Jim Greider, an Erie native, commanded a dangerous nighttime mission that was described at the time as the most dangerous peacetime helicopter rescue in the history of the U.S. Air Force.
Fifty years later, it gives the Iroquois High School and Thiel College graduate something of a retrospective.
“It didn’t bother me at the time. I was just doing my job,” Greider said in a telephone interview. “I think about that now and think I would never do that. I was 26 at the time and just did it.”
The rescue
In 1974, Greider was a pilot with the 5040 Helicopter Squadron, tasked with flying rescue missions for Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage, Alaska, and Eielson Air Force Base in Fairbanks. He and his three-man crew were preparing for practice approaches in Anchorage just after sunset on Nov. 12 when they were alerted to a small plane crash in Metal Creek Canyon, about 75 miles northeast of the city.
The civilian pilot had attempted to land at his fighter camp when his plane crashed into the canyon wall. A friend flying separately reported the crash and led the rescue crew to the accident scene.
The wreckage was located on a ledge about 50 feet above the bottom of a narrow canyon, illuminated only by the helicopter’s spotlights. The canyon floor was about 200 feet wide, or just three times the length of the helicopter, and a raging creek took up a third of that space.
Swirling snow and debris made the landing even more difficult. But Greider and his co-pilot positioned the helicopter with its tail over the creek and applied the main rotor brake to keep it from rolling forward into the canyon wall.
The co-pilot remained in the craft with auxiliary power providing heat, radio and spotlights, while Greider, the flight engineer and the pararescue crew member hoisted a litter over their heads and headed into the creek to cross to the crash site. The temperature was below freezing. And the icy water was almost shoulder high and moving so fast that it swept the men twenty yards downstream.
“The water was almost up to the flashlight I had in the top pocket of my flight suit, just below my neck,” Greider said.
The crew hiked back to the accident site and climbed about 50 feet to the wreckage, pulling themselves up through the snow using small tree branches and shrubs. Greider’s flashlight helped illuminate the scene as the medic worked on the downed pilot. Both of the man’s arms and legs were broken.
Once secured in the litter, rescuers worked their way upstream to compensate for the current and managed a controlled descent down the slope to the creek, emerging under the helicopter’s tail.
Getting the helicopter out of the canyon was potentially even more dangerous than landing. If the vessel had restarted, it could have ended up in the creek bed. Or it could have rolled forward into the canyon wall when the rotor brake was released and destroyed “like an eggbeater beats an egg,” Greider said in a 1975 report for the Anchorage Daily News.
Instead, the helicopter didn’t move an inch. From a low hover position, the crew set instruments to control the takeoff and determine a course parallel to the creek between the canyon walls as the craft ascended.
“After what seemed like an eternity, the helicopter broke through the clouds at 4,000 feet into a clear, moonlit Alaskan sky,” Greider wrote in the news report.
The crew took the injured man to a hospital in Anchorage.
‘I was just doing my job’
The mission earned Greider and his co-pilot the Air Medal the following spring. The crew doctor and mechanic received medals of distinction.
‘I was just doing my job. I didn’t expect any medals for it. It was exactly what you did,” Greider said.
Senior officers disagreed.
‘The senior executives loved it. My commander said he had never heard of anything like that,” Greider said. “I just thought, ‘Okay.'”
From wing defender to flying career
Greider is a 1966 graduate of Iroquois High School, where he played on the school’s first football team and scored its first touchdown, at Northwestern, on September 10, 1965. Iroquois High School had just opened and consolidated the former Wesleyville and Lawrence Park Schools. In its premiere season, the Braves’ football team was undefeated in the county and won the district championship.
Greider also played on the Iroquois district golf team, sang in the school choir and played trombone in the band and in district and regional competitions.
At Thiel College in Greenville, he studied business administration, played on the President’s Athletic Conference Championship golf team and played Hammond organ in a rock band he formed with his freshman roommate. By the time Greider graduated in 1970, Exposition Flyer was performing regularly in Pittsburgh, Cleveland and locations in between, and planned to begin recording.
“The last thing on my mind was joining the military,” Greider said. “Then I got my draft announcement.”
Instead, he went to a recruitment agency.
“I had about five minutes to decide whether I wanted to be a pilot or be drafted to carry an M16 through the rice paddies in Vietnam,” Greider said.
Greider also flew jets for the Air Force, mainly F-4s in Germany, before retiring in 1991.
Now 76, Greider lives in a suburb of Dallas, Texas, where he has trained U.S. airline pilots since 1998 in flight simulators that he describes as “$20 million video games.”
“I’ve trained over 18,000 pilots, so if you’ve flown American Airlines, chances are I’ve trained your pilot,” Greider said.
Married, father of two daughters and soon to be a grandfather for the fifth time, Greider is amazed that the flying career he chose on a whim 54 years ago continues to fascinate him.
“I’ve met pilots who wanted to fly from the time they were six or seven years old. That wasn’t me,” Greider said. “Instead, God had a strange way of pointing me in this direction and I just said, ‘Yes, sir.'”
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Contact Valerie Myers at vmyers@timesnews.com.
This article originally appeared on Erie Times-News: Veterans Day: Pilot recalls dangerous Alaska canyon rescue mission
