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Coast Guard concerns after rescue

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Coast Guard concerns after rescue

Old 28th Aug 2020, 07:27
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Coast Guard concerns after rescue

https://connachttribune.ie/coast-gua...iracle-rescue/


A review is underway to assess the Irish Coast Guard’s operation in the heroic rescue of two young women in Galway Bay two weeks ago – with questions remaining over how the pair were missed by aircraft searching the area on the night of their disappearance.

Speaking to the Galway City Tribune, a retired Coast Guard member said it was important that lessons were learned from the search and rescue operation on the Bay in the early hours of August 13 – with the local knowledge and gut instinct of fishermen winning out over technology in ensuring the safe return of Sara Feeney and Ellen Glynn.

While the former Coast Guard operator said it wasn’t a case of criticising the efforts of the committed individuals operating the search, it was important that there was a period of reflection and a consideration of what might be done differently if there was to be a similar search again.

“The elephant in the room, and the question being asked by a lot of seamen is how the Olivers [the fishermen who rescued the two young women] knew to go in that particular direction and found them – and why didn’t the rescue agencies say ‘let’s do that’ earlier,” said the experienced Coast Guard operative.

“It has to be examined if their searching procedures are a little bit too rigid. The software that’s being used is said to be brilliant, but it’s American software so do we need it updated, taking into account the Irish weather and sea conditions?”

After 15 hours in the water, every minute mattered, this person said, and while the Coast Guard might have eventually reached the young women where they were found by the Olivers – clinging to a lobster pot near Inis Oírr – it was healthy and necessary to question why they weren’t found sooner.

The Coast Guard helicopters were fitted with infrared cameras used to find people in the water by picking up body heat, and they made use of high-tech equipment to navigate the search area, but the women had reported the helicopters flying overhead and missing them.

Last edited by Senior Pilot; 28th Aug 2020 at 07:34. Reason: Add quote:then Rotorheads know what you're referring to
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Old 28th Aug 2020, 08:07
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If it is anything like the search program used by the UKCG a few years ago, it was good for open sea drift assessments but was very poor at local and coastal predictions.

You can't blame the crew if they were sent to search the wrong area.
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Old 28th Aug 2020, 08:46
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I flew many SAR missions and we were professionals and very good at it. But I do recall being told that on several occasions when people were eventually found in small boats that they reported that they had been directly overflown at low level by aircraft one or more times on previous days. It is very difficult to spot people using the Mk1 eyeball.
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Old 28th Aug 2020, 08:52
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I wonder how much training time is spent practicing searching c/f rescuing? 'We' were very good at the latter but hardly anyone wanted to practice searching back in the day. Over reliance on technology is also an issue in my opinion, both for search planning and detection reliance.
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Old 28th Aug 2020, 09:04
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You can't blame the crew if they were sent to search the wrong area.
….but the women had reported the helicopters flying overhead and missing them.
I'm not blaming the crew, but if they flew overhead the women then they clearly were in the correct search area....
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Old 28th Aug 2020, 09:19
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Not necessarily, if the helo was transitting to or from a search area, they might not be paying as much attention to the search.
Period of reflection does seem appropriate, kudos to the Oliver's.
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Old 28th Aug 2020, 09:53
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The S&R world has changed markedly since my time. Our equipment was extremely limited , (the only non-military aid was the Automan oxygen set) so the Mk1 eyeball was the primary seach device. The method of keeping them in good working order was the daily 'beach bumble' - a 'patrol' of our coastal patch with a mental note of potential trouble spots, or possible Wx related issues. I suspect that reliance on such things as thermal imaging, (plus the ever-present bean-counters) will have dispensed with such routines. Without good quality eyes, the Station Commander of a large overseas base, in a light blue dinghy without sails or oars, at dusk, would probably have continued his uncontrolled journey in the Med! His gratitude, on being spotted and recovered, was not evident!
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Old 28th Aug 2020, 10:00
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Originally Posted by Momoe
Not necessarily, if the helo was transitting to or from a search area, they might not be paying as much attention to the search.
Period of reflection does seem appropriate, kudos to the Oliver's.
True....interesting how the same statement can be interpreted differently
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Old 28th Aug 2020, 10:45
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Originally Posted by [email protected]
If it is anything like the search program used by the UKCG a few years ago, it was good for open sea drift assessments but was very poor at local and coastal predictions.

You can't blame the crew if they were sent to search the wrong area.
I know one of coxwains of a Scottish lifeboat, he would agree with your statement today Crab. Crews go where the coastguard tell them their part of the search area is.
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Old 28th Aug 2020, 10:58
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The human eye has limitations and so does a thermal imager, especially when it comes to items mainly submerged in water.
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Old 28th Aug 2020, 12:00
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Heights, speeds and track spacings for a search are based on probability of detection - on one search you are not going to get 100% probability unless you search so thoroughly (slowly) and only cover a tiny area with the time/fuel/daylight available.

If they flew directly over the women then it is not a surprise they didn't see them, you tend to look slightly away from the aircraft when visually searching over the sea.

The probability of detection is markedly increased in good weather, with good contrast between what you are looking for and where it is located.

Searching is hard work and humans miss things - you should have regular breaks when searching visually to refocus your eyes and your concentration but the urge to find someone in difficulty frequently overrides that.
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Old 28th Aug 2020, 17:11
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It seems they were searching in the early hours of the morning - not a great time for most humans - but people seem to think that having an infrared camera is a guarantee of finding someone.

The fact that the two women were found clinging to a lobster pot seems to indicate they had no flotation device or survival equipment so if it was just 2 heads in the water in the dark that would be easy to miss, especially if the sea state was anything but calm.

The turrets with the cameras in will doubtless have an autoscan function which, coupled with the correct height and speed settings (we used to use 60 Kts and 500' for a person in the water) would give the operator 3 chances to spot the person as they passed from top to bottom of the screen.

Sounds easy? trouble is that you need good thermal contrast between the object and the background and with just the head visible (and being washed over by waves) that can be very difficult to detect.

The big issue is being able to apply local knowledge to tides and currents - something the local fishermen should be expert at - but if you are only relying on a computer algorithm and database, it might not be specific enough.
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Old 28th Aug 2020, 22:25
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Are we returning to a question about SAR training raised in the thread about the events of March 2017 in Irish SAR?

Do the IRCG operate and train their officers in the same processes HMCG in the U.K. do? Given there was a tender not too long ago to provide aviation related training and knowledge to the IRCG....
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Old 29th Aug 2020, 01:01
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Originally Posted by tu154
I know one of coxwains of a Scottish lifeboat, he would agree with your statement today Crab. Crews go where the coastguard tell them their part of the search area is.
Unfortunately the program HMCG use is massively linked to senior management as an ego project and has no chance of being improved until they move on - as is the case of many things in the MCA, including aviation.

Granted that generating a search area isn’t an easy thing to do, but it could be very much better than it is currently.

I don’t know if the Irish coastguard use the same system.
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Old 29th Aug 2020, 09:37
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Rovertime - thanks for confirming what I thought, ie nothing has changed in the MCA since I last had dealings with them on a professional level.
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Old 29th Aug 2020, 20:58
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Some years ago, I went to a demo and presentation by a local UAV survey company that do a lot of agricultural work. They were using hyperspectral imaging to detect crop condition including specific diseases. That approach used resource-hungry post-processing but it was not difficult to see the potential, as technology marches forwards, for SAR.

Likewise the potential for military use. Being able to identify the location on a battlefield of clothing with materials made in Moscow and clothing with materials made in Minneapolis would have some advantages and there are varied opinions about whether that realtime detection technology exists at this time. Even if it does, a target identity system and a wide-scale SAR system are quite different beasts. It is important to note that this is very much a daylight tool that normally requires the full daylight spectrum to produce the expected signature. (It is not entirely inconceivable that a narrow spectrum programmable floodlight might one day make night searching feasible but that is yet another big tech step away.)

During the intervening years I have sought out manufacturers and academics who are knowledgeable in this area of research and manufacture. The academics tend to be astrophysicists who of course have been using this to tell us what distant stars and planets are made of for some decades. Like the agro-surveys, they have been using resource hungry post-processing and in some cases, rather like the military, they have been focused on a small target area. They make clear that the SAR task would be hampered by the sampling algorithm that would have to be used to bring the data load down to levels that could be dealt with in real-time. So that ends up with any early attempt at this tech in SAR probably having the same disadvantages as Mark One Eyeball: It will scan along certain paths but there will be gaps.

So what might we expect to detect that would make this a useful SAR tool? Well, at sea, the most useful might be the nylon facing materials used on lifejackets and liferafts. One might foresee a time when the IMO might dictate standards that make items easier to detect. Maybe even the Keratin in human hair, assuming that the misper is not bald. On land, most outdoor clothing is specific regions of the world will be made from a small number of compounds not found in the same natural environment.

So the task is to scan a wide area ahead of a search aircraft, pick out areas with an unusual spectral signature, check those against an ordered list of materials that might indicate human presence, calculate location, and alarm appropriately. Not nearly as simple as it sounds. All the bits exist to do this but putting it all together in a manner that produces a good SAR tool requires deep pockets and may well be some years away.

An American project claiming to be able to do all this was around a few years ago. However, it appears that although demos showed some potential, real searches proved too challenging. The fact that the companies involved seem to have disappeared tells a tale. The scanning and sampling rates available with current technology could easily have been the problem.

A few organisations presenting at the ICAR Air Commission have mentioned this technology so it's clear several of us are thinking along the same lines. It has been mentioned to UK MCA Aviation's technical assurance team in the preparatory meetings for their UKSAR2G and they are receptive to such new technology solutions.

Think big!

Ask stupid questions!
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Old 29th Aug 2020, 21:26
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Jim, as valid as your points are - if you don't search in the right area, you won't find what you are looking for.

The problem with the CG search predictor, as I understand it, is that modelling tidal drift and wind effect in open water is quite easy but when you have complex coastal variations and local anomalies, the computer just can;t cope.

I have been on many searches where the search boxes allocated have borne no reality to the situation or the casualty - search boxes for a person in the water which an olympic swimmer couldn't have reached at full pelt.

You can have all the clever search sensor technology you like but if you are looking in the wrong place it won't be any good,.
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Old 30th Aug 2020, 08:30
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Originally Posted by [email protected]
It seems they were searching in the early hours of the morning - not a great time for most humans - but people seem to think that having an infrared camera is a guarantee of finding someone.

The fact that the two women were found clinging to a lobster pot seems to indicate they had no flotation device or survival equipment so if it was just 2 heads in the water in the dark that would be easy to miss, especially if the sea state was anything but calm.

The turrets with the cameras in will doubtless have an autoscan function which, coupled with the correct height and speed settings (we used to use 60 Kts and 500' for a person in the water) would give the operator 3 chances to spot the person as they passed from top to bottom of the screen.

Sounds easy? trouble is that you need good thermal contrast between the object and the background and with just the head visible (and being washed over by waves) that can be very difficult to detect..

Local media report they were on 2 paddle boards tied together so they were out of the water and not just 2 heads bobbing
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Old 30th Aug 2020, 10:01
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Local media report they were on 2 paddle boards tied together so they were out of the water and not just 2 heads bobbing
Ok, that doesn't change much but explains how they were able to survive for so long.

Presumably they were wearing wetsuits so only heads and hands visible to thermal imaging - still not big targets.

The other consideration is that the drift calculations done by the search computer probably deal with a non-propelled craft at the mercy of the wind and tide - adding another unpredictable vector (how long and how hard they were paddling and in which directio) is not something I would expect the algorithms to cope with.

When you are given a search area, you get there quickly but are at your selected height and speed with lookouts (if required) ready as you enter the box. If they were outside the given box, it's not a surprise that they could be missed.
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Old 30th Aug 2020, 10:27
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Paucity of information as to how well they were equipped ,ie LSJ`s,wet/dry suits,did they have their mobiles(in a waterproof bag),which also have torch (probaly not enough credit left)..? ..Are they teenagers,or adults,experienced,or just jollying ...? Lucky that the sea temperature is between 14-16 in that area....
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