When physician David Kaminskas arrived less than five minutes after the crash of an MV-22 Osprey at Bellows Air Force Station in Waimanalo, he saw flames, billowing black smoke and an aircraft melting away.
He expected to discover multiple casualties, but that’s not what he found. All the crewmen and passengers were outside and clear of the burning aircraft.
"It was just amazing," he said. "It was a heroic effort. It really was a miracle."
Kaminskas, a neurologist with the Hawaii Pacific Neuroscience Center in Kailua, was at a weekend father-and-son camp-out at Bellows. He was in the company of his 11-year-old.
The group was starting to break camp Sunday morning when they heard the Ospreys coming in.
"They were incredibly loud, deafeningly loud," he said.
At the time, Kaminskas was sitting with a couple of fathers who are pilots, and they were describing how amazing the Osprey aircraft is. While the pilots decided to move closer to get a better look at the spectacle, Kaminskas and his son stayed back.
That’s when they heard the crash.
It wasn’t long before one of the pilot-fathers returned to camp in his car and told Kaminskas he was urgently needed. When they arrived at the crash site, Kaminskas was taken aback by the devastation.
"It was a scene out of some kind of apocalypse movie," he said.
All the military crewmen were out of the craft and apparently safe — though some were obviously much more injured than others.
Kaminskas sprang into action, going to the one in greatest need first. The man was unresponsive and Kaminskas didn’t feel a pulse, so he treated a couple of others who were in bad shape, complaining of severe back pain and unable to move. Others had nasty cuts and bruises, while 14 more appeared to be outwardly uninjured and some asked how they could help.
"I was impressed," he said. "They were all remarkably composed for what they just went through."
But there was some anxiety about whether the burning aircraft would explode. One of the airman told him they needed to move away as soon as they could.
"It was a dangerous situation," he said.
Kaminskas, a headache and stroke specialist who has worked in Hawaii on and off for 21 years, has practiced emergency medicine in the past — "but never in board shorts and slippers."
Other helpers soon arrived, he said, including some Bellows Beach lifeguards who brought bandages, cervical collars and boards to help stabilize the injured.
"It was a phenomenal effort by everyone," he said.
After about 10 minutes — "it felt like forever" — emergency vehicles arrived. Kaminskas helped carry the wounded into the ambulances, and all the injured were taken to hospitals.
Twenty-one Marines and one Navy corpsman had been aboard the aircraft. One Marine died in the crash.
During the triage effort, one of the injured men told him the Osprey had touched down on the ground in a cloud of dust, prompting him to take off his safety belt. But then, he said, the aircraft suddenly rose up and then fell back down to the ground — and that’s when he got hurt.
Kaminskas speculated that those most injured might have removed their safety belts too soon.
