Heroic Coast Guard Pilot saves Injured Cessna pilot

A missing Cessna and no radar target

This rescue began with a phone call, not a Mayday. On a stormy summer afternoon, controller Marcus Troyer was working at Pensacola TRACON (P31), having started his shift shortly after 12:30 p.m. EDT. A local aircraft owner, Freddie McCall, called the facility to report that one of his aircraft, a Cessna 172 Skyhawk flown by Scott Jeffrey Nee, was missing.

Nobody at P31 had been talking to the Cessna. Troyer replayed the recorded radar data to see whether the aircraft had ever been identified on the scope, and it hadn't. Controllers were starting with almost nothing: no radio contact, no tagged target and no position.

The crash site is found, but the rescue can't reach it

McCall took off in his own aircraft to search and found the wreck on a sandy bank of the Escambia River, in a remote area near Jay, Florida, north of Pensacola and close to the Alabama line. Nee had survived, but he was seriously injured. McCall passed the location to Troyer.

Getting help there was the hard part. Heavy thunderstorms covered the area. Troyer tried the Navy helicopters operating around Pensacola, but most could not take the job because of fuel. The LifeFlight crew in Pensacola had just finished a mission and was in a mandatory rest period.

Borrowing a training helicopter

Troyer knew the Coast Guard had a base in the Mobile area, used for training and aircraft testing rather than search and rescue. He called Mobile tower (MOB) to ask whether they were working any Coast Guard helicopters. They were: a newly converted MH-65E flown by Lt. Commander Brian Hedges on a routine training sortie, with Lt. Commander Bob Lokar and Petty Officer James Yockey on board. Mobile handed the helicopter over to Troyer's frequency.

Troyer explained the situation and asked whether the crew would respond voluntarily. They had no rescue swimmer on board, so on paper the aircraft wasn't equipped for search and rescue. They went anyway. For the next 25 minutes Troyer vectored them toward the river and around a strong line of storms. When a ground EMS crew reached the pilot, he relayed between them and the helicopter.

On the riverbank

The landing site was soft sand. Hedges kept the MH-65E at half power the whole time it was on the ground so it wouldn't sink, and even so the wheels settled about halfway into the sand. The crew loaded Nee and an EMT and flew to Sacred Heart Hospital in Pensacola.

Hedges had never landed at that hospital before. Troyer put him in touch with the LifeFlight pilot who was already there, so he could be talked through the approach. According to Hedges, it was the first search and rescue mission flown in the MH-65 Echo, and its new glass cockpit and weather radar helped the crew pick a way through the storms.

“He painted a perfect picture of where we needed to go, what we needed to do, and who was on scene,” Hedges said of Troyer. The commanding officer of the Coast Guard Aviation Training Center later wrote to commend the controllers for their “exemplary response.” The assist earned Troyer a 2020 NATCA Archie League Medal of Safety Award.

Why this case matters

Most ATC saves start with a pilot on frequency asking for help. This one started with no contact at all, and it was solved by a controller who knew who else was flying nearby and what each of them could do. The rescue depended on a chain of people outside the normal process: an owner searching in his own aircraft, a neighbouring tower, a training crew willing to go beyond their assigned role, and a medevac pilot guiding them in by radio.

Accident Facts

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