LAKE OZARK, MISSOURI - The Missouri Wing of the Civil Air Patrol, U.S. Air Force Auxiliary, will be participating in state-wide search and rescue exercise on Saturday, June 21, 2008.

Mission base for the Missouri Wing will be centrally located at the Lee C. Fine Memorial Airport located within the Lake of the Ozarks State Park, Missouri.  Additional staging areas will be near Kansas City, Springfield, and St. Louis.  The St. Louis staging area will be at the Midwest Aviation Center at Spirit of St. Louis Airport in Chesterfield, Missouri. 

Using techniques similar to those demonstrated in last year's search for missing adventurer Steve Fossett, the Missouri Wing will participate in the following training tasks:

•·        Aerial damage and assessment photo reconnaissance.

•·        Aircrew and ground team searches for missing aircraft and persons.

•·        State-wide communication drills.

•·        Hyperspectral imaging flights utilizing Civil Air Patrol's Airborne Real-time Cueing Hyperspectral Enhanced Recon (ARCHER) system.

•·        Near real-time satellite digital imaging flights utilizing Civil Air Patrol's Satellite Digital Imaging System (SDIS).

•·        Use of the National Incident Command System (ICS) for command and control.

The Missouri Wing of the Civil Air Patrol is composed of over 1,000 members organized in forty-three Squadrons located throughout the state.  Formal search and rescue training exercises are held on a regular basis several times each year.  

The Civil Air Patrol was founded on December 1, 1941, less than a week before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor brought the U.S. into World War II. CAP, the official auxiliary of the U.S. Air Force, is a nonprofit organization with more than 56,000 members nationwide. CAP performs 95 percent of inland search and rescue missions, as tasked by the Air Force Rescue Coordination Center, and was credited by the AFRCC with saving 103 lives in 2007. Its volunteers also perform homeland security, disaster relief and counterdrug missions at the request of federal, state and local agencies. Members play a leading role in aerospace education and serve as mentors to the almost 22,000 young people currently participating in the CAP Cadet program.

Civil Air Patrol has been performing missions for America for over 66 years.

To learn more about the Civil Air Patrol, please visit www.gocivilairpatrol.com (CAP National Headquarters' website), or www.mowg.cap.gov (Missouri Wing website).

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Media Inquiries

Maj. David A. Miller, CAP

Mission Information Officer

314-623-0831 Cellular

314-966-8300 Office

314-988-6782 Pager

Maj. Eric Jensen, CAP

Exercise Coordinator

573-286-0458 Cellular