Missouri Wing Civil Air Patrol Participates in State-wide Search and Rescue Drill

LEBANON, MISSOURI - The Missouri Wing of the Civil Air Patrol, U.S. Air Force Auxiliary, will be participating in state-wide search and rescue exercise on Saturday, August 15, 2008.

Mission base for the Missouri Wing will be centrally located at the Floyd W. Jones Lebanon Airport in Lebanon, Missouri.  Additional staging areas will be in Sedalia and Chesterfield. 

Using techniques similar to those demonstrated in the search for missing adventurer Steve Fossett, the Missouri Wing will participate in the following training tasks:

•         Aerial damage and assessment photo reconnaissance.

•         Aircrew and ground team searches for missing aircraft and persons.

•         State-wide communication drills.

•         Hyperspectral imaging flights utilizing Civil Air Patrol's Airborne Real-time Cueing Hyperspectral Enhanced Recon (ARCHER) system.

•         Near real-time satellite digital imaging flights utilizing Civil Air Patrol's Satellite Digital Imaging System (SDIS).

•         Use of the National Incident Command System (ICS) for command and control.

The exercise will also include inter-agency training through aerial photo reconnaissance of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers for the U.S. Coast Guard.

Formal search and rescue training exercises are held on a regular basis throughout the state several times each year.  Additionally, the Wing is evaluated annually by the U.S. Air Force.

"As a component of the Air Force, we go through an annual inspection of how well we interface and perform our missions assigned to us," said Major Eric Jensen, exercise coordinator.  "This is one of those exercises to prove that we know what we are doing and are able to do it in a professional manner."

The Missouri Wing of the Civil Air Patrol is composed of over 1,000 members organized in forty-one Squadrons located throughout the state.  

Civil Air Patrol, the official auxiliary of the U.S. Air Force, is a nonprofit organization with 57,000 members nationwide. CAP performs 90 percent of continental U.S. inland search and rescue missions as tasked by the Air Force Rescue Coordination Center and was credited by the AFRCC with saving 91 lives in fiscal year 2008. Its volunteers also perform homeland security, disaster relief and counter-drug missions at the request of federal, state and local agencies. The members play a leading role in aerospace education and serve as mentors to the more than 22,000 young people currently participating in CAP cadet programs.

Civil Air Patrol has been performing missions for America for over 67 years.

To learn more about the Civil Air Patrol, please visit www.gocivilairpatrol.com (CAP website), or www.mowg.cap.gov (Missouri Wing website).

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Media Inquiries

Maj. David A. Miller, CAP

Mission Information Officer

314-623-0831 Cellular

314-543-5943 Office

314-407-9197 Pager

Maj. Eric Jensen, CAP

Exercise Coordinator

573-286-0458 Cellular