Originally Posted by
Uplinker
I am fairly sure that pigeons were tried out for search and rescue at one time? They apparently could be trained to spot life-boats or whatever in the sea, and were placed in a glass bowl under SAR aircraft and could indicate if they spotted something?
There was a time the North Sea offshore industry switched from orange survival suits to bright pink ones. The rationale for switching away from the orange ones was consideration of the post-Piper Alpha search-and-rescue results where there was so much orange debris in the water that it was difficult for the SAR aircraft and vessels to determine what was trash and what was humans. The reason to move to the bright pink ones came from these US studies where they placed some trained pigeons in the cockpit of some long-range aircraft (I think it was P-3 Orion) and watched for which colour of target the pigeons were able to detect at greatest ranges. (Trained pigeons, random courses, various weathers and lighting conditions, equal sized raft targets at sea). Dayglo pink it was. A little bit of further study confirmed that pigeon vision was sufficiently similar to human vision, and the end result was we all got stuffed into bright pink survival suits.