The Most Daring and Expensive Rescue Missions in History

Year: 1937
Country: U.S.A.
Est. Cost: $8-$10 Million*

After becoming the first woman pilot to traverse the Atlantic, Amelia Earhart set the bar as high as it could go, in 1937, when she announced her intention to fly around the world with her navigator, Fred Noonan. The pair, subsequently, disappeared without a trace.

Search For Amelia Earhart ©Everett Collection / Shutterstock.com

Countless recovery operations have been done in hopes of uncovering the mystery surrounding Earhart’s disappearance. Many theories remain as to what actually happened to Earhart and Noonan. Some people believe that their plane crashed in the Ocean and sunk to the bottom of the sea, while the optimists of the world like to believe that they ended up on a deserted island in the middle of nowhere and lived out the remainder of their days in peaceful solitude.

Year: 2009
Country: Atlantic Ocean
Est. Cost: $160 Million*

In 2009, Air France Flight 447, from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, took off as scheduled, but, shortly after take-off, the plane stalled and, after a failed attempt by the aircraft’s crew, crashed into the Atlantic. 5 days after the accident took place, the Brazilian Navy was the first on the scene and found some of the plane’s wreckage. 

Air France Flight 447 ©Rebius / Shutterstock.com

Knowing that they wouldn’t find any survivors, a search was underway for evidence as to why the accident happened. It took an astronomical sum of an estimated $160 million to fund the 2-year search that ended with the recovery of Flight 447’s black box from the ocean’s floor, but no definitive answers.

Year: 2018
Country: Thailand
Est. Cost: $9 million*

Back in the summer of 2018 – the Tham Luang cave rescue, or, as most people remember it, the rescue of the junior Thai soccer team and their 25-year-old assistant coach, had the whole world watching on in anticipation.

Thailand Cave Rescue @BBC News/YouTube

It took the efforts of more than 10,000 people from dozens of countries, 10 police helicopters, 7 ambulances, and the pumping of billions of liters worth of floodwater out of that cave, but after 2.5 weeks of being trapped, all 12 boys and their coach were brought out alive. The overall cost of the rescue is unconfirmed, although it’s thought to be in the tens of millions, with the biggest cost being the life of Saman Kunan, the Thai Navy Seal who lost his life during the rescue.

Year: 1972
Country: Vietnam
Est. Cost: Incalculable

On April 2nd, 1972, a plane carrying “Gene” Hambleton was shot down over the Northern Vietnamese side of the DMZ, and the United States Military went to great lengths to ensure the safe extraction of its man. This included delaying a ground offensive and a no-fire zone within a 17-mile radius of where he was believed to have been. 

Rescue of Bat 21 ©Public domain / commons.wikimedia.org

After 11 days behind enemy lines, the navigator, known by his call sign “Bat 21”, was extracted from Northern Vietnam, but it wasn’t without a cost. In the attempts to rescue “Bat 21”, 11 men were killed and 2 were captured, when their 5 aircraft were shot down by enemy forces.

Year: 2013
Country: Canada
Est. Cost: $150,000*

When it’s -70° F outside, being stranded on an ice cap, that’s broken off from the mainland and is drifting out to sea, would be a horrifying enough experience for anyone to have to endure, but when this happened to Joe Karetak and his son, their rescue almost ended up being more disastrous than the original ordeal.

Joe Karetak and Son Set Adrift On An Ice Cap Bernhard Staehli / Shutterstock.com

The cost of rescuing the elder and junior Karetaks included the price of the rescue helicopter, that was sent for them, but struck an ice sheet and crashed into the sea before their eyes. Joe ended up pulling the pilot on board and the three men kept each other warm until the second (successful) rescue party arrived.

Year: 1979
Country: Iran
Est. Cost: $193 Million*

“Operation Eagle Claw” was designed with the intention of ending a 444-day stand-off in which Iranian forces, loyal to the Ayatollah, held more than 60 people hostage within the United States’ Tehran embassy. For the operation, everything was accounted for…or so the U.S. Military thought.

Operation Eagle Claw ©english.khamenei.ir

The 90-person team, that was sent to extract the hostages, couldn’t even get close enough to see their target because of a sandstorm that didn’t just disrupt “Operation Eagle Claw” but rendered it completely useless. All up, eight military personnel lost their lives, and, approximately, $193 million was spent, and not one of the hostages was extracted in President Carter’s failed attempt at a Hollywood ending.

Year: 1970
Country: Outer Space
Est. Cost: Unknown

A lot of people tend to forget that the Hollywood film Apollo 13 was based on a real event. A few days into its mission, there was an explosion in Apollo 13’s service module that caused irreparable damage. Fortunately, being part of one of NASA’s programs means that some of the brightest minds in the world were formulating a plan to bring the astronauts home.

Apollo 13 @universetoday/Pinterest.com

Rescuers were up day and night finding ways to prolong the astronauts’ oxygen supplies and crunching numbers in order to plan flight trajectories around the moon. These efforts utilized knowledge of maths and science that most people didn’t know existed. As the film so accurately portrays, the whole crew made it back to Earth alive.

Year: 2009
Country: Indian Ocean
Est. Cost: Unknown

What the Maersk Alabama cargo ship experienced in April of 2009 is like something right out of a story by J.M. Barrie. When 4 Somali pirates attempted to highjack the Maersk Alabama, the crew (which had been given training on anti-piracy protocol), flipped the script on the pirates and instead took one of them captive. 

Rescue of The Maersk Alabama @Charles Mansfield/Facebook

The remaining pirates escaped to the lifeboat and took the cargo ship’s captain with them. A three-day pursuit ensued in which the United States Navy and a team of SEALS ultimately neutralized the pirates and rescued Captain Phillips (yes, that Captain Phillips) unharmed.

Year: 2010
Country: China
Est. Cost: $5-$15 Million*

On March 28, 2010, more than 260 workers were in the Wangjialing coal mine when one of them dug in the wrong spot causing the mine to fill with water. More than 100 of those workers escaped before it was too late, the other 153 found themselves scattered across nine of the mine’s platforms watching the water levels rise from the cavernous maze below.

The Wangjialing Mine Rescue @theguardian/Pinterest

In a rescue that took 8 days to complete and required the services of more than 3,000 rescue workers, the equivalence of 55 Olympic swimming pools worth of water was pumped out of the mine. 115 of the miners lived to tell the tales of the rescue that has been estimated to have cost at least $5 million to complete.

Year: 1939
Country: United States
Est. Cost: $1-$5 Million*

While partaking in a test-dive off the Isles of Shoals the USS Squalus experienced every crew’s worst nightmare when a malfunction caused the flooding of most of the submarine, including the crew’s quarters and both engine rooms. 26 of the crew were lost immediately, but the other 33 managed to seal themselves in a secured part of the sub. A rather larger problem still remained – the crew was trapped inside of a sinking submarine. 

Rescue of The USS Squalus' Crew @Lawrence Brennan/Facebook

It took a little more than a day and a half but, thanks to the implementation of new diving theories that had never before been tested practically, and the help of the McCann rescue chamber, all 33 remaining crew members were rescued from the ocean’s floor, 240-feet below the water’s surface.

Year: 2009
Country: United States
Est. Cost: $2-$5 Million*

Not long after it took off from LaGuardia Airport in New York City, US Airways Flight 1549 – piloted by Chesley Sullenberger and Jeffrey Skiles – got in the way of a skein of Canadian geese. The result was a 3,000-foot descent into the Hudson River with two blown engines, no power, and one “Miracle On The Hudson”.

With quick thinking and nerves of steel, Captain “Sully” safely landed Flight 1549 in the Hudson River, rescuing everyone onboard from an accident that couldn’t have been prevented. Aside from the obvious cost of the damaged aircraft, the bill for this rescue also included the $5,000 that each of the 150 passengers received for their troubles, as well as the total price of refunding all of their flights.

Year: 1987
Country: United States
Est. Cost: $1-$2 Million*

In 1987, while in her aunt’s yard, 18-month-old “Baby Jessica” McClure fell down a well, and the world came to her rescue. Due to the narrow composition of the well, a second (wider) well was dug next to the one Jessica was in, and a small tunnel was built to connect the wells and retrieve the toddler.

The Rescue Of Baby Jessica @CBS7News/Facebook

The estimated cost of digging the well next to the one that Jessica was in, and all of the associated fees was somewhere in the $1-$2 million range, but the bill was covered by private and public donations. A trust fund was also set up in Jessica’s name that should have been worth close to $1 million, but it was mostly erased during the market crash of 2008.

Year: 2014
Country: Indian Ocean/South China Sea
Est. Cost: $140+ Million*

When Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 departed from Kuala Lumpur International Airport on March 8, 2014, it did so with the intended destination of Beijing. When the aircraft disappeared from air traffic control’s radar less than an hour after take-off, the search for the 227 passengers and 12 crew members began.

Search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 ©LS(HM) Andy Coutanche / commons.wikimedia.org

So far, more than $140 million has been spent on trying to find out what happened on that fateful March day back in 2014. More than 2 million square miles of the ocean’s surface has been searched, as have close to 50,000 square miles of the underwater world, and yet, to date, no signs of the missing vessel have been discovered.

Year: 2010
Country: Chile
Est. Cost: $22 Million*

Throughout history, there have been countless occurrences of mines collapsing. On most occasions, the resulting search and rescue operations don’t have the greatest outcomes – as was the assumption of what would be found upon clearing the wreckage that trapped 33 miners 2,000 feet below the surface of Northern Chile’s San Jose copper mine.

Chile Mine Rescue @Cnn / Pinterest.com

It was 17 days after the main ramp’s collapse that contact with the miners was initiated, and another 52 days before they would be rescued from their underground prison. Approximately $22 million was spent on the rescue that involved hundreds of people and drilling a human-sized hole hundreds of feet through solid rock.