Erie native Jim Greider commanded a perilous nighttime mission described at the time as the most dangerous peacetime helicopter rescue in U.S. Air Force history.
Fifty years later, it gives the Iroquois High School and Thiel College graduate a kind of retrospective chill.
“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 that I would never do that. At the time I was 26 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-member crew were preparing for practice approaches at 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 been trying to land at his hunting camp when his plane crashed against the canyon wall. A friend flying separately reported the crash and guided the rescue crew to the scene.