WEST POINT, N.Y. — A daring New York Police Department helicopter rescue in darkness and dangerous winds safely delivered two West Point cadets Sunday from an 18-inch-wide mountain ledge where they were stranded 500 feet above ground for nearly eight hours.
“It was the most dangerous thing I’ve ever done in the police department,” said Officer Steve Browning, who has flown helicopter missions for the NYPD for the past 14 years and in the U.S. Army for 14 years before that.
Browning, of Shirley, credited his crew with heroics in plucking the 20-year-old men from a nearly vertical rock formation at West Point, located about 50 miles north of New York City.
The U.S. Military Academy at West Point said the freshman cadets had gone rappelling down Storm King Mountain until they became unable to proceed at about 6:30 p.m. Saturday.
Summoned by the cadets with their cell phones, local authorities responded to the mountain but were unable to reach the cadets, who had tied themselves to a tree branch jutting out between rocks, authorities said.
NYPD aviation unit Capt. James Coan said the police department’s rescue helicopter team was assembled just after midnight, when winds that gusted as high as 60 mph in Manhattan on Saturday were beginning to die down. He said a helicopter piloted by Browning arrived at the scene shortly after 2 a.m.
Browning said the helicopter was steadied against winds exceeding 30 mph as it hovered about 60 to 80 feet above the men, the chopper’s blades just 20 feet from rocks and trees. The helicopter was kept within a 3-foot radius as the men were secured to a horse-collar style rescue harness dropped from it.
Coan said there was “absolutely no room for error.”
By 3 a.m., the cadets were aboard the Bell 412 Air-Sea-Rescue helicopter, where they were treated for hypothermia and transported to Keller Army Medical Center at West Point, where they remained Sunday.
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