AFRCC 2009 annual report released

[RiverAux]

The AFRCC has posted their 2009 annual report here: http://www.1af.acc.af.mil/shared/media/document/afd-100408-038.pdf

Some highlights:
1.  Total missions dropped by over half and incidents (no fed resource deployed) also declined significantly.  No surprise that this is a result in a big drop in ELT missions.

2.  As you might predict, the number of ELT missions that turn out to be distress mission has increased from 7% to 24%.  Interestingly, the % that are non-distress is a little bit higher.  Seems like the biggest decline in ELT missions are those that ceased before being found.  So, the upshot is that we're having fewer ELT missions, but when we do get called the liklihood that we'll find it has increased and the liklihood that it is a real distress mission has increased by more than 300%.  We need to really start wrapping our heads around the urgency of any ELT mission we get now as 1/4 will be a distress mission.

The number of beacons silenced by CAP is only a third of what it was in 2008, but we still account for about a quarter of all silencing, with maintenace folks still beating us out (presumably they were called by AFRCC.).


CAP has dropped   to only 90% of AFRCC taskings.

AZ Wing got credit for 61 saves? Seems like somethign that we would have done a little publicity on, don't you think?

[SarDragon]

That AZ figure's gotta be a typo.

[sardak]

I think the 61 saves comes from this mission: http://www.1af.acc.af.mil/news/story.asp?id=123182528
"AFRCC aids in AZ search for 55 stranded people"
AFRCC personnel responded Dec. 10 by coordinating aircraft from the Arizona Civil Air Patrol to overfly the Flagstaff area and search for the missing individuals.

"The Civil Air Patrol spotted eight of the stranded individuals and were able to help redirect ground crews to their locations," said Senior Airman Christopher Uppling, AFRCC search and rescue controller.

In total, 54 stranded individuals were rescued while one person was found deceased.

Find and save totals also included those credited to Justin Ogden, the cell phone forensics analyst. COWG was credited with finds and saves for Guy Loughridge's work on radar analysis. At some time during the year those wings stopped receiving credit for the cell phone and radar missions because Justin and Guy are considered national resources.
****
A change involving AFRCC and SAR at the national level occurred last November when the Inland SAR Coordinator position was transferred from the Air Force to NORTHCOM. As part of this, NORTHCOM replaced USAF as the lead DoD agency for ESF 9. This is reflected in the the SAR chain of command shown in the reports:
2008 (page 4) AFRCC -> AFNORTH -> ACC
2009 (page 4) AFRCC -> AFNORTH -> NORTHCOM

Mike

[tdepp]

^^Didn't Justin also help find the missing North Dakota college students this past winter who had driven into a lake?  Pretty amazing work by both he and Guy.  What great resources and people!