The Australian Aerial Patrol is an aerial observation and support service in New South Wales, Australia. It was formed in 1957 following a meeting convened by the City of Greater Wollongong Council, with a charter to maintain the safety and the welfare of the community through aerial observation and support. The Aerial Patrol is available to respond to emergencies 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
The Aerial Patrol operates regular shark spotting and beach safety patrols along the coastline between Palm Beach (north of Sydney) and Mollymook on the New South Wales South Coast. The patrols take place on Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays from October to April and provide recreational safety for swimming, surfing, boating, fishing, bushwalking and other activities, as well as monitoring potential bushfire hazards.
In recent years,[when?] the Aerial Patrol has expanded its service to the south east region of New South Wales and, through its affiliation with the NSW Volunteer Rescue Association, to inland regions of the territory. The patrol is accredited as a specialist agency in accordance with the State Rescue Manual, administered by the NSW Rescue and Emergency Services Board, to assist and support all land- and marine-based emergency services.
In 1993, the Australian Aerial Patrol was accredited by the Civil Aviation Safety Authority as a Search and Rescue (SAR) Unit, which was expanded between 2001 and 2007 to a Tier 1 SAR capability – the highest level of civilian fixed-wing SAR in the Commonwealth and only one of three such organisations at that time. Parallel to that, a working agreement was reached in 1993 between the Aerial Patrol and the Australian Volunteer Coast Guard by the Minister for Emergency Services, the only such agreement between a marine agency and an aerial support agency in Australia.
Funding and personnel
The Aerial Patrol, as a Registered Charity, relies entirely on community fundraising programmes to pay for its operational costs, the most successful of which is the promotion of annual raffles over a 20-year period. Four local government bodies within Illawarra and Shoalhaven provide funding towards the operations, as well as a regional sponsorship by the Bendigo Bank and support from various clubs and local companies. Furthermore, a number of fundraising campaigns are conducted throughout the year, which together raise the half a million dollars a year required to ensure the continued operation of the service.
Aerial Patrol personnel are volunteers, rostered for duty 365 days a year, during daylight hours only. The air crew consists of commercial pilots, airborne observers, accredited dropmasters / dispatchers, and any time ERS and radio communications officers.
To support its emergency operations, the Aerial Patrol has introduced a commercial department that includes pilot training and aircraft engineering division under the name NSW Air. These have generated successful revenue streams for its community operations. Additionally, the pilot training has streamlined various aspects of the emergency operations through specialised techniques provided via a Commercial training syllabus. The Aerial Patrol is based at the Illawarra Regional Airport at Albion Park south of Sydney.
A coast guard or coastguard is a maritime security organization of a particular country. The term embraces wide range of responsibilities in different countries, from being a heavily armed military force with customs and security duties to being a volunteer organization tasked with search and rescue without law enforcement authority. In most countries, a typical coast guard's functions are distinct from those of the navy and the transit police, while in certain countries has similarities to both.
Search and rescue (SAR) is the search for and provision of aid to people who are in distress or imminent danger. The general field of search and rescue includes many specialty sub-fields, typically determined by the type of terrain the search is conducted over. These include mountain rescue; ground search and rescue, including the use of search and rescue dogs; urban search and rescue in cities; combat search and rescue on the battlefield and air-sea rescue over water.
Mountain rescue refers to search and rescue activities that occur in a mountainous environment, although the term is sometimes also used to apply to search and rescue in other wilderness environments. This tends to include mountains with technical rope access issues, snow, avalanches, ice, crevasses, glaciers, alpine environments and high altitudes. The difficult and remote nature of the terrain in which mountain rescue often occurs has resulted in the development of a number of specific pieces of equipment and techniques. Helicopters are often used to quickly extract casualties, and search dogs may be deployed to find a casualty.
A volunteer fire department (VFD) is a fire department of volunteers who perform fire suppression and other related emergency services for a local jurisdiction. Volunteer and retained (on-call) firefighters are expected to be on call to respond to emergency calls for long periods of time, and are summoned to the fire station when their services are needed. They are also expected to attend other non-emergency duties as well.
Her Majesty's Coastguard (HMCG) is a section of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency responsible, through the Secretary of State for Transport to Parliament, for the initiation and co-ordination of all maritime search and rescue (SAR) within the UK Maritime Search and Rescue Region. This includes the mobilisation, organisation and tasking of adequate resources to respond to persons either in distress at sea, or to persons at risk of injury or death on the cliffs or shoreline of the United Kingdom. It is also responsible for land based search and rescue helicopter operations from 2015.
The New South Wales Police Force is the primary law enforcement agency of the state of New South Wales, Australia. Divided into Police Area Commands (PACs), for metropolitan areas and Police Districts (PDs), for regional and country areas, the NSW Police Force consists of more than 400 Police stations and over 18,000 officers, who are responsible for covering an area of 801,600 square kilometres and a population of more than 8.2 million people.
The VRA Rescue NSW (VRA) is an Australian organisation of volunteer members, they provide rescue to the communities across New South Wales. The first rescue squads, with the assistance of NSW Police formed the Volunteer Rescue Association, groups with common charters can become an affiliate of the Association.
CHC Helicopter is a large helicopter services company, specializing in the following services:
Responsibilities for traditional coast guard duties in Australia are distributed across various federal, state and community agencies. The de facto coast guard of Australia is the Maritime Border Command, a joint command of the Australian Defence Force and the Australian Border Force which works alongside the Australian Federal Police, the Australian Fisheries Management Authority, and the Australian Maritime Safety Authority. Each state and territory government have specific maritime safety agencies and police marine units. In addition, there are several private volunteer coast guard organisations which act as auxiliary search and rescue services and maritime safety educators with the largest organisations being the Royal Volunteer Coastal Patrol established in 1937, the Australian Volunteer Coast Guard established in 1961, and Marine Rescue New South Wales established in 2009.
WIRES Wildlife Rescue is the largest wildlife rescue & rehabilitation charity in Australia. It is a non-profit organisation providing rescue and rehabilitation for all native Australian fauna. All animal rescuers and carers are volunteers. It is funded by public donations and operates throughout the most populous Australian state, New South Wales.
The South Australian Country Fire Service is a volunteer based fire service in the Australian state of South Australia. The CFS has responsibility as the Control Agency for firefighting and hazardous materials and inland waterways in the country regions of South Australia. Its official mission is "To protect life, property and the environment from fire and other emergencies whilst protecting and supporting our personnel and continuously improving."
The New South Wales Rural Fire Service is a volunteer-based firefighting agency and statutory body of the Government of New South Wales.
Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) is an Australian statutory authority responsible for the regulation and safety oversight of Australia's shipping fleet and management of Australia's international maritime obligations. The authority has jurisdiction over Australia's exclusive economic zone which covers an area of 11,000,000 square kilometres (4,200,000 sq mi). AMSA maintains Australia's shipping registries: the general and the international shipping registers.
Fire and Rescue New South Wales, an agency of the Government of New South Wales, Australia, is responsible for firefighting, rescue and HazMat services in the major cities, metropolitan areas and towns across New South Wales. Fire and Rescue NSW is the fourth largest urban fire service in the world, with over 6,800 firefighters serving at 335 fire stations throughout the state, supported by 465 administrative and trades staff and 5,700 community fire unit volunteers. FRNSW are also the busiest fire service in Australia, attending over 124,000 incidents a year.
The Westpac Lifesaver Rescue Helicopter Service is a helicopter surf lifesaving service that operates in Australia.
Surf Life Saving Australia (SLSA) is an Australian not-for-profit community organisation that promotes water safety and provides surf rescue services.
Explorer Search and Rescue (ESAR) are teams of Explorers in the Learning for Life program of the Boy Scouts of America who are trained and deployed for search and rescue missions. Well-developed ESAR programs emerged in the state of Washington in the mid-1950s and were followed by others in California and elsewhere. The rugged, mountainous terrain of these areas often require massive amounts of manpower for proper searches for missing people, not to mention their rescue and evacuation from remote areas. The ESAR mission has also expanded over the years to include urban search and rescue and other disaster-related disciplines. Many ESAR groups also provide wilderness safety training to the public.
The New South Wales State Emergency Service, an agency of the Government of New South Wales, is an emergency and rescue service dedicated to assisting the community in times of natural and man-made disasters. The NSW SES is made up almost entirely of volunteer members, numbering over 10,214 as of July 2021. Members are easily identified by their distinctive orange overalls.
NSW SES Bush Search and Rescue (previously known as Bush Search and Rescue NSW, Bushwalkers Wilderness Rescue Squad and Bushwalkers Search and Rescue is a remote and rugged area land search and rescue service in New South Wales, Australia established on 27 November 1936. NSW SES Bush Search and Rescue is a wholly volunteer operated, specialist squad of the NSW State Emergency Service.
Air medical services is a comprehensive term covering the use of air transportation, aeroplane or helicopter, to move patients to and from healthcare facilities and accident scenes. Personnel provide comprehensive prehospital and emergency and critical care to all types of patients during aeromedical evacuation or rescue operations aboard helicopter and propeller aircraft or jet aircraft.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
