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3 Lost on Mount Hood


cluck

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Chinook helicopters have a 3ft square hole in the bottom of them that they are able to lower and raise a winch cable out of. If the person medically does not need to be immobilized, they can simply be loaded onto a 1-2 person carrier/seat called a "jungle penetrator". They clip into the ring at the end of the cable and are winched up into the aircraft. The hole is also large enough to accomidate a "litter", what rescuers use to transport people with broken legs, backs, etc. kind of a backboard with handles and rails around it. these can be hooked to the winch cable and guided into the helicopter from below. The latter is more difficult and time consuming, but still fairly standard practice.

 

I would say that winching them into the bird on the jungle penetrator is the most likely scenario. Another option is to do a "hot" landing on the summit, where flat enough ground allows for the helicopter to set down. They keep the engines running at full speed so there is no danger getting stuck. If the winds are high, they may very well use this option. They can also hover/land with only part of the aircraft on the mountain (like the back, where the door is). Just for scale, chinook helicopters are about as big as a school bus.

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So, if the cave is really only 300 feet from the summit, would they likely try to haul him up to where the rescuers were dropped off?

 

Watching the feed on CNN, there are a bunch of guys up on the ridgeline watching one climbing down. Then, on the other (sunny) side, there appears to be some guys doing something (saw some swinging motions like they were driving something into the snow). Any insight on what they are doing?

 

Now there's a second guy climbing down.

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I don't care if they have dish network in their cave. It wouldn't have done them any good since SAR and MR couldn't get to them until today. END OF CONVERSATION ON THIS THREAD. GET IT!

 

Please take your idiot conversation else where.

 

Thank you.

 

 

Who in the hell appointed you the moderator of this thread, Atreides/Nazi/jerk? This is my thread just as much as it is anyone else's.

 

I want to see the technical comments because, in the future, when people want information about what happened on this climb and how to avoid the same problems in the future, this is where they'll look. Limiting technical commentary to some other thread in some other forum consigns them to obscurity and destroys the important immediacy factor of the vital lessons-to-be-learned aspect of all this.

 

Frankly, all of you As-the-World-Turns gawkers need to go somewhere else - we don't need a half-dozen people transcribing the same CNN broadcast.

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The guy who went down the ridge is now digging.

the " /\ " shape is visible in the snow just below the sar guy on cnn.

I concur, was watching the guy digging from the apex of the /\ for five minutes and amazed that none of the talking heads mentioned it. You could even see the spindrift coming from his shovel.
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