Since 1975, the pilots, pararescue jumpers, maintenance crews and other Airmen of the Westhampton Beach-based 106th Rescue Wing of the New York Air National Guard have kept their main mission simple: "That Others May Live."

The only U.S. Air Force rescue wing in the northeast recently celebrated 50 years dedicated to combat search and rescue efforts, including after life-threatening accidents, in the wake of natural disasters and on the battlefield.

So far, according to wing leaders, 2,974 lives have been saved by Airmen with the 106th.

Here are five stories of those who serve the 106th Rescue Wing risking their own lives to save others.

During the early '70s, the 106th Rescue Wing's primary mission changed from aircraft refueling to air defense for Long Island and New York City.

The mission changed again in 1975, when Air Force Senior Master Sgt. William Hughes, a pararescue jumper during the Vietnam War, helped found the wing's new "Aerospace Rescue and Recovery Squadron." He and his fellow Westhampton Beach Airmen embarked on the wing's first rescue less than two years later.

On a frigid January day in 1977, a young couple found themselves stranded in the middle of Tiana Bay after their boat's motor died. Another boat tried and failed to navigate the ice to reach the couple, and police and fire departments did not have the watercraft needed for an icy rescue, Hughes said.

The 106th then got the call. 

Sporting a wetsuit, Hughes was lowered by helicopter to the couple, who had boated into the bay to retrieve a duck blind frozen in the ice.

"They were in a flat-bottom duck boat, one that you’d see Elmer Fud using," Hughes told Newsday in a recent interview "It wasn’t a very good plan they had because they could have frozen to death quite frankly."

The wing's first-ever rescue operation was a "gratifying" success for everyone involved, including behind the scenes aircraft mechanics and other essential personnel, Hughes said.

"The rescue business is sometimes very difficult and very dangerous, but it’s very gratifying when you save somebody," he added. "Something like that, a lot of people contribute, and sometimes people forget that."

Shortly after he watched the levees protecting New Orleans buckle from the storm surge of Hurricane Katrina on TV, Col. Andrew J. Wineberger climbed into the cockpit of an HH-60 Pave Hawk helicopter, lifted off from the 106th and flew south.

The hurricane left an "apocalyptic" scene in New Orleans, Wineberger, the vice commander of the rescue wing, recalled in an interview with Newsday.

"There was water in some areas 10 feet high," he said. "Some people didn’t have time to evacuate ... and they went right on their rooftops."

For 10 days, two of the 106th Rescue Wing’s helicopters and a C-130 aircraft joined the Army, Coast Guard and civilian crews searching the city day and night for people trapped above several feet of water. By the end of their deployment in New Orleans, the Airmen had rescued 161 people.

"One of the first rescues we did ... I saw the pararescueman coming up, carrying an infant," Wineberger recalled.

Hovering about six inches above rooftops, Wineberger held steady as pararescuemen stepped out of the helicopter with power tools to breach the tops of homes or apartment buildings in the search for survivors. He had to avoid not only the other aircraft performing rescues, but the power lines running through the city.

A few years ago, Wineberger said he and his wife celebrated her birthday in New Orleans. This time around, he encountered a rebuilt city and resilient people. He thought of those he helped save, including the infant he watched a pararescueman carry into his helicopter 20 years ago.

"What we do affects not only those people, but it affects generations to come," Wineberger said. "Maybe that young man or young woman is a doctor or a lawyer ... and pays it forward to the next person."

When Senior Master Sgt. Erik Blom boarded one of two helicopters destined for Kandahar, Afghanistan on Dec. 10, 2012, he thought he was embarking on a simple extraction mission: rescuing four wounded American soldiers and their Afghan interpreter.

"But once the first helicopter went in to land ... they were being shot at," Blom recalled. "And then the helicopter I was in shortly thereafter was shot at with a rocket-propelled grenade."

The firefight raged as Blom and his team rounded up the five men. One wounded soldier had three limbs amputated by an IED explosion, the pararescue team leader said.

The other three soldiers and the interpreter "were less severely injured" by gunshot and shrapnel wounds, Blom added, but still required "pressure dressings taking care of bleeding on their bodies."

While attempting to get the wounded aboard the helicopter, members of the 106th rescue team helped the Army soldiers with "returning fire at the enemy," Blom said. He and his fellow Airmen eventually took off with their five patients safely, but the most severely injured soldier, 25-year-old Staff Sgt. Wesley R. Williams, of New Carlisle, Ohio, ultimately died.

During a ceremony recognizing the mission nearly one year later, Blom and five other Airmen of the rescue wing’s 103rd Rescue Squadron were awarded one of the nation’s top military honors: the Bronze Star for Valor.

"We were all, myself included, proud to be able to do that mission," Blom said. "But you definitely feel sad because at the end of the day, the person that really paid the ultimate price is deceased ... That deserves more recognition than the people who got to come home."

On April 24, 2017, Cannet embarked on "the most complicated, challenging mission I’ve been a part of."

He flew a HC-130 plane more than four-and-a-half-hours across the Atlantic so pararescuemen and combat rescue officers could plunge into the water, board a ship on which four crew members were injured in an explosion, and establish a makeshift ICU to administer lifesaving medical care. Two men died before the Airmen could reach them.

"The other two were savable," the colonel recalled last week at the rescue wing he leads. "But they had restricted breathing, they didn’t have the ability to open their eyes ... severe swelling, the typical things you see from an explosive burn injury."

The Airmen flew 1,500 miles east in an aircraft that only carries around 3,000 miles worth of fuel and were forced to leap into the water at less than half their desired altitude due to cloudy conditions.

"My last thought before I jumped out of the plane was ‘come on God just give me a chance.’" recalled combat rescue officer Lt. Col. Martin Viera. "'Let me please help them.'"

With the clock ticking and Cannet’s fuel depleting, the Airmen had to drop all the pararescue jumpers’ supplies — including ventilators for their patients and a pair of boats they inflated with scuba tanks to reach the ship — in a single drop. The pilot said he was forced to make a "gut wrenching decision" and dash toward the Azores to refuel while his fellow Airmen were still treading water in the "ink black" night.

After the pararescuemen boarded the ship, they kicked-off a cycle of administering the medicine necessary to keep the burn victims in a medically-induced coma and removing the dead skin from their eight burned limbs, cleaning the wounds and wrapping them.

The crewmen’s burns restricted blood flow to their fingers and toes, forcing the pararescuemen to perform escharotomies, a series of precise surgical cuts to the limbs and digits to restore circulation.

“They’re practically surgical residents,” Cannet said of the pararescue jumpers under his command.

After three days under the Airmen's care, the injured crewmen were airlifted to a burn center in Lisbon, Viera said. He has kept in touch with one of the two survivors.

"It was the mission of my lifetime," Viera said. "I’m just grateful that my team could come together and really pull this off."

Less than two weeks after more than 100 Airmen of the 106th Rescue Squadron deployed to Texas, where they rescued more than 500 survivors of Hurricane Harvey, they headed to the Caribbean islands reeling from Hurricane Irma.

While helping local authorities in Puerto Rico and St. Thomas, the Airmen were tasked with a "courtesy mission," Lt. Col. Sean Boughal, a combat rescue officer, said. Pararescuemen had to rescue a member of the West Virginia Air National Guard honeymooning with his wife in St. Martin. Hurricane Irma devastated the island’s Princess Juliana International Airport, leaving the couple and their fellow vacationers trapped as another hurricane was forecast to strike the island.

"St. Martin was completely flat; it looked like you were flying over Afghanistan," Boughal recalled. "You think everything’s nice and green. Everything that was green on the island got washed out to sea."

Over three days, the Westhampton-based rescue force flew more than 1,000 Americans, and citizens of other countries, to safety.

"We wouldn’t send a plane out half empty," Boughal said. "If we got through all the Americans, we were taking out English and Canadians ... We felt it was the right thing to do."