruvola establishes a low hover aft of the sailboat and flips on his floods, which throw down a cone of light from the belly of the aircraft. Spillane can't believe what he sees: massive foam-laced swells rising and falling in the circle of light, some barely missing the belly of the helicopter. Twice he has to shout for altitude to keep the helicopter from getting slapped out of the sky.
The wind is blowing so hard that the rotor wash, which normally falls directly below the helicopter, is forty feet behind it; it lags the way it normally does when the helicopter is flying ahead at eighty knots. Despite the conditions, Spillane still assumes he and Rick Smith are going to deploy by sliding down a three-inch-thick "fastrope" into the sea. The question is, what will they do then? The boat looks like it's moving too fast for a swimmer to catch, which means Tomizawa will have to be extracted from the water, like the Satori crew was. But that would put him at a whole other level of risk; there's a point at which sporty rescues become more dangerous than sinking boats. While Spillane considers Tomizawa's chances, flight engineer Jim Mioli gets on the intercom and says he has doubts about retrieving anyone from the water. The waves are rising too fast for the hoist controls to keep up, so there'll be too much slack around the basket at the crests of the waves. If a man were caught in a loop of cable and the wave dropped out from under him, he'd be cut in half.
For the next twenty minutes Ruvola keeps the helicopter in a hover over the sailboat while the crew peers out the jump door, discussing what to do. They finally agree that the boat looks pretty good in the water—she's riding high, relatively stable—and that any kind of rescue attempt will put Tomizawa in more danger than he is already in. He should stay with his boat. We're out of our league, boys, Ruvola finally says over the intercom. We're not going to do this. Ruvola gets the C-130 pilot on the radio and tells him their decision, and the C-130 pilot relays it to the sailboat. Tomizawa, desperate, radios back that they don't have to deploy their swimmers at all—just swing the basket over and he'll rescue himself. No, that's not the problem, Buschor answers. We don't mind going in the water; we just don't think a rescue is possible.
Ruvola backs away and the tanker plane drops two life rafts connected by eight hundred feet of line, in case Tomizawa's boat starts to founder, and then the two aircraft head back to base. (Tomizawa was eventually picked up by a Romanian freighter.) Ten minutes into the return flight Ruvola lines up on the tanker for the third time, hits the drogue immediately and takes on 1,560 pounds of fuel.
They'll need one more refueling in order to make shore. Spillane settles into the portside spotter's seat and stares down at the ocean a thousand feet below. If Mioli hadn't spoken up, he and Rick Smith might be swimming around down there, trying to get back into the rescue basket. They'd have died. In conditions like these, so much water gets loaded into the air that swimmers drown simply trying to breathe.
MONTHS later, after the Air National Guard has put the pieces together, it will determine that gaps had developed in the web of resources designed to support an increased-risk mission over water. At any given moment someone had the necessary information for keeping Ruvola's helicopter airborne, but that information wasn't disseminated correctly during the last hour of Ruvola's flight. Several times a day, mission or no mission, McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey faxes weather bulletins to Suffolk Airbase for their use in route planning. If Suffolk is planning a difficult mission, they might also call McGuire for a verbal update on flight routes, satellite information, etc. Once the mission is underway, one person—usually the tanker pilot—is responsible for obtaining and relaying weather information to all the pilots involved in the rescue. If he needs more information, he calls Suffolk and tells them to get it; without the call, Suffolk doesn't actively pursue weather information. They are, in the words of the accident investigators, "reactive" rather than "proactive" in carrying out their duties.