Five pararescuers peer out the wide cargo door of a KC-130 more than 1,000 miles off the coast of California. From the vantage of the large military aircraft, the Ocean Applaud, a cargo ship, looks like a toy bobbing in the Pacific Ocean several thousand feet below. It’s late August and the rescuers have been called in to recover an injured sailor who has fallen more than 30 feet.
With their target in reach and the mission set, the crew slides a large package out the door. It contains an inflatable boat rolled up like a hot dog with an outboard engine. The parachute immediately opens. Five men follow, waddling toward the edge of the door with dive fins on and decked out in tactical gear. One by one they step out of the plane with zero hesitation.
When they hit the water, the resucers use a dive bottle to inflate the boat. In just a few minutes, they have the engine running and head toward the ship. The rescuers stabilize the injured man, and the next day he’s flown to Stanford Hospital. Another mission accomplished, but this one, and thousands of others, would not be possible were it not for a very specialized outboard engine.
“It’s all about getting our troops home,” says George Woodruff, the director and patriarch of Raider Outboards, a company he founded
