- Already hurt and then put into a human fidget spinner.
After getting injured during a hike, a Phoenix area woman needed to be airlifted to safety. However, the rescue did not go as planned.
“Sometimes when we bring the helicopter up from the ground, [the basket] will start to spin,” Chef pilot Paul Apolinar of the Phoenix Police Department’s Air Support Unit said. “We have a line attached to the basket that’s supposed to prevent that. Today it didn’t.”
Instead of a controlled lift, the basket began to spin wildly and faster and faster. It was the real life human equivalent of a fidget spinner.
“They tried to stop some of the spin with the line that Paul was referring to, but that didn’t work and it eventually broke,” Derek Geisel, the pilot during the rescue, said.
They attempted to lower the basket, hoping that it would slow the spinning. It did and they were thankful.
But as soon as they were able to get the basket lifted, it began to spin again. They did eventually get the unidentified woman to safety.
She had a facial laceration, wrist and hip injuries, and what could be a fractured nose as a result of her hiking injuries. None of the rescuers were injured during the rescue.
According to Apolinar, the occurrence of spinning is a “known phenomenon” but is rare. Over 210 rescues done during the past six years in the area, the spinning has happened only twice.
“It’s not something that’s inherent to the basket or inherent to the bag,” he said. “It’s just something that occurs every now and then and we train to deal with it.”