The Sikorsky H-3: Sea King, Jolly Green Giant, and the Men Who Flew Into Danger

The Sikorsky H-3: Sea King, Jolly Green Giant, and the Men Who Flew Into Danger

Few helicopters have lived as many different lives as the Sikorsky H-3 family. It began with a Cold War requirement to find and destroy submarines, yet descendants of the same basic Sikorsky design would eventually hunt Soviet boats from aircraft carriers, pull American pilots out of enemy territory in Vietnam, carry Special Forces raiders into North Vietnam, recover astronauts returning from the Moon, rescue mariners hundreds of miles offshore, and transport presidents of the United States. To generations of Navy sailors it became the Sea King. Air Force rescue crews knew the HH-3E as the Jolly Green Giant. Coast Guardsmen called their HH-3F the Pelican. Millions of Americans who knew none of those names still recognized the white-topped presidential version the moment it appeared on television.

The H-3 story is also more complicated than simply following one helicopter through different paint schemes. The Navy's SH-3 Sea King was based on Sikorsky's S-61 and retained the distinctive boat-like amphibious hull and side-mounted sponsons that made the aircraft immediately recognizable. The later Air Force CH-3 and HH-3 and Coast Guard HH-3F came from the related S-61R development, with a substantially redesigned fuselage, tricycle landing gear, and rear loading ramp. They shared their ancestry and many characteristics, but they were not merely Navy Sea Kings repainted for another service. That distinction matters because the H-3 family evolved into two closely related branches, each shaped around dramatically different missions.

What connects them is not simply engineering. It is the people who flew them. The H-3's history contains some of the most remarkable rescue stories of the Vietnam War, and in many of them the helicopter was being deliberately flown toward a place from which every sensible person was trying to escape.

Born to Hunt Submarines

During the 1950s, the United States Navy faced a rapidly growing Soviet submarine threat. Nuclear propulsion was allowing submarines to remain submerged for increasingly long periods, while advances in weapons and sensors made the submarine a serious threat to American carrier groups and the sea lanes upon which NATO depended. The Navy needed a helicopter capable of searching for submarines well beyond the immediate vicinity of a ship and then attacking them once found.

Sikorsky answered with the S-61. The prototype HSS-2 first flew in March 1959, and the new helicopter began entering Navy service in the early 1960s. When the Department of Defense standardized aircraft designations in 1962, the HSS-2 became the SH-3A Sea King. Later SH-3D and SH-3H versions improved the engines, sensors, and antisubmarine equipment while preserving the aircraft's basic appearance.

The Sea King represented an important advance over earlier naval helicopters. Two General Electric T58 turboshaft engines provided greater power and a degree of security that came with having a second engine available if one failed. The helicopter was designed for operations at sea, with folding rotor blades and a folding tail section to reduce the space it occupied aboard a ship. Its hull was capable of water landings under suitable conditions, while the large cabin provided space for crew, electronic equipment, passengers, or survivors. In the antisubmarine role, the Sea King could employ dipping sonar and carry torpedoes or other weapons, allowing one helicopter to participate in both locating and attacking an enemy submarine.

The Sea King soon became a familiar presence around American aircraft carriers. While antisubmarine warfare remained its original purpose, naval aviation found uses for virtually every cubic foot of the machine. Sea Kings carried passengers and cargo between ships, moved personnel ashore, supported fleet operations, and stood plane guard while fixed-wing aircraft launched and recovered from carriers. When a pilot went into the water, the helicopter orbiting nearby could suddenly become the most important aircraft in the entire task force.

Vietnam would take that rescue role much farther.

Big Mother Goes to War

Navy crews flying the SH-3 during the Vietnam War sometimes used the call sign “Big Mother,” a name that suited a helicopter considerably larger than many of the other rotary-wing aircraft then operating in Southeast Asia. Carrier-based Sea Kings were expected to recover aviators who came down at sea, but as American air operations pushed deeper into North Vietnam, helicopter crews increasingly found themselves being asked to go inland.

One of the most extraordinary examples occurred in July 1967 after Navy aviator Lieutenant Commander Demetrio A. Verich was shot down over North Vietnam. Verich, flying an F-8 Crusader, came down far inland in hostile territory. Reaching him would require a helicopter to leave the relative safety of the Gulf of Tonkin, penetrate North Vietnamese defenses, find the isolated aviator, hover long enough to retrieve him, and then fly back through the same defenses.

On July 17, Navy pilot Neil R. Sparks Jr. took an SH-3 Sea King from Helicopter Antisubmarine Squadron 2 inland to get him.

Sparks navigated through heavily defended territory while supporting aircraft worked to locate Verich and suppress threats along the route. When the Sea King finally reached the survivor, Sparks had to hold the large helicopter in a hover for approximately twenty minutes while the recovery was carried out. Enemy fire struck the aircraft, damaging radios and other equipment as the crew continued the pickup. Every additional second in the hover gave enemy gunners another opportunity to bring the helicopter down.

The crew nevertheless got Verich aboard.

Sparks then had to fly the damaged Sea King back across hostile territory and return the rescued aviator to the fleet. The mission lasted roughly two and a half hours and earned Sparks the Navy Cross. It was exactly the kind of mission for which the Sea King had not originally been conceived. Sikorsky had designed a submarine hunter. Men like Sparks turned it into a combat rescue aircraft.

The risks were not theoretical. Navy search-and-rescue crews suffered losses while trying to reach downed aviators in North Vietnam. Helicopters were large, comparatively slow targets, and the final stage of almost every rescue demanded the one thing a crew under fire least wanted to do: stop moving. A rescue helicopter could weave through terrain and approach at low altitude, but sooner or later someone had to hover while a survivor was lifted aboard. Enemy troops understood that as well as the rescuers did.

The Air Force faced the same problem, and its answer would create one of the most famous names in helicopter history.

The Jolly Green Giant

The Air Force branch of the H-3 family began with the Sikorsky S-61R, developed with a different fuselage from the Navy Sea King. The CH-3C and improved CH-3E provided transport capability, but the demands of Southeast Asia quickly demonstrated the need for a helicopter specifically equipped to penetrate hostile territory and recover downed airmen.

CH-3Es were modified with rescue equipment and combat-survivability features including armor, self-sealing fuel systems, defensive armament, a rescue hoist, and eventually aerial-refueling capability. In rescue configuration they became HH-3Es. Their size, green camouflage, and mission produced the enduring nickname “Jolly Green Giant.”

The HH-3E did not operate alone. Combat search and rescue in Southeast Asia became an elaborate team effort. A downed aviator might be hidden in jungle, mountains, or karst terrain while enemy troops searched for him. Forward air controllers and other aircraft helped establish contact. A-1 Skyraiders, famous under the call sign “Sandy,” located survivors, attacked threatening enemy positions, and escorted the rescue helicopters. HC-130 aircraft known as “King” helped coordinate missions and could refuel helicopters equipped to take fuel in flight. Pararescuemen aboard the Jolly Greens were prepared to descend into the terrain when a survivor could not reach the hoist by himself.

The purpose of the entire operation was one human being on the ground.

That philosophy created an extraordinary bond between combat aviators and the rescue community. A pilot launching over North Vietnam or Laos understood that if he was shot down and survived, people he had probably never met might risk their own lives to find him. The promise was not that every man could be saved. Many could not. The promise was that someone would try.

Between 1966 and 1970, HH-3Es were credited with hundreds of aircrew recoveries in Southeast Asia. Statistics, however, disguise what those rescues actually required. The H-3 story becomes much clearer when the names of the people inside the aircraft are restored to it.

Leland Kennedy: Five Attempts

Captain Leland T. Kennedy had not been in the rescue business long when he launched on October 5, 1966, in search of an F-4C Phantom crew down in North Vietnam. It was only his eighth mission, and the rescue location lay hundreds of miles inside hostile territory.

The downed airman was trapped in a box canyon. The lead HH-3E made repeated attempts to reach him but was battered by enemy fire, eventually losing use of its hoist. Under normal circumstances, Kennedy's backup helicopter would have helped escort the damaged Jolly Green home. Instead, Kennedy was asked to try the pickup.

His HH-3E descended into the canyon.

Enemy fire struck the helicopter and wounded a crew member. Kennedy pulled away. The crew nevertheless agreed to go back.

They tried again.

Then again.

Four approaches were driven off by hostile fire. On the fifth attempt, Kennedy held the helicopter near the canyon floor while the hoist was lowered to the survivor. The crew finally got the man aboard and escaped at low level beneath deteriorating weather, the helicopter now badly damaged and dangerously short of fuel.

Kennedy received the Air Force Cross.

Fifteen days later he earned another one.

On October 20, Kennedy again flew as the backup helicopter during an attempt to recover the crew of another downed F-4. The lead Jolly Green managed to hoist one of the aviators but took serious damage and was forced to make an emergency landing. Kennedy brought his HH-3E down nearby. To compensate for the additional men he would have to carry, fuel was dumped and external tanks were jettisoned. The crew of the disabled helicopter and the rescued F-4 aviator ran to Kennedy's aircraft while enemy fire continued around them.

With the extra men aboard, Kennedy made a maximum-performance departure and carried them out.

He became the first Airman to receive the Air Force Cross twice. The two actions occurred only fifteen days apart.

The important part of Kennedy's story is not simply that an HH-3 could absorb punishment. It is that the aircraft repeatedly gave a crew the ability to make another decision. Leave, or go back. Kennedy and his men kept choosing to go back.

Duane Hackney: The Parachute

The pararescuemen who rode aboard the Jolly Greens occupied a particularly unforgiving position in the rescue chain. Pilots had to put the helicopter over the survivor. The PJ sometimes had to leave it.

Airman Second Class Duane D. Hackney became one of the legendary figures of Air Force rescue. He eventually flew more than 200 combat search-and-rescue missions and accumulated more than seventy individual awards and decorations, but the mission for which he is best remembered nearly killed him.

On February 6, 1967, Hackney was aboard an HH-3E searching for a downed O-1F pilot near the Mu Gia Pass. The survivor was eventually located and recovered, but during the extraction the Jolly Green was struck by a 37mm antiaircraft round.

The helicopter was mortally damaged.

Hackney was wounded, but he looked at the airman they had just rescued and gave the man his own parachute. Hackney then reached for a spare.

Another explosion tore through the helicopter and blew him out of the aircraft before he had fully secured the second parachute. Falling toward the jungle, Hackney managed to pull the ripcord shortly before reaching the trees.

The canopy opened.

Hackney survived.

He was the sole survivor of the helicopter and was later rescued. For his actions he received the Air Force Cross, becoming its first living enlisted recipient. He returned to rescue duty and continued flying combat missions.

The sequence lasts only a few lines when reduced to an award citation: helicopter hit, parachute transferred, aircraft destroyed, airman survives. What those words mean is that a wounded young pararescueman inside a burning helicopter looked at a man his crew had just risked everything to save and decided that the survivor would get the first parachute.

The Jolly Green was an extraordinary aircraft. It still required someone like Duane Hackney to make that choice.

Gerald Young, Larry Maysey, and Jolly Green 26

The night of November 8-9, 1967 produced another H-3 mission that became part of Air Force history. A reconnaissance team operating in Laos had been badly mauled and was in danger of being overwhelmed. Earlier extraction attempts had already cost helicopters, and enemy troops surrounded the area.

Two HH-3Es were sent in.

One Jolly Green managed to recover several members of the team but was heavily damaged and forced away. That left two wounded men still on the ground.

Captain Gerald O. Young commanded the second HH-3E, Jolly Green 26. His pararescueman was Sergeant Larry W. Maysey.

They went in after the remaining survivors.

The helicopter was already being hit as Maysey exposed himself to hostile fire to help the wounded men aboard. Getting them into the helicopter did not end the danger. As Jolly Green 26 attempted to leave, enemy fire fatally damaged the aircraft. It crashed, rolled, and burned.

Maysey was killed. He was posthumously awarded the Air Force Cross. Copilot Captain Ralph Brower and flight engineer Staff Sergeant Eugene Clay were also lost.

Gerald Young survived the crash with serious burns.

Young escaped the burning wreck and helped another survivor. Then he realized enemy troops were preparing positions from which they could ambush the helicopters that would inevitably come looking for him. Rescue aircraft attempted to reach the area, but Young refused to allow men in the air to fly blindly into the trap.

He moved away.

For approximately seventeen hours, burned and injured, Young evaded enemy troops and deliberately drew them away from the crash area and the other survivor. Only when he believed another helicopter could approach without flying directly into the ambush did he allow himself to be recovered.

Gerald Young received the Medal of Honor.

His story is often remembered as the story of the man who survived the burning Jolly Green and evaded the enemy. It should also remain connected to Larry Maysey and the rest of the crew. They had entered that valley for two wounded men on the ground. Maysey exposed himself to enemy fire to get those men aboard. Young then refused an immediate rescue because he would not allow another helicopter crew to be sacrificed trying to save him.

Combat rescue created that strange chain of obligation. Someone came because you were down. If they went down trying to get you, someone else came for them. The cycle could become terrifyingly expensive in aircraft and lives, yet the men continued to answer the call.

Thomas Newman Goes Down the Hoist

On May 30, 1968, another HH-3E crew was attempting to recover a downed Air Force pilot near Savannakhet, Laos. Darkness, jungle, and concentrated automatic-weapons fire made the extraction extremely dangerous.

Sergeant Thomas A. Newman, the pararescue specialist aboard the H-3, descended into the jungle.

Once on the ground, Newman understood that leaving the HH-3 hovering overhead would advertise their exact position to enemy troops. He told the helicopter to move away while he worked with the injured pilot below. That decision left Newman on hostile ground without the immediate protection or escape offered by the aircraft.

When the HH-3 returned, Newman secured the wounded pilot to the forest penetrator. During the ascent he used his own body to shield the injured man while enemy fire continued around them.

Both reached the helicopter.

Newman received the Air Force Cross.

His rescue illustrates why the H-3's hoist was far more than a piece of equipment hanging above a cabin door. In jungle terrain, the aircraft often could not land. The hoist became the connection between the helicopter and a man who might be injured, tangled in vegetation, hanging in a tree, or unable to move. Sometimes a PJ had to ride that cable down into the same situation everyone else was trying to escape.

Jolly Green 22: Sixty-Eight Bullet Holes

Individual aircraft sometimes accumulated histories almost as remarkable as those of their crews. HH-3E serial number 67-14709, known at various times by its serial and as Jolly Green 22, became one of them.

On March 14, 1968, a two-helicopter rescue force attempted to recover the crew of a Marine Corps F-4 Phantom shot down over North Vietnam. One Marine was recovered, but heavy enemy machine-gun fire forced the rescue helicopters away before they could get the second man.

Jolly Green 22 had already been damaged.

Its crew returned anyway.

By then the remaining Marine had been killed, and North Vietnamese troops had prepared an ambush for the rescuers. Jolly Green 22 flew into it and was hammered by ground fire. The helicopter escaped with 68 bullet holes, damage to the windshield, and holes through its rotor blades.

Pilot Major Stuart Hoag, copilot Lieutenant Colonel Gerald Lowe, and pararescueman Sergeant James Locker received Silver Stars. Flight engineer Sergeant Dennis Richardson had repeatedly exposed himself to enemy fire while dealing with the damaged helicopter and was initially awarded the Purple Heart.

His part in the story did not end there.

Decades later the Air Force reviewed the documentation surrounding the mission. In 2008, retired Chief Master Sergeant Dennis Richardson was finally presented the Air Force Cross for what he had done forty years earlier.

The helicopter itself survived Vietnam. During its approximately thirty-two months in Southeast Asia, crewmen assigned to 67-14709 accumulated an Air Force Cross and fourteen Silver Stars, and the aircraft was credited with the rescue of 27 American airmen.

Then, more than a decade after being shot full of holes over North Vietnam, it went back to work saving people.

On the night of March 30-31, 1979, Major James E. McArdle Jr. and his crew flew the same HH-3E into severe weather over the Yellow Sea after the Taiwanese freighter Ta Lai ran aground. High winds and seas reaching roughly fifteen feet made the operation dangerous, but the crew made repeated trips between the ship and Kwangju Air Base in South Korea.

Twenty-eight sailors were rescued.

McArdle received the Mackay Trophy for the mission.

Aircraft 67-14709 eventually survived long enough to serve into the era of Operation Desert Storm before being retired. Today it is preserved by the National Museum of the United States Air Force. Visitors can stand beside a helicopter that once returned from North Vietnam carrying 68 bullet holes and years later flew into a storm to bring twenty-eight sailors home.

If an aircraft can have a biography, Jolly Green 22 certainly earned one.

Aerial Refueling Changes the Rescue Map

Perhaps the most important technical advance incorporated into the HH-3E was its ability to refuel in flight.

Range had always haunted helicopter rescue operations. A fixed-wing aircraft could fly hundreds of miles into enemy territory, but the helicopter expected to recover its pilot was slower and consumed enormous amounts of fuel while hovering. A survivor could therefore be alive, located, and communicating while still being beyond practical helicopter rescue range.

Aerial refueling changed the equation.

The HH-3E could connect with an HC-130P tanker and receive fuel in flight. This allowed Jolly Greens to reach farther into Southeast Asia, remain on station longer, and return from missions that would previously have exceeded a helicopter's endurance. It also added another demanding task to an already complicated rescue mission. A helicopter crew headed toward enemy territory might first have to rendezvous with a tanker, position itself behind a much larger aircraft, place the refueling probe into the trailing drogue, take fuel while maintaining formation, and then continue toward the rescue area.

The capability was publicly demonstrated in spectacular fashion in 1967 when two HH-3Es completed the first nonstop transatlantic flight by helicopters. Flying from the United States to France for the Paris Air Show, they remained airborne across the Atlantic with the help of repeated aerial refuelings.

It was an impressive record, but its military significance went beyond publicity. The same technology that allowed an H-3 to cross the Atlantic meant a rescue crew in Southeast Asia could reach an airman previously considered too far away.

For someone hiding in enemy territory listening for rotor blades, range was not an engineering specification. It was the difference between hearing a Jolly Green coming and hearing nothing at all.

Son Tay: The H-3 That Was Never Coming Home

By 1970, confidence in the H-3 had grown to the point that one was selected for an extraordinary mission in which everyone involved knew the helicopter itself probably would not survive.

American planners had developed a joint raid to rescue prisoners of war believed to be held at Son Tay, west of Hanoi. The operation demanded a nighttime penetration deep into North Vietnam by a complex force of helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft. Special Forces soldiers rehearsed the assault repeatedly against a mock-up of the prison camp while aircrews practiced the long, low-level route.

An HH-3E, call sign Banana 1, was assigned to carry the assault element led by Captain Richard “Dick” Meadows directly into the prison compound.

There was no convenient landing zone.

The plan was therefore wonderfully direct in the way military planning occasionally becomes when every sensible alternative has been exhausted. The H-3 would crash into the compound.

During the raid on the night of November 20-21, 1970, Banana 1 came in low and deliberately forced its way into the prison area. Rotor blades struck trees as the helicopter was put down inside the compound. Meadows and his men poured out and began clearing buildings while other elements of the raiding force fought outside.

The helicopter had performed its last landing.

The prisoners, however, were gone. They had been moved from Son Tay before the raid.

The primary objective therefore failed, but the operation stunned observers because an American force had penetrated one of the most heavily defended regions of North Vietnam, assaulted the compound, and withdrawn. More important to some of the prisoners held elsewhere, news of Son Tay eventually demonstrated that the United States had been willing to send men into the heart of North Vietnam to bring them home.

For Banana 1, there was no return flight, no museum retirement, and no long postwar career. Its purpose on that night was to carry the assault force all the way through the prison wall if necessary.

It did.

From the Battlefield to the Moon

While H-3 crews were risking their lives over Southeast Asia, Navy Sea Kings were also appearing in another kind of history.

NASA's Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo spacecraft returned to Earth by splashing down in the ocean. The final stage of some of the most technically sophisticated voyages ever attempted therefore depended on sailors, swimmers, ships, and helicopters.

Sea Kings became familiar participants in spacecraft recovery operations. Their ability to hover over water, operate far from the recovery ship, carry personnel and equipment, and lift people aboard made them ideally suited to the mission.

On July 24, 1969, Apollo 11 returned from the first human landing on the Moon.

Neil Armstrong, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, and Michael Collins splashed down in the Pacific. Navy swimmers moved to the command module and began the carefully planned recovery operation. Concern about possible contamination from the lunar surface meant that the astronauts donned biological isolation garments before leaving the spacecraft.

Waiting above them was a Navy SH-3D Sea King from Helicopter Anti-Submarine Squadron 4.

The aircraft became famous as “Helicopter 66.”

One by one, the Apollo 11 astronauts were hoisted aboard.

The scene remains one of the wonderful juxtapositions in aviation history. Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins had ridden a Saturn V away from Earth, traveled hundreds of thousands of miles, sent two men down to the lunar surface, reunited in lunar orbit, and hurled themselves back through Earth's atmosphere.

The last few hundred feet required a Sikorsky helicopter.

Helicopter 66 and other Sea Kings participated in multiple Apollo recoveries. The H-3 thus became connected to another group of men experiencing the peculiar relief of seeing a helicopter after surviving something extraordinary. For a downed pilot in Vietnam, the rotor noise meant the rescue force had found him. For an astronaut floating in the Pacific after returning from the Moon, it meant the same basic thing.

Someone had come to take him home.

The Pelican: Coast Guard H-3s

The Coast Guard also adopted the S-61R family, receiving the HH-3F that became known as the Pelican. The aircraft entered Coast Guard service in the late 1960s and gave the service a powerful medium-range search-and-rescue helicopter with considerable endurance, payload, and overwater capability.

The Coast Guard's enemy was different. There were no antiaircraft guns waiting beneath the helicopter, but weather, darkness, freezing water, fog, and distance could be just as final.

One mission in February 1971 demonstrated what the Pelican and its crew could do.

The merchant ship Steel Executive reported a seriously ill crewman approximately 220 miles south of San Diego. HH-3F CG-1473 launched from Coast Guard Air Station San Diego with Lieutenant Commander Paul Lewis as aircraft commander, Lieutenant Joseph Fullmer as copilot, Aviation Survivalman Third Class Larry Farmer as flight mechanic, Aviation Electronics Technician Third Class Charles Desimone, and Hospital Corpsman Third Class Richard McCollough.

The distance alone made the mission demanding. Then the crew reached the area and found the ship hidden beneath dense fog.

Above the cloud layer the night was clear. Below it, visibility was almost nonexistent.

Lewis had to decide whether to descend.

There was a sick man aboard the ship who needed help. There were also five men in the helicopter whose lives depended upon not flying the HH-3F directly into the ocean or the freighter's superstructure.

Lewis descended.

Using instruments, radar, radio-direction finding, and floating marine location markers, the crew brought the Pelican down to roughly forty feet above the water and began creeping toward the ship through the fog. Eventually the vessel's own radar helped guide them closer.

Lewis still could not adequately see where he was going.

Larry Farmer could.

Leaning from the cabin, secured by a gunner's belt, Farmer became the pilot's eyes. He called directions to Lewis while trying to locate the ship, judge the helicopter's position, avoid rigging disappearing into the fog above them, and prepare the rescue hoist.

The crew reached the Steel Executive. Farmer guided the aircraft into position and delivered the rescue basket. The patient was hoisted aboard on the first attempt, McCollough began caring for him, and the pilots then had to climb back through the darkness and fog using instruments before returning to San Diego.

The merchant seaman survived.

Lewis received the Distinguished Flying Cross and Farmer the Air Medal. When Lewis later received a major civilian helicopter award for the rescue, he made a point of saying that the honor properly belonged to the entire crew rather than to him alone.

That statement became painfully meaningful.

On December 16, 1972, Lewis was flying another HH-3F, CG-1474, after the crew had rescued four men from the sinking fishing vessel Wanda Dene. After refueling at Naval Air Station Key West, the Pelican departed for St. Petersburg with eight people aboard.

The helicopter disappeared over the Gulf of Mexico.

Despite a massive search, only limited wreckage and one body were recovered. Lewis, Major Marvin Cleveland, Aviation Machinist's Mate First Class Edward Nemetz, Aviation Electronics Technician Third Class Clinton Edwards, and the rescued fishermen were lost. The cause of the crash was never determined.

The two missions belong together. Search-and-rescue history naturally celebrates the nights when the helicopter returns with survivors. It is harder to remember that the same crews flew again the next day and the next, knowing perfectly well that weather and machinery did not care how many people they had previously saved.

The Coast Guard continued operating the HH-3F for decades. Pelicans performed rescues far offshore, flew through storms, searched for lost vessels and aircraft, and carried sick or injured mariners toward medical care. The last Coast Guard HH-3F was retired in 1994, ending an era in which the service operated large amphibious helicopters capable of landing on water.

The Sea King at the White House

The H-3 also acquired a role almost completely removed from submarine hunting and combat rescue.

Marine Helicopter Squadron One had begun presidential helicopter transportation during the Eisenhower administration. The VH-3A joined the executive transport fleet during the 1960s, followed later by the VH-3D. Painted in the distinctive presidential scheme and operated by HMX-1, these aircraft became among the most photographed helicopters in the world.

“Marine One” is not the permanent name of a particular helicopter. It is the call sign used by a Marine Corps aircraft while the President is aboard. Nevertheless, decades of television coverage made the white-topped Sea King visually synonymous with the presidency. It appeared on the South Lawn of the White House, at Andrews, beside Air Force One, and at presidential destinations around the world.

The contrast with the H-3's other careers could hardly be greater. An aircraft family associated with PJs hanging from rescue hoists over Laos also carried presidents beneath immaculate interiors and polished paint. Yet the presidential mission depended on the same qualities that made the H-3 useful elsewhere: reliability, twin-engine power, cabin space, and the ability to operate from confined landing areas.

It was another example of just how far the original submarine hunter had traveled.

The H-3's Long Goodbye

As the Cold War moved toward its final decades, newer helicopters gradually assumed the H-3's missions. The SH-60 Seahawk increasingly took over naval antisubmarine work. HH-60 and later rescue helicopters replaced the Air Force's aging Jolly Greens. The Coast Guard transitioned from the HH-3F to the HH-60J Jayhawk. Presidential VH-3Ds remained visible long after most other American H-3 variants had disappeared from regular service.

The Sea King also became an international success. Versions and derivatives served with numerous foreign militaries, while licensed production, particularly Britain's Westland Sea King, took the design into additional roles ranging from antisubmarine warfare and airborne early warning to rescue and troop transport. Exploring every foreign Sea King could become another article by itself, because apparently one multinational career was insufficient for this helicopter.

The American H-3's legacy, however, is best measured in people rather than production totals.

There was Demetrio Verich, watching a Navy Sea King come for him deep inside North Vietnam while Neil Sparks held the helicopter under fire. There was the Phantom pilot lifted from a box canyon after Leland Kennedy and his crew had been driven away four times. There was Duane Hackney giving his parachute to another man in a dying helicopter. There were the wounded reconnaissance troops Larry Maysey helped aboard Jolly Green 26 before the aircraft was shot down. There was Gerald Young, burned and alone, refusing to bring another rescue helicopter into an ambush. There was Thomas Newman descending into a hostile jungle because the injured pilot could not simply climb aboard. There was Dennis Richardson exposing himself to enemy fire in a helicopter that came home with 68 bullet holes, and James McArdle flying that same aircraft years later to rescue sailors in a storm. There were Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins rising from the Pacific toward Helicopter 66 after returning from the Moon. There was Larry Farmer leaning from a Coast Guard Pelican into black fog because Paul Lewis could not see the ship ahead of them.

Different uniforms. Different wars. Different oceans. Different missions.

The helicopter connected them.

Why the H-3 Mattered

The Sikorsky H-3 family arrived during a period when helicopters were rapidly changing from relatively limited utility aircraft into machines capable of becoming integral parts of naval warfare, long-range rescue, special operations, and national transportation. The H-3 helped prove that a large turbine helicopter could operate routinely from ships, carry sophisticated sensors, function in difficult weather, travel extraordinary distances, refuel in flight, and survive levels of punishment that designers could never completely anticipate.

Its greatest contribution may have been in combat rescue.

The HH-3E helped establish concepts that continue to influence American personnel recovery today. Rescue helicopters needed range, armor, defensive weapons, trained specialists, aerial refueling, escort aircraft, coordination, and crews willing to enter hostile territory. The later HH-53 Super Jolly Green Giant, HH-60 Pave Hawk, and today's rescue community inherited that culture.

Modern Air Force rescue helicopters still carry the name.

The HH-60W is called the Jolly Green II.

That is not nostalgia for an old aircraft. It is a tribute to the crews who created the reputation behind the name.

Military aircraft are usually judged by what they destroy, how fast they fly, how much they carry, or how many wars they survive. The H-3 deserves another measurement.

How many people saw one coming when they desperately needed it?

For a Navy pilot hiding in North Vietnam, a wounded airman somewhere beneath the jungle canopy, a sailor staring up from a sinking ship, or an astronaut floating beside a spacecraft in the Pacific, the approaching sound of an H-3 meant the same thing.

Someone had found you.

And they were coming to bring you home.

Sources and citations

The development and early U.S. Navy career of the HSS-2/SH-3 Sea King, its antisubmarine role, carrier operations, and the evolution of naval aviation during the 1960s were checked against Naval History and Heritage Command material, including its official history of naval aviation. (Naval History and Heritage Command)

The July 17, 1967 rescue of Lieutenant Commander Demetrio A. Verich by Neil R. Sparks Jr., including the approximately twenty-minute hover under enemy fire and Sparks' Navy Cross, is documented in Naval History and Heritage Command's history of the air war over North Vietnam. (Naval History and Heritage Command)

Information on the HH-3E's development for combat search and rescue, the conversion of CH-3Es with armor, defensive armament, self-sealing fuel tanks, rescue hoists, and inflight-refueling equipment was checked against the National Museum of the United States Air Force's HH-3E and CH-3E histories. (Air Force Museum)

The broader Air Force rescue record and the HH-3E's importance in Southeast Asia were checked against the official history of Military Airlift Command, which records the extensive contribution made by HH-3Es to aircrew recoveries during the war. (AMC)

Leland T. Kennedy's two October 1966 rescue missions, for which he received two Air Force Crosses only fifteen days apart, were checked against his award citations and historical accounts of the missions. (Hall of Valor)

Duane Hackney's February 6, 1967 mission, his transfer of his parachute to the rescued pilot, survival after being blown from the stricken HH-3E, more than 200 combat rescue missions, and status as the first living enlisted recipient of the Air Force Cross were checked against the National Museum of the United States Air Force and official Air Force historical material. (Air Force Museum)

Gerald O. Young's November 9, 1967 rescue mission and Medal of Honor actions were checked against his official U.S. Air Force Medal of Honor citation and the Congressional Medal of Honor Society. (Air Force)

Sergeant Larry W. Maysey's actions during the same mission, including his efforts to assist the wounded reconnaissance-team survivors aboard the HH-3E under fire, were checked against his Air Force Cross documentation and the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency record of the loss. (37th Training Wing)

Sergeant Thomas A. Newman's May 30, 1968 rescue near Savannakhet, Laos, including his descent into hostile terrain and protection of the injured pilot during extraction, was checked against his official Air Force Cross account. (37th Training Wing)

The March 14, 1968 history of Jolly Green 22, HH-3E serial 67-14709, including its 68 bullet holes, Dennis Richardson's later Air Force Cross, the 27 credited airman rescues, fourteen Silver Stars earned by personnel assigned to the aircraft, and its 1979 rescue of 28 sailors from the Ta Lai, comes from the National Museum of the United States Air Force's history of the preserved aircraft. (Air Force Museum)

The H-3's role in aerial refueling and the 1967 nonstop transatlantic demonstration were checked against official Air Force historical material on the HH-3E and HC-130 rescue team. (AMC)

Apollo-era spacecraft recovery information was checked against NASA's official Apollo histories and chronology. (NASA)

Information concerning the VH-3 and HMX-1 presidential mission was checked against Marine Helicopter Squadron One and National Naval Aviation Museum histories. (HMX-1)

Coast Guard HH-3F Pelican service and retirement history was checked against the U.S. Coast Guard Historian's Office. (US Coast Guard History)

The February 1971 Steel Executive medevac, the actions of Lieutenant Commander Paul Lewis, Larry Farmer and the rest of CG-1473's crew, and the later loss of Lewis and CG-1474 following the Wanda Dene rescue were checked against the Coast Guard's detailed historical account of the missions. (mycg.uscg.mil)