Originally Posted by
UnreliableSource
Anyone with SAR experience care to talk about the number of rubbish or other objects that are identified as not relevant to a search in open waters?
On land, a crashed aircraft looks like a rubbish dump on a farm. Sadly, there are lots of rubbish dumps. In land searches each search aircraft might further investigate (eg circle) 1-2 candidate crash sites per hour. 99.something percent of these are just dumped rubbish.
Over water off the Australian east coast, I did not see many items in the water.
In my experience: over land a search observer is constantly seeing stuff and deciding not to call it out because it does not meet some threshold of likelihood. Over water everyone is so "weary" that everything gets called out. "Weary" isn't quite the right word, there is a structure and discipline to observing from an aircraft without missing things. Observing is a tiring thing to do, especially when you see nothing.
^^ accurate post. To be able to get 'eyes' on anything in rough ocean conditions and be able to differentiate 'something' from 'nothing' requires two conditions...the aircraft needs to be close to the surface (< 2000ft AMSL) and even then the observer needs to be switched on! The seas in the Southern Ocean are equal to the roughest anywhere (Google 'roaring 40's'..), so swells/white caps/breakers are constantly in the line of vision. Aircraft paintwork is predominantly white...this does not assist.
Having said that, anything that is 20+ meters long would certainly be spotted on the first pass.