CHESTERFIELD, Mo. – The Missouri Wing of the Civil Air Patrol, U.S. Air Force Auxiliary, will be participating in a state-wide search and rescue exercise on Saturday, June 23, 2012.

Mission base for the Missouri Wing will be located at the Branson West Municipal – Emerson Field Airport in Branson, Missouri.  Additional staging areas will be at the Sedalia Memorial Airport in Sedalia, Missouri; and Spirit of St. Louis Airport in Chesterfield, Missouri.

Volunteers from across the state will participate in the following training tasks:

· Aerial damage and assessment photo reconnaissance, including critical infra-structure evaluation.

· 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.

· Real-time full motion video imaging flights utilizing Civil Air Patrol’s Geospatial Information Interoperability Exploitation - Portable (GIIEP) 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 over forty units located throughout the state.  Formal disaster relief and search and rescue training exercises are held on a regular basis several times each year.  

Civil Air Patrol, the official auxiliary of the U.S. Air Force, is a nonprofit organization with more than 61,000 members nationwide, operating a fleet of 550 aircraft. CAP, in its Air Force auxiliary role, performs 90 percent of continental U.S. inland search and rescue missions as tasked by the Air Force Rescue Coordination Center and was credited by the AFRCC with saving 54 lives in fiscal year 2011. Its volunteers also perform homeland security, disaster relief and drug interdiction missions at the request of federal, state and local agencies. The members play a leading role in aerospace education and serve as mentors to nearly 27,000 young people currently participating in the CAP cadet programs. CAP received the World Peace Prize in 2011 and also participates in Wreaths Across America, an initiative to remember, honor and teach about the sacrifices of U.S. military veterans.

Civil Air Patrol has been performing missions for America for over 70 years.

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