Thoughts on NESA being the primary tool for teaching cadets ES

[Spaceman3750]

I'm a little late to the party here, but here goes.

NESA is great for teaching a large number of people some cool followership, leadership, SAR, and outdoorsman skills in a restricted period of time. The utility of the SAR skills at home will 100% depend on the working relationship your local unit, group, and wing has with the public agencies that make up your AO (and that's a whole other topic). The rest of them should be highly valuable regardless.

The national curriculum as it stands today does introduce some key topics related to missing person searches: types of search formations, how to implement them, missing person clues, etc. however I would agree with the statement that it doesn't go far enough in preparing our ground teams for the task. The tendency of our GTLs to jump straight into line searching an area (as pointed out above) brings up a couple of deficiencies not only in how we do searches in general, but also in how we train our GTLs to think and act (at NESA, I feel like we do a better than average job of training GTLs how to apply the right technique to the right problem, but we can always improve too). What we have today is something, but we can do better.

In the meantime, you would be well served to build relationships with SAR teams from your other local agencies and train your team alongside them. Areas differ, but the folks I've met so far in the SAR community at large lead me to believe that if you're willing to identify a weakness in your own team and ask for help to improve it, they would love to help you out, because ultimately they're the ones you'll be working next to in the field. I rarely hear of a problem in CAP that is unique to CAP - everyone has similar problems, let's work together to solve them.

By the way, NESA GSAR presents students with a mixture of aviation related scenarios and missing person related scenarios. Because of that, you can know that your students coming home will have had at least cursory exposure to both. It's up to you and them to improve those skills.

[Ed Bos]

Well said, Spaceman.

As for the other folks with ideas for improving NESA, will we be seeing you out there this summer? Applications are open now. We can't improve it without YOUR help, just saying.

Cheers!