Photo By Capt. Charles Baxter | Air crew members from the 1st Battalion, 137th Aviation Regiment, 185th Theater...... read more read more
NORTH ARABIAN GULF – After more than two months of planning and preparation aircrews from the 1st Battalion, 137th Aviation Regiment, 185th Theater Aviation Brigade executed search and rescue training in the North Arabian Gulf, Aug. 24. The training event was significant in that U.S. Army Aviation personnel had the opportunity to deploy a life raft in a realistic scenario where a simulated downed aircrew dropped off rescue boats in the North Arabian Gulf.
The training was designed to mitigate risks and provide familiarization with the life rafts that are carried onboard UH-60 Black Hawks to conduct overwater missions in support of U.S. Navy Central Command. Chief Warrant Officer 4 Bart Carter, 185th Theater Aviation Brigade, Tactical Operations and Personnel Recovery Officer, was one of the lead planners for the event.
“Originally our medical evacuation unit was doing overwater hoist operations as part of the search and rescue plan for the brigade,” said Carter.
As a secondary plan to using the hoist to recover downed aircrews in the North Arabian Gulf, the UH-60 MEDEVAC aircraft would drop a raft for the surviving members of the crew. “We wanted to actually see how this plan would be implemented so we asked the unit to show us how they would do it,” said Carter.
However, this presented a number of challenges. The most salient challenge was that each life raft costs approximately $10,000 and, once it is deployed, it has to be sent back to the manufacturer to be properly repacked.
As in any military training, there was a necessity to do a “crawl, walk, run” approach prior to actually executing the training in the North Arabian Gulf. This meant they would need enough rafts to conduct training in a controlled environment, in this case a swimming pool, before deploying the rafts in the gulf.
In the “crawl” phase the aircrews participated in the academic portion of the training. “Nobody knew how this raft was going to work so for safety purposes we had our subject matter expert for Aviation Life Support equipment (ALSE) show everyone involved in the training the features of the raft as well as how to operate it,” Carter said. As Carter and Chief Warrant Officer 5 Donny Dukes, Brigade Tactical Operations Officer, began planning for the second phase of the training at the swimming pool they realized there was not a great deal of information available on how the life raft actually would deploy once in the water. They were unsuccessful in getting any substantive training products from the manufacturer with respect to actually deploying the life rafts.
“Everybody had their ideas about how this raft would act once it hit the water, but no one really knew,” Carter said.
After a short training event where aircrews practiced using there aviation life support equipment in conjunction with fully deploying the life rafts in a swimming pool,
the planners from the 185th Theater Aviation Brigade shifted their focus to the more realistic scenario in the North Arabian Gulf.
With assistance from the 411th and 97th Transportation Detachments, the 185th Theater Aviation Brigade was able to conduct this training in a maritime environment utilizing vessels that are organic to U.S. Army Central Command.
Utilizing one Logistical Cargo Vessel and one Logistical Supply Vessel, the aircrews were able deploy the rafts at approximately 10 Kilometers off Kuwait’s shoreline. The vessels enabled Soldiers from throughout the brigade to witness how a search and rescue mission might take place in the event an aircraft went down during an overwater mission.
As the training wrapped up, all the personnel involved in the event conducted an after action review to capture the lessons learned. “The more and more training that we have done with the life rafts, the more we know how to use this tool- it could actually save someone’s life,” said Dukes.
The training provided insight into the various features available on the raft, which includes hand pumps, patch kits, and survival kits as well as methods and techniques for the crews to use while they wait on a raft to be dropped to them.
The tactical operations officers from the 185th Theater Aviation Brigade want to continue to build on this training and are even planning a more comprehensive scenario in the near term.
“In the next iteration of this training we are going to involve the Joint Personnel Recovery Center, U.S. Navy Central, and the Coast Guard,” Carter said.
| Date Taken: | 08.31.2015 |
| Date Posted: | 09.19.2015 03:12 |
| Story ID: | 176636 |
| Location: | KUWAIT NAVAL BASE, KW |
| Web Views: | 174 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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