BEST P RACTICES
A Matter of Survival
By Lt. John Goodenough
hen walking to a jet, most aviators aren’t mentally preparing to spend the afternoon camped out on a mountain 200 feet below the freezing level. However, that mountain is where I found myself after I was chosen to participate in a squadron-wide mishap exercise to test what would happen if a Prowler went down. 44
My crew of three was kidnapped as we walked to preflight our aircraft. My safety officer told us, “Your plane has gone down, and you have what you walked to the jet with to survive.” We were driven by van to the local SAR helicopter and flown to the lower-Cascade mountain range, where we were dropped off with our flight surgeon and corpsman. Our parachute riggers had switched the radios in our flight Approach
