The first civilian helicopter rescue plucked five men off a sinking barge in 1945
On 29 November 1945 a Sikorsky R-5, flown by the company's chief pilot Dmitry Viner with an experimental hoist, lifted all five crew from an oil barge stranded on Penfield Reef before it went down. It was the first civilian helicopter rescue, and modern search and rescue grew around such tools.
Search and rescue covers any effort to find and help people in danger, and it splits by terrain: mountains, caves, open land, cities, battlefields and the sea. Agencies define it differently. The United States Department of Defense separates the two halves neatly, treating the search as the job of locating people, usually run from a rescue coordination centre, and the rescue as retrieving them, meeting their first medical needs and bringing them to safety.
Organised efforts go back centuries. After the Dutch merchant ship Vergulde Draeck was wrecked off the west coast of Australia in 1656, survivors went for help and three separate missions set out, none of them successful. Failure still happens at modern scale. When Air France Flight 447 vanished over the mid-Atlantic in July 2009, only a third expedition nearly two years later found the wreck and its flight recorders, and by 2014 the hunt for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 had become the largest search of its kind.
Specialisms have multiplied. Urban teams, sometimes called heavy urban search and rescue, extract people from collapsed buildings and are trained to handle live wires and ruptured gas lines; earthquakes are their traditional call-out, though storms and attacks also summon them. Smaller units handle swift water, thin ice, confined spaces or rope work, and robots are being designed to enter underground mines too dangerous for human rescuers.
National systems vary widely. Australia's Joint Rescue Coordination Centre runs a round-the-clock hub in Canberra and oversees a zone of 52.8 million square kilometres, about 11% of the planet's surface, while some volunteer groups there search on horseback. Canada logs roughly 7,000 marine and humanitarian incidents a year; its Coast Guard Auxiliary, with more than 4,000 volunteers and over 1,000 boats, answers about a quarter of them. At sea, the duty to help is written into Article 98 of the UN law of the sea convention.
Source: Search and rescue
