Highland Falls (New York):
In a daring nighttime run, amid conditions that left no room for error, a New York City police helicopter hoisted two shivering West Point cadets early Sunday morning off an 18-inch-wide ledge on Storm King Mountain, where they had been stranded for more than eight hours.
The helicopter's pilot, Officer Steven Browning, said in a telephone interview on Sunday that he had never faced such difficult flying conditions in his 14 years with the Police Department, with powerful winds blasting in two directions and with his rotors clearing the cliff face by just 20 feet.
"This hopefully was once in a career," Officer Browning added. "We were at our absolute limit."
Capt. James Coan, the commander of the department's aviation unit, said the feat of the helicopter crew was like "hovering three-quarters the way up the Empire State Building and trying to pick you up off a window ledge."
The two cadets, both plebes, or freshmen, whose names were not released, suffered from hypothermia, but the rescue crew described them as alert and otherwise uninjured.
The two men had decided, according to a United States Military Academy spokeswoman, to "conduct rappelling on their own" down the jagged red-brown cliffs of Storm King, which is 1,300 feet above sea level and looms over the Hudson River in Orange County.
The circumstances that led to the Saturday afternoon outing were unclear, but other students said it was uncommon for cadets to go rappelling on their own, especially away from the academy's designated rappelling site.
At some point in the afternoon, the cadets found themselves stuck on a narrow shelf about 500 feet off the ground. "They were unable to ascend or descend from that location," Captain Coan said.
Tying themselves to a large branch that jutted from the mountain, the two cadets used their cellphones to place emergency calls. While they did not know their precise location, rescuers were able "to ping their cellphone and get a grid coordinate," Captain Coan said.
Rescue crews from West Point and the Highland Falls and Cornwall Fire Departments rushed to the mountain about 6:30 p.m. but could not reach the ledge, the academy spokeswoman, Theresa Brinkerhoff, said in a statement.
A State Police helicopter spotted the cadets later but lacked the necessary equipment to lower someone to pick them up, Captain Coan said.
The New York Police Department received a call for assistance just after midnight, and after discussing wind and flight conditions, Officer Browning, two other crew members and two medics left Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn and flew the roughly 40 miles to Storm King in a Bell 412 helicopter.
They arrived to find "the absolute worst scenario you could imagine, with winds coming over the top of the mountain and off the side," Officer Browning said. Temperatures had plunged to the 20s, he added.
As they approached the mountain, Officer Browning recalled later, he told the crew and the medics that if any of them felt unsafe, he would scrub the mission. They all agreed to continue.
He said he spotted the cadets when they held their lighted cellphones in the air. With night-vision goggles, the landscape was clear as day, he said. The helicopter hovered some 80 feet above them, with the cliff face some 20 feet off the rotors.
According to Officer Browning, the crew members initially planned to lower a litter to pick up the two cadets but realized the ledge was too narrow to receive it.
They also considered using a "penetrator" -- so named because it can poke through foliage. The rescued person sits on the device and is hoisted up. But the rescuers were concerned that the cadets were too weakened to hold on properly.
The third option, which they used, was to send down a "horse collar" of webbing that cinches around the chest of the person being rescued.
One of the medics aboard, Detective Christopher Condon, lowered himself to the ledge shortly after 2 a.m. and placed a collar around one of the cadets, who was hoisted up to the helicopter. The crew decided, because of winds, turbulence and other factors, to take the rescued cadet back to the academy and return for the second cadet -- and Detective Condon. The crew dropped off the cadet at a West Point parade ground and then went back to pick up the others.
The cadets, Captain Coan said, were wearing only camouflage fatigues with fleece outerwear when they were rescued. They were listed as stable and in good condition Sunday night at Keller Army Medical Center on the academy's campus.
"The cadets were elated to have been rescued, and were very surprised that it was the N.Y.P.D. who came up to West Point and actually picked them up off that ledge," Captain Coan said.
Asked what the cadets told their rescuers, Officer Browning said, "It's a very noisy helicopter and there was not much spoken."