2 Navy Copters Collide in Remote Mono County Area

Two Navy helicopters apparently collided in a remote brush-covered mountain range in Mono County on Thursday, prompting a massive deployment of emergency rescue crews to the area. However, initial reports indicated that all nine crew members survived.

The two CH-46 helicopters apparently collided a short distance from the ground at about 6:30 p.m., Mono County sheriff’s dispatchers said. A Navy spokesman said he could not confirm a collision, saying only that the two aircraft made “forced landings.” Three crew members walked away from the wreckage toward the nearest highway.

“Basically we have walking wounded, people attempting to walk out,” said Brad Mercier, a nurse in charge of the night shift at Mono General Hospital in Bridgeport, who was monitoring radio transmissions of the rescue operations.

“Our initial report said there were no critical injuries,” Navy Public Affairs Officer Ken Mitchell said.

“The most current information we have is that only three were injured,” added Sheriff’s Deputy Suzanne Sturdivant. “We have no reports of fatalities.”

Mitchell said the helicopters were enroute to the naval air station at China Lake, Calif., before continuing to their homebase, North Island Naval Air Station in San Diego. The two choppers had been operating in Seattle, he said.

The crash site was at an altitude of about 10,000 feet in the Sweetwater Mountains, near Bridgeport and a short distance from the Nevada border, residents of the Eastern Sierra town said. Temperatures were expected to drop overnight to below 20 degrees at that altitude.

“It’s going to get real cold up in those mountains tonight,” Mercier, the nurse, said. “They’re going to have to try to (get out).”

Once the report of the crash went out, volunteer rescue crews, medical evacuation helicopters from as far away as Reno and several ambulances and aircraft from a Naval base in Nevada were dispatched to the scene.

The search operation was scaled back late Thursday when a C-130 aircraft with night vision capabilities spotted the wreckage and determined that the crews had survived.

“We heard it was a close-to-the-ground” crash,the cause of which was not yet determined, said Fred Bell, a Navy spokesman in Fallon, Nev.