The video introduces the challenging and elite role of US Coast Guard rescue swimmers, focusing on the complex process to become one. The video takes viewers into the experiences rescue swimmers undergo, such as rigorous training, completing a six-month program with a high attrition rate. The duties of rescue swimmers extend beyond just performing rescues; they are also responsible for maintaining survival equipment, ensuring the vitality of the Coast Guard's operations.

The video provides exciting insights into what happens in a rescue situation with footage showcasing actual rescues from water, cliffs, and dangerous situations. The role of rescue swimmers includes a range of duties requiring high levels of expertise, from saving people and pets after hurricanes to conducting medevacs under challenging conditions. By doing this, viewers gain an understanding of how crucial and multifaceted the role of rescue swimmers is.

Main takeaways from the video:

Please remember to turn on the CC button to view the subtitles.

Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. attrition rate [əˈtrɪʃən reɪt] - (noun) - The rate at which individuals drop out or leave a program or institution. - Synonyms: (drop-out rate, withdrawal rate, burnout rate)

It's a brutal six month program with a high attrition rate, 73%.

2. medevac [ˈmɛdəˌvæk] - (noun) - The evacuation of military or other casualties to the hospital by helicopter or airplane. - Synonyms: (airlift, emergency evacuation, casualty evacuation)

In this case, an aviation crew was called to medevac two injured firefighters who were being surrounded by a fire.

3. desalination [diˌsælɪˈneɪʃən] - (noun) - The process of removing salt from seawater to make it drinkable. - Synonyms: (salt removal, purification, distillation)

And then this is our desalination kit.

4. honing [ˈhoʊnɪŋ] - (verb) - Sharpening or refining a skill or capability. - Synonyms: (enhancing, perfecting, sharpening)

They never stop honing their craft.

5. updrafts [ˈʌpdrafts] - (noun) - A current of rising air, typically resulting from warm air lifting. - Synonyms: (rising thermal, uplift, convection climb)

Hovering over a flaming forest that caused heat updrafts.

6. survival kit [sərˈvaɪvəl kɪt] - (noun) - A set of provisions or equipment for use in an emergency or life-threatening situation. - Synonyms: (emergency gear, survival pack, preparedness kit)

The third question that we're going to answer here is, what's in their kit?

7. rotor blades [ˈroʊtər bleɪdz] - (noun) - The rotating part of a helicopter that generates lift and holds the aircraft in the air. - Synonyms: (helicopter blades, airfoils, rotors)

Hovering over a flaming forest that caused heat updrafts on the rotor blades.

8. talon [ˈtælən] - (noun) - A claw, especially one belonging to a bird of prey; or equipment used in aviation attached to a rescue harness. - Synonyms: (claw, hook, grabber)

This is an accessory hook. It's called a talon.

9. hoist [hɔɪst] - (verb) - To raise or lift something by means of ropes and pulleys. - Synonyms: (lift, elevate, raise)

Rescue swimmer deploys, swims over to them, gets them and pulls them out so where they can be hoisted from danger.

10. incidentally [ˌɪnsɪˈdentli] - (adverb) - Occurring as an extra; by the way. - Synonyms: (by the way, as a side note, furthermore)

Rescue swimmers don't just save people from the water, incidentally.

What Gear Does a US Coast Guard Rescue Swimmer Carry? - Smarter Every Day 279

I'm Destin. This is smarter. Every day. I want to go back and look at what you just saw and explain what's going on. This is me, and this is John Calhoun, a US coast Guard rescue swimmer. He's pulling me towards a helicopter. He puts me in a basket. He steadies the basket until it's lifted up out of the water, and then he drops away. This was part of a training session where I was the person they practiced saving.

We're going to go into that specific experience in a future video, but today I want to talk about what John Calhoun, that rescue swimmer, has done for the last 20 years. Coast Guard rescue swimmers, or aviation survival technicians, the technical term, are one of the most elite positions in all military branches. And it's possible that you, like me before this experience, haven't heard of aviation survival technicians. In this video, we're gonna answer three questions.

Number one, what is a US coast Guard rescue swimmer and how do you become one? It is brutally challenging. Number two, we're gonna go to an air station. We're gonna go to what's called a survival shop, and we're gonna learn a secret skill that coast Guard rescue swimmers have. Did not see this coming, but it makes sense if you think about it. And number three, we are going to learn what is in the kit of a rescue swimmer if they jump out of a helicopter. If you think about it, if you're on a helicopter and you're about to jump out, what kinds of things would you want to have with you to help save somebody and help keep yourself alive?

This continues our smarter, everyday deep dive series of videos into the inner workings of the US coast Guard. We've learned about how the Coast Guard is set up and how it handles distress calls and what the coast guard does at their stations, about their awesome boats and their search and rescue strategy and search patterns. And I'm really excited to begin to explore the aviation side of what they do. The helicopters, the technicians, the mechanics that keep them running, the pilots that fly them.

I think one of the best ways to understand something is to see it in action. So to answer our first question, what is a rescue swimmer? What I'm going to do is look at a bunch of footage that I got from the Internet. But this is some awesome footage. And because it's so awesome, it feels like a really cool eighties action movie. So I'm going to get my voiceover mic here. And now that I got my voiceover mic, I'm going to ramp up my rad eighties action movie tunes and let's check out some videos.

Okay, here's a good place to start here we've got someone stuck on the pylons inside the surf line and they can't get out. Rescue swimmer deploys, swims over to them, gets them and pulls them out so where they can be hoisted from danger. Now this is up off the coast of Kodiak, Alaska. There's a disabled vessel with three crew members on board, and they're getting battered around by the surf. Now, apparently, because the boat was being tossed around so much, they couldn't just hoist the sailors off the boat itself. So they had to jump into the water and inflate their gumby survival suits and trust their lives to the rescue swimmer who had to get them up into the chopper. All three sailors were rescued.

Rescue swimmers don't just save people from the water. So here we are rescuing two trapped surfers from a cliff in Oregon. Here we are again in the northwest. A young man had fallen partway down a cliff and sustained serious head injuries. Rescue swimmer goes down, brings him up and begins treating him as they get him on the way to the hospital here, the coast guard pulls up another fisherman who fell and broke his foot while walking along a cliff, and another rescue of a woman who got stuck on a cliff. I hate to say it, but it looks like we civilians have some room for growth in our safety decision making process around seaside cliffs.

Who do you call when the rescuers need rescuing? In this case, an aviation crew was called to medevac two injured firefighters who were being surrounded by a fire on a steep mountainside in California, hovering over a flaming forest that caused heat updrafts on the rotor blades. And with smoke entering the cockpit, the crew was able to thread the needle in a 20 by 30 foot opening in the tree canopy and extract these wounded firefighters before they were overrun by the fire.

Here's a case from Florida. A boat broke down as they were rushing to flee from an incoming hurricane. Rescue swimmer has to get them in the water and then up on the helicopter working in 20 to 25 foot waves. Speaking of hurricanes, here we see an aviation survival technician chopping through the roof of a flooded house to get to trapped residents on the inside of the attic. Now, after storms like this, these air rescue teams are often out there working day and night, just plucking people out of houses and cars. Sometimes while fighting with really fast running water. What are you doing? Is it just you? No one else is in the house. In some cases, they've been able to save pets and deliver emergency supplies.

They do medevacs from cruise ships, oil platforms, boats. These rescue swimmers and aviation crews are a lifeline for so many people who are out on the water and end up needing critical medical attention. Just to note, they operate in all, all kinds of weather, from beautiful blue waters down south to the edge of the Arctic up north.

Right here, we're looking at a training exercise up in Alaska. I love that this rescue swimmer just climbs up on a stinking iceberg. So as you can see, these rescue swimmers, both men and women, are absolute beasts. Okay, so that was a really fun segment. I hope you enjoyed that. I enjoyed using the mic there. So basically, we just watched a lot of superhero footage. Like these are people literally saving lives.

So as you can probably imagine, it's not going to be an easy process to become a coast Guard rescue swimmer. Right? So to learn about this, let's go talk to Joe Keefe, a rescue swimmer down at Air station New Orleans who's training a group of young coasties who are hoping to become rescue swimmers. So once you go through boot camp, a school is like your specialty school. So the coast guard, you go out to the fleet. So any small bus station, a cutter, wherever it might be, these guys got lucky enough to be stationed at this air station. And then when you go to a school, that will give you your rate, your specialty, skill, and what you'll be and what your job is in the coast guard.

So these coasties are in a four month program designed to prepare them for the rigors of a school. And the one they're going to go to is for rescue swimmers if they qualify. So we like to do the workouts with them just so that way we know what they're going through and know what kind of level fatigue they're at. And we can tailor the workouts differently to hit different weaknesses or different strengths depending on the day.

Then if you make it, you go to a school. It's a brutal six month program with a high attrition rate, 73%. So less than a third of the people who start are able to graduate. That's one of the highest attrition rates of any program within the us military. Only 15 to 30 new rescue swimmers graduate every year, and there are usually only about 350 rescue swimmers operating nationwide at any moment. It is an insanely elite group of people.

They learn basic emergency medical care as well and become emts. After that, they do a six month apprenticeship program. Then once you're a rescue swimmer, you keep training all the time. The training really never stops. They never stop honing their craft, and they always have to be in top shape.

And this brings me to that secret skill that all rescue swimmers have. They learned this in a school. And to explore this more, I want to go back down to air station New Orleans and go to an area just off the hangar where they keep and maintain the helicopters. This is where the rescue swimmers hang out. It's known as the survival shop. This is where John Calhoun and Joe Keefe, who we previously met, are based.

One of the things that people don't know about us is we actually, part of our school is sewing. Like, all of us can sew. Really? Yeah. So we repair flight suits, like, what the pilots wear. Like, we sew patches on it and stuff like that. Is that the sewing machine? Those are the sewing machines, yep. And, you know, we make bags. I mean, anything that any kind of project that comes up, we're able to sew.

What we're learning here together is that rescue swimmers aren't just the people that go down and save people. They're also responsible for all of the survival gear. This is our day to day operations around here. We just take care of the whole station's life support equipment. We do everything from sewing flight suits to inflating all of our life preservers to inspecting the float containers, the floats that actually keep the helicopter up in case of a water landing.

So I'm working on one of the aft floats for the helicopter. Basically, this is, we'll inflate into a big, giant ball. And what we're doing right now is just packing it up so it's big. All this fabric has to go into this little, tiny container. This is on the tail rotor assembly? Nope. So this will be just after the wheels. So a little bit behind the wheels of the helicopter.

So there's one on each side, and then these will be the forward ones. So these will be up front, these will be in the back. And then everything we do is step by step instructions. So it's pretty easy to follow, and it's easy not to mess up. So how do you, like. Are there pictures of how to fold this thing? Yep.

Exactly. So we go through here, and it gives us instructions, and then there's references in the back, and we're able to look at the pictures and, you know, from years of experience, gain a little bit of inside knowledge in different. Can I see that? Yeah, absolutely. That's crazy. So, John, do you inspect. You inspect what he does or how does this work?

So, yeah, my role in this is. I'm a, what's called a quality assurance inspector. So as he's going through the steps, I'll actually go along with him and make sure that it's done correctly. So you double check everything? Everything. One of my favorite things in the world is to get to snoop around in other people's workshops and see how they organize all their tools. Check this out.

It's okay if I open one of these? Absolutely, yeah, yeah. Holy cow. Okay, this is cool. This is where we keep all of our stuff that we, you know how we do our maintenance day to day, so you can repair anything here. This is cool stuff, man. Survival, man. This is like a Boy scout dream come true.

Grommet tools, I love. So, because you have aircraft, you have to make sure all the tools are in place, kind of thing. Correct. Oh, wow. That's awesome. Like, the pilots will come in and they'll drop off their flight suits, and then, you know, they have their little special requests that they will sew stuff on for them. We make the leather name tags as well. So a little bit of a tailor operation.

These right here, we make these. You make those here? Yep. Just like, super site contained. Yeah, I mean, we have to be able to, uh. There's one of our airmen. You can. You could film him doing his push ups every time they come in the shop. Every time we come in here.

Why do you have to do ten push ups? Get stronger. Good answer. So just, like, you just walk in the door, do ten push ups? The perfect answer. He's like, what are you, idiot? I'm doing push ups. I'm trying to get stronger. Anyway, I love that answer.

The third question that we're going to answer here is, what's in their kit? Now, remember, rescue swimmers take care of everybody, right? So they're going to, like, have the survival vests for all the air crew, but they also take care of their own survival vests. But think about this for a second. If you had the option to take anything with you when you jump out of a helicopter and you might have to stay alive in the ocean, what would you choose to, like, attach to yourself? That's what we're gonna find out.

John's first gonna show us what the aircrew has, and then he's gonna show us what the rescue swimmer has. Can I see your kit? Like, is this standard kit? So this is just a. So we have the collars removed over there. That's the inflatable part. That's the life vest.

Okay. And this is what the pilots and the air crew wear. It has a standard flare, day and night. This end is the day end, and it's smoke. It emits orange smoke. And then the other end is a night end, and it does a red flare. Oh, so it's two flares and one. Two flares and one. Yeah. It's a day and night. Oh, wow.

So that's. I notice you're kind of handling that delicately. That's kind of a big deal. Right? Well, we don't want it to go off in the shop. Cause a, you know, problem for us, the Navy. The Navy doesn't like it when we have to call the fire department over on this side.

We gotta inspect it anyway. So we might as well pull it all out. It's just a red pyrotechnic star. So this is a. This is the flare cartridge? Yep. You screw it in. I'm trying to get my focus. You screw that cartridge in and you pull this down, and there's a firing pin inside of there. Uh huh. And when you let it go, the firing pin will just fly up. Yep. That is awesome.

And then, you know, some other things we have is just basic, you know, life support stuff. A strobe light for at night. And this is all for an air crew to use in the case of an emergency. An emergency landing. A water, like, if you land in the water. Signal, mirror, whistle. This is just a webbing cutter, so in case they get trapped. Like, one of the aircrew members gets trapped in the helicopter, they can use it to cut their seat belts.

This is one of our new epirbs. It's registered to our unit. And in case of an emergency, they can kick this off. Is it like a beacon? That's the same as. What do you call the beacon and aircraft? I forget the name of it. The ELT. Yeah. Elt is it. Was that stand for. Was it emergency location transmitter?

Yeah, emergency location transmitter. So is that, like, the same thing? Yeah, but it's for, like. It's a personal use and it's registered to our. Our unit, and it'll actually. It goes down and tells you which vest it is. So in case of a crash, we can. We'll get notified and we can actually go down to who is wearing the vest because we have a sign out sheet for them, so it gets that specific.

Oh, wow. Imagine that you find yourself away from the helicopter. You'd be able to get a little bit closer using the PLB versus the ELT. What's the PLB? Personal locator beacon. Okay. It'll tell you exactly where you are when you're holding it.

Oh, wow. So the ELT, which we talked about earlier, that'll just show you where the helicopter is. This will show you where the person is. Is this a torque screwdriver? Yes, it is. I've never seen one of those. Yeah. So it'll tell you exactly what the torque is. And this one can go either the right way or go left as well. These are threaded the opposite way of normal, so righty, Lucy. Exactly.

Exactly. So are you taking it out or putting it in? So what's your. Is that chewing tobacco? What's your other, this is a. It's just calories, in case you're stuck in a raft or something like that for days on end. It's candy and chewing gum. And then this is our desalination kit.

Really? Mariner F 20. Yeah. It's. It's used for turning seawater into drinkable water. How does it work? So it's got a, it's got a membrane on the inside, and it works through, I guess, osmosis. Reverse osmosis, yeah. So you put the seawater in one of the pouches, and then it's got this syrup. It's for electrolytes, basically. So in case you're stuck in a raft, you need to keep those electrolytes up. But, yeah, it takes, like, four to 6 hours to make drinkable water.

There's one last thing. This. This is the. It's just a little knife. Mm hmm. So. Oh, everything's tied to you. Everything's tied to you. And this is, you know, that way you don't have to worry about losing stuff. Serrated, so you can cut stuff. Right. And it's got a blunt tip, you know, so you don't stab yourself. Oh, that's awesome. So what about you guys?

So, this is our Triton harness. Anytime we're in the helicopter, this is what we wear. This is an accessory hook. It's called a talon. That's legit d ring. This is what gets attached to the helicopter. So this is what we go up and down with. This is an in ear right here. It's an in ear. It's a. They call it a bone mic. It works by pressing against your ear, and it's. It's actually a really effective tool. It's really clear.

So you can hear it over the helicopter rotor. Correct. This is the radio that it's connected to, just a standard handheld water VHF radio. Like, when you're talking to these guys up top, are you telling them, like, hey, I'm in the water? You have standard things you say. So normally we don't. Most of our communication is via hand signals. So we have a whole gambit of hand signals that we use to talk to the helicopter to let them know what we need, what we want, and whatever the hand signals don't cover, we can obviously use the radio.

That's awesome. Did you finally get that thing in there? Yep. Wrestle that pig to the ground, didn't you? That's right. So I'm right at the riveting stage of this process. So what I'll be doing is I get these plastic rivets with metal washers, and now I'll just be riveting down the side. And then we'll tie this up, get rid of the zip ties, and then we'll be ready for the final QA, lace it up, and then in a few days we'll put this back on the helicopter.

I've got more videos with the coast guard coming up. You got a sneak peek at the beginning where I participated in a training exercise in Lake Pontchartrain in New Orleans. To qualify to do that, I had to get trained on some stuff. So I got out in the water with Joe and he totally kicked my tail. And you'll see why in that video. We also got to learn a lot of awesome stuff about the helicopter. There's so much more I want to show you.

As you may remember, I love helicopters. I hope it's clear what I'm doing here on smarter every day. I'm actually making the videos I want to make, which isn't always the type of content that sponsors want to support. And I don't want to get into a situation where the tail is wagging the dog. Those financial forces are trying to tell me to make a certain type of content, which is why I'm doubling down on independent viewer support on Patreon.

Coast Guard, Aviation, Education, Rescue Swimmer, Survival Skills, Helicopter Operations, Smartereveryday