FLYING TO THE RESCUE ‘Aerial angel’ gets her wings with first chopper rescue
IT was the moment this aerial angel earnt her wings.
Surf life saver Kathryn McKenzie has saved dozens of lives, but she had never had a rescue quite like this before.
As one of the newer crew members of the Westpac lifesaver rescue helicopter service – as featured in the Bulletin in September – the 29-year-old has performed her first ‘‘aerial angel’’ rescue, a dramatic recent retrieval of two bushwalkers lost in dense terrain on the side of a Gold Coast hinterland mountain.
The registered nurse, who has belonged to surf clubs across the Gold and Sunshine coasts for more than 20 years, was winched down between trees and cliff faces at Mount Cougal in Currumbin Valley to pull the two Brisbane women to safety.
She said the adrenalinpumping rescue took a while to sink in.
“Any winch rescue is potentially going to be a bit hairy, especially for your first one,” she said.
It was the culmination of a 15-year fascination with the Westpac rescue helicopter, which started when she saw the chopper perform a simulated rescue when she was a youngster.
Vacancies for volunteer rescue crew members are rare, the last intake being five years ago, so when positions became available this year Ms McKenzie jumped at the chance.
“It’s something I’ve wanted to do since I was a teenager,” she said.
Ms McKenzie featured in a Bulletin story in September as one of three new Gold Coast recruits to the service.
Another of those recruits, Scott Andrews, also performed his first winch rescue on the same recent weekend, plucking a family to safety after they had become stuck in a mangrove swamp on the Gold Coast.
With the summer season having just begun, surf life saving officials are renewing calls for beachgoers to swim between the flags.
Nationally, surf life saving volunteers performed more than 10,000 rescues last year, while new research has found that more than half beachgoers said they did not always swim between the flags.