Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, the Royal New Zealand Air Force 5 Squadron has an aircraft, full crew and maintenance personnel on standby for Search and Rescue (SAR).
Whether it’s a regular working day, a weekend or Christmas Day, the P-3K Orion aircraft can be airborne at a moment’s notice to aid people in distress at sea.
In 1948-49 New Zealand subscribed to the ‘Chicago Convention’, which meant that New Zealand acknowledges an international obligation to provide aid to any distressed person in or around New Zealand. As it turns out, although New Zealand is a comparatively small country, it’s been given one of the largest SAR regions in the world to protect – 6 million square nautical miles!
The best asset to cover this large expanse of ocean is the P-3K Orion, part of the Airborne Surveillance Reconnaissance Force within the RNZAF. With careful fuel management the P3 can remain airborne for up to 15 hours and can reach as far as Hawaii in one flight. It has a range of sensors onboard that can be used for searching at sea including radar, infra-red, electro-optics, ESM and of course windows for visual detection.
On a SAR mission the aircraft carries green search flares, items as radios, water and food that can be dropped to survivors, and two Sea Rescue Apparatus which contain self inflating 10 man life rafts and survival equipment.
On average, 5 Squadron conducts seven to 15 SAR missions per year. In March of last year a fishing vessel with engine trouble in the vicinity of Tonga was rescued as a result of 5 Squadron’s efforts. The success was largely due to the fact that the vessel had a 406MHz beacon on board that enabled the Orion to fly directly to the vessel’s position. In contrast in October last year an Orion spent two full days searching in the vicinity of Kiribati for a missing vessel.
Six million square nautical miles of ocean is a large area, therefore the Orion crew has a very hard job ahead of them attempting to find distressed or missing persons at sea without a beacon. If survivors have a beacon, in particular a 406MHz beacon with an attached GPS, the search area can be reduced to only a few metres making the Orion’s job a lot easier and the chances of a successful rescue very high.
As we go to print, an RNZAF Orion took just 52 minutes to locate a stranded vessel off the coast of Tonga, dropping radios and equipment to its occupants before liaising with a Tongan patrol craft who completed the rescue.