A daring nighttime helicopter rescue by the NYPD in ferocious winds and bitter cold early Sunday saved a pair of West Point cadets stranded on a mountaintop about 60 miles north of Manhattan.

The pilot, Officer Steve Browning, 52, of Shirley, described in an interview how he struggled against winds gusting to 32 mph as his craft, a Bell 412 air/sea rescue helicopter, hovered atop Storm King Mountain just after 2 a.m. The five-member rescue team saved the unidentified cadets with the help of infrared and night-vision equipment.

The copter and its crew had to make two trips, hoisting first one cadet into the craft for the trip to the U.S. Military Academy’s parade field, then the second. The two, stranded on the mountain since late afternoon Saturday, were treated for weather-related conditions at the academy’s Keller Army Medical Center, according to a spokeswoman.

“The first thing we saw were two of them on top of a small rock with barely enough room for them,” he said adding the cadets were huddled together. He said he lowered the paramedic and served as Browning’s eyes while he steadied the chopper. If Almeida said “right,” Browning went right. If he said “left,” Browning would go left.

During the rescue, he said, the helicopter’s rotors were about 20 feet from the edge of the cliff in conditions he described as the “worst winds you could ever think of.”

The two cadets had gone rappelling alone on the mountain on a training exercise, on the west bank of the Hudson River, which can reach up to 1,360 feet above sea level, according to a spokeswoman for the U.S. Military Academy. NYPD said signals from one of the cadet’s cell phones were used to locate them.