Dmitry “Jimmy” Viner was at the Sikorsky Aircraft Company on November 29, 1945, doing nothing as important as what his next job entailed.
When the telephone rang, Viner answered it. He learned two men required rescuing from a grounded barge, which separated from an oil tanker and became trapped on Penfield Reef near Fairfield, Connecticut. The helicopter crew on-site couldn’t land because of the terrible waves, and no boats could maneuver close enough to the barge to save Capt. Joseph Pawlik and crewman Steven Penninger.
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Running out of options, the caller asked Viner for assistance.
“The police called us and said the barge was in a hell of a shape and asked if we could do anything,” Viner recalled in 1995. “I said, ‘Sure could.’”
Viner prepared to do something for the first time, an extraction technique that is common in the United States military today. He planned to use a helicopter hoist to lift the stranded men to safety.
In Need of the Right Equipment
An article in the Igor I. Sikorsky Historical Archives at Sacred Heart University in Connecticut detailed the groundbreaking rescue.
After hanging up, Viner and Capt. Jackson Beighle, an Army Air Forces representative at Sikorsky, quickly boarded a helicopter. With Viner—who started at the company in 1923 as an errand boy and truck driver, among other tasks—as the pilot, they soon arrived at the scene six miles southwest of Sikorsky’s factory in Bridgeport.
Once there, Viner and Beighle dropped a note to the stranded bargemen, inquiring about their situation. It wasn’t good. They discovered the barge was taking on too much water and in danger of collapsing in Long Island Sound.
Viner now had a full understanding of what he and Beighle aced. Knowing that, he also realized they didn’t have the right equipment on board to assist Pawlik and Penninger out of their perilous predicament.
Viner, however, knew where to find what they needed.
Viner and Beighle returned to the factory, stepped out of their bird, and hopped into another one. The experimental YR-5A Sikorsky helicopter that they commandeered included a hoist. Earlier in 1945, the Coast Guard demonstrated how the hoist worked.
That was a demonstration. This was the real thing. Viner decided it was their best chance at a successful operation.
Don’t Let Go of the Cable
The military and civilian community previously used a helicopter hoist, but never to pull people out of harm’s way from the air. For example, Coast Guardsman Frank Erickson flew in the first helicopter rescue flight on January 3, 1944, the National Park Service recalled. He delivered blood plasma to wounded sailors whom a snowstorm stranded in Sandy Hook, New Jersey. He secured the two cases of plasma to the helicopter floats and landed during that mission.
Viner, the nephew of founder Igor I. Sikorsky and the company’s chief test pilot, faced challenging conditions as well.
He coped with strong winds, with gusts as high as 60 mph. That added to the degree of difficulty in operating the hoist. A harness rested at the bottom of the hoist, and Beighle instructed Pawlik and Penninger to loop it under their arms. As the hoist lifted toward the helicopter, they were told to grab the cable and not let go. If they did, they likely would fall from the harness and into the unforgiving water.
Penninger went first.
A Successful Mission
As Viner piloted the helicopter, Beighle operated the hoist.
With Penninger in the harness, Beighle operated the winch to raise the hoist back to the helicopter. The aircraft hovered approximately 30 feet above the water. Once Penninger got close enough to be pulled on board, a problem arose: There wasn’t enough room inside the copter.
For the quarter-mile trip to the beach, where onlookers watched with keen interest, Penninger remained partially outside the Sikorsky YR-5A. The accommodations likely didn’t bother Penninger much, not after he finally returned to solid ground.
Pawlik, the barge captain, didn’t have a choice of whether to stay inside or outside the helicopter. He didn’t get that far, because as Beighle attempted to lift him, the hoist mechanism became inoperable. Viner piloted the helicopter to shore with Pawlik suspended in midair between the aircraft and water.
Newspapers across the nation splashed details of the rescue onto their pages. It made for captivating reading, as well as a template for future rescues. There is no official total for the number of people that the hoist has saved over the years, but it is commonly used in dangerous situations, such as during Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
It all began with Viner.
“The wind was so strong that the wet sand was blowing on the beach,” Viner wrote, according to the Igor I. Sikorsky Historical Archives. “In spite of these facts, it was possible to hover the aircraft accurately enough over the barge to enable both men to get into the hoist harness without any difficulty. I believe that the above facts could always be cited in any discussion where controllability and precision flying of this aircraft are questioned.”
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