Channel 5 News reporter Christian Von Preysing is spending a week at the largest Navy base in the world in Norfolk, Virginia and learning about their training.

One skill that's saving lives overseas is rescue swimming.

For sailors, including those from the Rio Grande Valley, going overboard on a Navy ship is a real danger.

On Tuesday, rescue swimmers went to work in the Red Sea where the Navy is operating after a plane went over the runway on an aircraft carrier.

Channel 5 News witnessed that training at the Helicopter Sea Combat Squadron Number 2. That's a highly skilled job in the Navy for people whose job it is to jump into the water to try to recover a sailor who went overboard.

That's a reality when working on ships in the open sea, both for personnel who work the ship and aircraft. They performed a live demo of how to conduct the rescues, with precise movements from the onboard crew, a skill set and training that's hard to pass.

"Here, at this schoolhouse, we teach brand-new rescue swimmers who actually end up graduating the schoolhouse, which has a pretty high attrition rate around of 70 percent. So only about 30 percent of the people who go through actually make it," Navy rescue swimmer AWS1 Keggin Daniels said.

A Navy spokesperson said two crew members of a jet did not land successfully and went over the deck of the Harry's Truman Aircraft Carrier. The aircraft was lost at sea.

A crew of swimmers and aviators jumped into action, saving the pilots lives, resulting in minor injuries of that crew that was involved in that incident.