CSEL Rescue

The Combat Survivor Evader Locator (CSEL) is the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) Program for Joint Search and Rescue. The CSEL provides the worldwide identification, location, and communications required between military rescue teams and people in need of assistance. DS worked as the SPAWAR Site Rep at Sicily to take care of the Boeing's CSEL project. One dramatic rescue operation by CSEL in JULY 2007 got all media attention. Here is the story:

Downed pilots evade insurgents until rescued

By Matthew Cox - Staff writer
Posted : Friday Jul 6, 2007 17:36:32 EDT

The morning of July 2 started out with a routine reconnaissance flight over Baghdad. Before it was over, Kiowa helicopter pilots Chief Warrant Officers 2 Mark Burrows and Steven Cianfrini were shot out of the sky and forced to hide out while armed insurgents fired over their heads.

Their rescuers arrived in short order, but not before the downed aviators from 3rd Squadron, 17th Cavalry had to out-think the enemy, drawing on every survival lesson to stay alive. “The situation was normal; we pushed a little farther away to check some roads for IEDs ... and we started taking fire from the rear,” Cianfrini said in an interview of both pilots posted on the Pentagon’s Digital Video and Imagery Distribution System.  “I looked out the left door I saw and heard a heavy machine gun open up on us. I felt the aircraft take rounds.”

As the pilot, Burrows quickly tried to fly the OH-58 Kiowa Warrior away from the firing. “I was trying to zigzag across the field when something must have hit the main rotor because the aircraft started shaking violently,” he recalled. “The aircraft would no longer fly.” Burrows tried to do a controlled landing but realized the tail rotor had also been knocked out. Their Kiowa began to spin. “Luckily we were only about eight feet off the ground,” Burrows said. “I reduced all the power I could. I tried to ... put the aircraft down so it wouldn’t flip over forward, but we ended up bouncing over the canal and landing on our left side, nose forward.” Cianfrini climbed out; Burrows followed. “The aircraft was on fire,” Burrows said. “I looked around the aircraft across the field and saw ... we were still being shot at from some houses. You could hear the rounds impacting on the aircraft, so we decided we definitely had to go.”

The two ran to a nearby canal and tried to cross it. “The water was up to our shoulders. We were stuck in mud,” Burrows said. “Our attackers appeared on both sides of the canal and started firing in at both of us.”
The aviators’ first instinct was to shoot back, but they soon realized the band of insurgents couldn’t see them down in the thick reeds that lined the canal. “I had one of the attackers in my sights, but there were eight to 10 of them, so I couldn’t fire back for fear of giving away our location,” Burrows said. “All we could do was sit there and wait for them to go or find us and luckily they didn’t see us.” After several minutes, Cianfrini and Burrows watched the enemy shift their fire down the canal and eventually leave the scene.
The two stayed hidden for about 15 minutes, Burrows said, until they heard U.S. helicopters flying overhead.

AH-64 Apache helicopter pilots Chief Warrant Officer 3Allan Davison and Chief Warrant Officer 2 Micah Johnson of the 1st Cavalry Division’s 1st Battalion, 227th Aviation Regiment were also flying a routine mission that morning when they heard over their radio that a Kiowa was receiving enemy fire. Davison told Army Times they immediately started flying to the scene. When they arrived, they joined two other Kiowas in the search for wreckage. The search party soon found the Cianfrini and Burrow’s downed Kiowa.
“We circled the crash site, as one of the 58s landed,” said Davison. “They checked for bodies but told us the pilots weren’t there. ... It was kind of surreal — it was good and bad to see the aircraft lying on its side. We didn’t know if the pilots were evading or captured.” A few more minutes ticked by as the aircraft crews expanded their search of the area. Davison said he heard over the radio that the pilots were down near the crash site. “They were to the west of the crash site about 100 meters away,” Davison said. Meanwhile, Burrows and Cianfrini knew they had to signal the aircraft overhead. “We were pretty deep into the canal, so I know they wouldn’t see us,” Burrows said. Cianfrini stayed in the canal with the survival radio they had used to radio for help. Burrows climbed out of the embankment and waved for help. Davison landed the Apache about 20 meters from their position, he said. “They ran up ... soaked and covered with dirt,” Davison said. Then Davison’s co-pilot, Johnson, got out of the aircraft and helped Cianfrini get into the front seat, Davidson said. “He strapped Burrows on the left side of the aircraft ... and then got on the right side of helicopter. Once he saw both were secure, Davison took off for Baghdad International Airport. The flight took about 10 minutes, said Davison, who admitted that his decision to fly 140 mph may have made it uncomfortable for the two aviators strapped to the outside of the Apache.

“I just really wanted to get them out of there,” he said. The dramatic rescue isn’t the only time an Apache crew has flown with passengers strapped to the outside of the aircraft. Just past midnight on July 1, Chief Warrant Officer 4 Kevin Purtee and Chief Warrant Officer 2 Allen Crist of the 36th Combat Aviation Brigade used their Apache to evacuate a badly wounded 3rd Infantry Division soldier from the middle of a heavy firefight near Ramadi. The ground troops had already moved wounded Spec. Jeffrey Jamaleldine of 1st Brigade to a more secure area when Purtee and Crist arrived. Crist and two soldiers helped put a conscious Jamaleldine into the front seat of the Apache. “He got shot in the face,” Purtee said. “It was bad.”
Crist strapped himself to the side of the helicopter, and they quickly flew the three minutes back to the refueling site, where he was taken to a field hospital. Purtee and Crist later visited Jamaleldine, who was in stable condition in the hospital, Purtee said. “That was the most significant mission the two of us had been on,” said Purtee, whose unit is about the leave Iraq. Davison agreed it was great feeling to be involved in a rescue mission. “It was the best feeling I have had since I’ve been here,” he said. Davison’s unit wasn’t so lucky when one of its Apaches was shot down early this year. “My company had two Apache pilots shot down back on the second of February, and they didn’t make it so it’s a very real thing for us,” Davison said.
Killed were Chief Warrant Officer 4 Keith Yoakum and Chief Warrant Officer 2 Jason Defrenn.
Both Cianfrini and Burrows, who suffered only some bruises and scrapes when their helicopter went down, agreed that the lessons aviators have taken from those losses helped them to survive their ordeal.
“I think that is definitely one of the reasons we were able to walk away from this,” Burrows said. “There were numerous points that I didn’t think we would make it through it, but ... we were able to apply that and make the right decisions to get out of it.”