Chopper pilot’s tough mission
It was a single beam of torchlight streaming through the dark near the summit of Taranaki Maunga that let rescue helicopter pilot Mike Adair know the climbers he was searching for had been in the area.
An hour-and-a-half earlier, at 10pm on Tuesday, May 4, Adair was five hours into his 72-hour on-call shift when a call came through to the Taranaki Community Rescue Helicopter hangar from police asking for help.
A pair of climbers were near the top of the mountain and one of them had ‘‘slipped off the side’’, he recalls.
With only a rough idea of a location, Adair was soon circling the mountain’s summit with a paramedic and two alpine cliff rescuers on board the helicopter.
‘‘It was one of the most challenging flight environments I’ve ever operated in – that night,’’ he said. The wind was howling round the mountain and ‘‘dumping’’ right where they were needing to fly, creating severe turbulence.
‘‘We were right on the edge of what the aircraft could do. So we were working pretty hard. But relatively quickly we saw a light,’’ he said.
They flew to the light, which they realised was a torch, and scanned the surrounding area, but couldn’t spot any signs of life nearby.
Then, 45 minutes later, around midnight, they found the climbers separated but relatively close together on the eastern side of the summit.
They were Christchurch colleagues Richard Phillips, 46, and Peter Kirkwood, 33, who had got into trouble after one of them fell near the summit.
They were a ‘‘pretty decent distance’’ from the torch, Adair said, and located near a track that leads to Syme Hut, but still not a place climbers would usually be.
After the on-board paramedic made an aerial assessment of the climbers and determined they were dead, the crew made the hard decision to leave the pair on the mountain due to the extreme conditions.
‘‘It’s pretty hard. You don’t really sleep that night. You just keep wondering if there was something more you could do. What if you got it wrong?’’
They had an hour-and-a-half debrief at the hangar that night, before attempting what was now a body recovery on Wednesday.
Adair dropped members of the alpine rescue team to the climbers early that morning, but 20 minutes later received a call asking they be picked up.
‘‘They said the surface was so challenging to work in there was no way for them to safely conduct it on that day.’’
At the end of last Wednesday another massive meeting took place at the hangar with all rescue personnel involved and they decided it was possible to extract the bodies by helicopter, but they needed good weather conditions. And it needed to be cold.
On Thursday, those perfect conditions came together.
So at 5am the team arrived at the hangar and got geared up, before arriving at the mountain just before sunrise.
Four alpine team members were then winched 150 feet down to the bodies, before they were winched up and transported to the Stratford Plateau where police and hearses were waiting.
‘‘The alpine team were the last to come off the mountain,’’ Adair said. Having the bodies off the mountain was a huge relief for Adair and the teams involved.
‘‘It was massive, absolutely massive,’’ he said.
Thinking of the families was something Adair had to put at the back of his mind while attempting the rescues.
‘‘But at the same time it’s impossible you wouldn’t be human if you didn’t have those things just ticking away at the back of your mind. The whole time you know they’re up there you want to bring them back to their loved ones.’’
On Thursday morning the sun was rising beautifully behind them, but Adair didn’t realise until he got back to the hangar and one of the alpine rescuers showed him a video he took.
‘‘At the time you’re so focused on the job I didn’t even think about it,’’ he said.
‘‘It was pretty emotional seeing the photos when we got back.
‘‘We deal with human tragedy daily here, so you kind of become a bit numb to a lot of that stuff.
‘‘But this one will stick with me.’’