USAF SAR Evals, Are They Helpful?

[Eclipse]

OK

So  How do we make it better, I for one detest the guys who show up to meetings and do nothing but criticize, I  know that we have a huge number of guys who are very capable, I have flown with crews that are more professional than any I flew with in the AF. No one can deny that we are for the most part an organization of professionals who volunteer much of our time and utilize our expertise in the support of CAP.   

You either tell them directly to "Shut up and color", or simply marginalize them until they no longer participate.

Build a program and an ops tempo that requires they put their money where their mouth is.  Will this reduce numbers?  Maybe?  But I can promise a functional program will bring you all the new recruits you need.

GOB's and ROMEOs are plenty happy just showing up, whining, and going for coffee - the rest of the week they tell everyone how they are a Light Kernal in the USAF/Aux.  A REAL program, takes REAL work, which usually scares these guys away, however the real assets will be telling their friends and co-workers how awesome the unit is and will bring them in for meetings, etc.

Want to raise the military bearing?  Well, you could ask your people if they "want to", or just start wearing your uniforms more, having inspections, and holding formations. 

Rinse, repeat.


Rinse, repeat.

[arajca]

Good point. I think the majority of us here wouolf love something like this. Unfortunetely, we do run CAP, yet.

Rinse, repeat.


Rinse, repeat.

You forgot to lather. 

[RiverAux]

Yes, the vast majority of our missions do not require setting up a large base and using a large number of staff members.  The AF knows that the IC sitting in his pajamas can send out a ground team and an aircraft to find an ELT.  However, it is just the large scale mission for which we do need to practice.  That is when you really have to have your stuff together or it is a major botch (reference the McGuire AFB thread).  As I said, I'm not sure the AF is the right group to evaluate us but it does need to be done. 

[wingnut]

Msn suspended due to lack of resources


This email was sent this AM. The ELT Mission was in Southern California, around Palm Springs, this is SAR reality, unless we recruit members who can participate we are dead, on the other hand the issues are. . .Crap participation in ELT searches by Southern California Units, some units have 60+ members.  The guys who do the Missions are the SAME ONES OVER AND OVER.  Ladys, We failed both the USAF and our Community, WE FAILED IN OUR MISSION.

EVALUATE THAT

PS:  There are reasons no one answers the phone, is it MUTINY??have we had 10 false ELTs in the last 2 months in the same area? are people repelled by the IC,  Stay Tuned, as the CAP WORLD TURNS:

[Chaplaindon]

As an IC, and one who served as a SAREVAL IC/MC in the past, I can only describe the system of USAF EVALS (Monitored SAREXs) as "theatrical productions."

They demonstrate:

• How well the USAFR can devise intricate scenarios for CAP to foul up.
• How well a given wing can do if they have: months to prepare, handpicked staff and crews, the best aircraft and vehicles, ideal facilities, & an orderly --CONVENIENT-- schedule of operations (e.g. not too early in the AM, or too late in the PM, not during important holidays or likely in-climate wx, etc.).

IMHO, they do absolutely nothing toward defining the actual capacity and/or operational readiness of a given unit, group or wing to respond to any sort of real-life emergency services operation (the ostensible purpose of such evaulations). And what's worse, the leadership of CAP knows this (as I have been told this directly by wing and region CC's) --and I can only --logically-- presume that the USAF does too.

NHQ (and all subordinate eschelons) know(s) that members would be loathe to take off from work/family on short/no notice for a mere exercise. No many CAP volunteers are "saving themselves" for the next REDCAP.

Thus, in order in ensure that SOMEONE comes "out to play," SAREVALs must be pre-planned well in advance. No CC (or DO or DOS) in their right mind would fail to handpick every possible element of their operation with such foreknowledge. Hence, it ceases to be a legitmate assessment of CAP capabilities and devolves into a Quixotic charade.

It teaches us nothing except how to cheat on the spirit of the evaulation process. It assess nothing but our success in that cheating ... the USAF's score is therefore --effectively-- nothing but a theatrical "review."

What's sad (and ironic), though, is that wings still fail to achieve the highest possible score when graded (inexplicably, some even FAIL ) --even after stage-managing virtually everything concerned with the event.

Friends, until CAP has the courage to upset some of its "darling" ES personnel with reallife no-notice exercises and random USAF evaluations of same, we'll never know (nor will the USAF) what CAP's actual ES/Operation capabilities are and where improvements need to be made. IMHO, we stay "fat, dumb, and happy" and that's just what NHQ, the regions/wings ... and perhaps even the USAF wants.

And, that's how it'll remain ...

[bosshawk]

I have been out of the net for a couple of weeks, due to a trip to the East Coast and overload on humidity.

Wing94(I think) hit the nail on the head on the mess that transpired at the practice SAR Eval at Castle.  What I was referring to was that the only successes were due to several very experienced guys stepping in and making things happen.  The concept of the main base and two remote bases was a disaster and that was acknowledged by most folks.  The IC and his staff were not my favorite people and they did not cover themselves in glory.  I was there and the IC wasn;t seen in the flesh for the entire day: he stayed hidden in his little enclave with his henchmen. There weren't enough tasks to utilize more airplanes and there weren't enough ground teams available to make a squad-sized assault.   I understand that lots of changes are going to be in place for the real thing next weekend.

For whatever reason, we seem to be able to pull some form of success out of messes.  Maybe the AF feels sorry for us.  I certainly hope so.

If not, we will go back to the drawing board and some heads may roll.

[ZigZag911]

Chaplaindon makes some excellent points.

Realistically, we can't expect people to take off work/school for a SAREVAL.

However, to add reality to the mix, what if it was really short notice?

What I have in mind is this: a wing will be notified they will be evaluated in a certain 'quarter' (Jan-Mar, Apr-Jun, etc).

Some weekend morning (or even Friday evening) comes a call out of the blue to an IC chosen at random activating the exercise.

Now we'll start to see how CAP can really respond!

[arajca]

What I have seen done is an "Availability Exercise".

Wing/CC draws IC name out of hat, hits with a dart, or other random selection method.

At some time during the next week, the wg/cc calls that IC and gives them a set time frame to find out which aircrews, gt's, and base staff are available and for how many operational periods.

IC calls wg/cc at specified time and reports in.

No one actually goes anywhere. For most members, involvement is swift and non-intrusive.

Wing commander sends out wing-wide email with results with two days.

[SAR-EMT1]

Combine the two and structure it so that you conduct this poll both in the daylight as well as in darkness. Availibility WILL be linked to work/.weekday/weekend

[Larry Mangum]

Washington had theirs this last weekend and received an Excellent.   The evaluation actually started on the 15th with receipt of tasking to photograph 42 different facilities for Home land Security, followed on the 20th with an additional 19 high priority photo tasking.  The SAR portion of the evaluation begin on Friday, the 22nd with the stand up of a full mission base.  On Saturday the wing responded to a missing aircraft and the simulated explosion of a ferry terminal.  All photo taking where accomplished prior to the customers deadline and the missing aircraft was found by the ground teams.   All this was accomplished despite the evaluation teams effort to distract or disrupt the mission staff. Some of the tricks played by the evaluators included, removing the Incident Commander from the base; having the High Bird go silent; and a evacuation of mission base.

[SARPilotNY]

I have a friend in the SF Bay area that said California earned a marginal at their Eval.  He said a CAP crew flying  the Air Force busted a restricted airspace and officially went missing and was a subject of an AFRCC mission.  The base actually shut down because this guy stopped to have lunch without getting any permission from the base.  No wonder!  Now the Wing CC is demanding that CA be upgraded to a Sat rating. Good Luck!  I also heard that they never were able to send any pictures back via ARCHER or SDIS, the Ops section chief went missing for two hours during the mission to have lunch and the IC needed medical attention.  Great Job!  Also they could not find a udf team for a real missing hiker that activated his 406 beacon.  The sheriff had to be called in to drive him to the hospital after waiting all night with the aircraft flying overhead.  Anyone know more about this?

[SJFedor]

TN scored an excellent last weekend. 30-some SDIS targets, 4 route surveys (verbal reports), blood/organ transport, and an ELT search. We were supposed to have a 2nd ELT search and blood/organ transport, but the weather got real bad, real quick in the afternoon, which caused us to cease operations. Got all our SDIS targets and everything else they handed to us done promptly. I served as an Assistant Air Ops Branch Director/Aircrew Briefing Officer for the Eval.

Highlights: 1st aircraft wheels up within 10 minutes of target time, 7 a/c up within 45 minutes.

ELT bird (C172, Becker DF Unit) was dispatched around 8am to start doing a route search for the missing aircraft. "AFRCC" had informed us that they were getting signals on every other sat pass, indicating the ELT was intermittant, they did a route search, some grid searches near the most probable area, etc. The ELT went active for the first time at 10am, and our ELT bird was on top of it within 4 minutes. (Combo of skill and dumb luck, but we were on it fast) GT was there within 30-40 min after first signal heard, everything went well.

SDIS is getting worse and worse. I believe Globalstar, our Satphone provider, did a crap job with their birds, because their functionality is marginal at best. Don't know if it's bad radiation shielding or what, but they continue to decline. We actually got the first 5 targets through the phone into WMIRS, but after that, they took a dump. So, instead, we had our IO (our new Wing Commander) sitting in front of a computer logged into WMIRS, and as soon as an SDIS bird would put down, we'd have a vehicle and a runner get a USB data stick from them, and go direct to the IO for transmittal to WMIRS and our "customer", which was both the USAF Eval team and the local county EMA.

The Eval team didn't do anything ridiculous to us like tell us a bomb was in the ICP, have a simulated irate victim's relative come in, kidnap our IC, or anything else. They definitely gave us some distractions, but kept it within the realm of reality, which I thought was a nice change. Our only bug, which was an actual problem, was that our 2nd airmobile repeater broke, which meant that once our highbird had to refuel, we had to get creative. We ended up retasking another aircraft in the area that had completed it's mission to stay on station to serve as a relay while the highbird crew came down, refueled, rebriefed, and got back in the air. Total time from the repeater going down to it going back up was about 45 minutes, which was pretty good in my opinion.

We actually did our Eval at the end of a week long exercise with the State EMA simulating a major earthquake along the New Madrid Fault line, so I think that really helped us. We got all our comm bugs ironed out, the staff got all warmed up, and we impressed TEMA and the Eval team when the time came.


Anyone else have a good story of their Wing's eval this year?

[SeattleSarge]

Having survived a Wing SAREVAL (general staff) in 2005 and having a CAP-USAF guy attached to our squadron, one question comes to mind...

Why aren't SAREVALs monitored by a team from AFRCC instead of CAP-USAF guys from region?  I mean wouldn't it be more useful to have real-world SAR guys evaluating us instead of USAFR officers that may or may not have any SAR experience?  Just wondering how realistic power outages and bomb threats in the command post are?

Just thinking out loud.

-SeattleSarge

[SARPilotNY]

Having survived a Wing SAREVAL (general staff) in 2005 and having a CAP-USAF guy attached to our squadron, one question comes to mind...

Why aren't SAREVALs monitored by a team from AFRCC instead of CAP-USAF guys from region?  I mean wouldn't it be more useful to have real-world SAR guys evaluating us instead of USAFR officers that may or may not have any SAR experience?  Just wondering how realistic power outages and bomb threats in the command post are?

Just thinking out loud.

-SeattleSarge

Bomb threats and power outages...no   Food poisoning  YES!
They always have the SAREVALs in the HOT zone...in real life...not a good idea.
As far as the AFRCC sending people out, two things...one, they lost many of their best folks when they moved from Langley and two, they are more like "dispatchers" vs. line folks.  I think many of the USAFR do a good job, they have a fair understanding of ICS and CAP, members from other wings are good, but may bring along a bias.   I have had county and state "experts" with the eval team but they never had "voting" powers.    Now it not just SAR, but HLS, CD, DR...

[SeattleSarge]

Bomb threats and power outages...no   Food poisoning  YES!
They always have the SAREVALs in the HOT zone...in real life...not a good idea.
As far as the AFRCC sending people out, two things...one, they lost many of their best folks when they moved from Langley and two, they are more like "dispatchers" vs. line folks.  I think many of the USAFR do a good job, they have a fair understanding of ICS and CAP, members from other wings are good, but may bring along a bias.   I have had county and state "experts" with the eval team but they never had "voting" powers.    Now it not just SAR, but HLS, CD, DR...

Sorry about that previous posting....

Well, what about using folks from a USAF Rescue Squadron?  We have one down in Portland, OR.  Seems like it would be nice to develop a relationship anyway...

Just more thinking..

-Seattle Sarge

[SARPilotNY]

Bomb threats and power outages...no   Food poisoning  YES!
They always have the SAREVALs in the HOT zone...in real life...not a good idea.
As far as the AFRCC sending people out, two things...one, they lost many of their best folks when they moved from Langley and two, they are more like "dispatchers" vs. line folks.  I think many of the USAFR do a good job, they have a fair understanding of ICS and CAP, members from other wings are good, but may bring along a bias.   I have had county and state "experts" with the eval team but they never had "voting" powers.    Now it not just SAR, but HLS, CD, DR...

Sorry about that previous posting....

Well, what about using folks from a USAF Rescue Squadron?  We have one down in Portland, OR.  Seems like it would be nice to develop a relationship anyway...

Just more thinking..

-Seattle Sarge

No need to be sorry....
The best to evaluate us...is us.   But that would be the fox guarding the chicken ...well you know.

[wingnut]

Cowabunga Globalsat

they put four sats up, but me think I reeed they be for Australia and New Zealand, we be left in cold. SDIS??

Good  Re con Photograph's can only be used in large files, remember SDIS is a very small emailed clip. CAWG will be hosting an on Line Photo class real soon. In my experience many of the photo's are poor, blurry, out of focus or unsuitable for the customer

anyone hear whats up with Pacr Evals

[SARPilotNY]

I have seen very few high quality photos from an aircraft.  I have seen where members have sent shots taken from a cell phone camera from a moving aircraft a thought they were photos our customers would expect.  We need a standard so our folks have an understanding of what would be expected.  An on line course would be a good start.

[isuhawkeye]

Iowa spent some of its appropriation to outfit each of our aircraft with a standardised camera.  This allows us to develop a consistant training platform with a consistant product.

[floridacyclist]

You can see some good comparisons of aerial and ground-based RECON photos at http://www.floridadisaster.org/eoc/eoc_Activations/Charley04/Reports/CharleyPics.htm . Incidentally, I would say that 90% of all of them are from CAP and most of the ground shots are from our team.

Considering the customer for those pics, I would say that CAP is very capable of turning out a pretty decent product.