Last weekend, Adventure Girl and I attended our first search and rescue exercise as members of the Civil Air Patrol. While I obviously can’t speak to any organizational lessons learned, I do think it’s useful to conduct a personal After Action Report (AAR) and list a few of the personal lessons that I learned for future improvements.
- Mission Base is a BYOD area. Don’t get me wrong, there were enough Wing equipment laptops to cover anyone without their own computer, but bringing your own gear is definitely preferable if you’re going to be on the base side of the equation. Pretty much every experienced individual had a personal laptop that they used for mission needs.
- Prequalifications matter. I didn’t end up doing one of the main tasks I had hoped to do, because I misunderstood when the prequalification process would happen. That’s on me to push harder to get these things done. That said…
- Be flexible for the sake of the mission. I may not have gotten to do what I want, but I did end up in a good place to help meet the overall needs of the mission. That’s an important thing to keep in mind. In a real SAR situation, there’s no place for egos and “But I’m not a Whatever.” When lives are on the line and seconds count, the mission should always come first. Train to that standard as well.
- My gear needs some serious improvement. I should probably be grateful that I wasn’t being graded on ground team standards, because my “24-hour pack” wouldn’t have been sustainable for anywhere close to 24 hours. On the plus side, I finally found the standards for these things.
So what are my next steps? Given that I eventually want to qualify on both air and ground search operations, Step 1 is going to be to focus on knocking out my relevant prequalifications for each of those things. One of the neat things about CAP is the philosophy that “everyone teaches”, so I’ll probably be getting an education from some of the cadets who’ve got several years of SAR team training under their belts already. Step 2 is going to be a full gear review and putting together a proper 24-hour bag for both myself and Adventure Girl. Optimally for me, some of those items would then be duplicated into my flight bag so that I don’t have to remember to swap things between bags depending on what mission team I’m with.
Onward and upward!