The National Radar Analysis Team does not hoist wreckage, extricate pilots, or stand on Thorodin Mountain. It examines radar. In less than 10 days, that was sufficient for the Air Force Rescue Coordination Center to attach five official lives to a 10-member volunteer cell, a yield that treats a tracking location map as the moral equivalent of a hoist.
AFRCC asked the team to fix the positions of a U.S. Army Black Hawk that had gone down on a training exercise out of Buckley Space Force Base and a hand-built experimental aircraft that had failed to complete a local flight in Jackson County, W.Va. Neither was transmitting Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast data. Both were, after some staring at raw returns, findable. Local authorities then walked to the indicated terrain and discovered occupants still using it.
A Suspicious Track From Saturday Afternoon
The West Virginia problem opened with an error in the alert. The experimental aircraft was reported missing at 3 a.m. Aug. 16 after a flight from Jackson County Airport the previous afternoon. The departure date and time were wrong. There was no ADS-B. Lt. Col. Mark Young and 1st Lt. Joe Ashworth therefore did what the mission required: they started looking back in time.
Ashworth found a Saturday afternoon track with no valid Mode-C and thus no altitude, which is the radar equivalent of knowing an airplane was somewhere and declining to say how high. “The parameters matched what we are looking for,” said Lt. Col. John Henderson, the team’s commander, a standard that in this instance meant a radar track of a missing experimental airplane in the county where an experimental airplane was missing.
The team passed a map to AFRCC, which passed it to local law enforcement, which found the wreckage. The pilot — the only person aboard — had neck and back injuries, was trapped under his own aircraft, and had to be extricated, nearly 20 hours after the flight likely ended. AFRCC recorded this as one save.
Four Saves for the Easier Helicopter
The Black Hawk was easier, Henderson’s account allows, which did not prevent it from generating four times the credit. Henderson, Young, and Ashworth used raw radar and the team’s improved low-altitude tracking tools and produced a map of the whole track within 10 minutes of AFRCC’s call. Authorities found the helicopter of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment on the east side of Thorodin Mountain in Gilpin County, just outside Denver. Four soldiers were rescued within 45 minutes of impact.
AFRCC credited the team with four more saves. In Civil Air Patrol arithmetic, an easier helicopter with four soldiers is a better mission than a harder experimental airplane with one man under it. The maps were the same species of product.
The Ledger Since 2009
“The time from notification to rescue is what saves lives,” Henderson said. “Our team can usually deliver actionable data within minutes.” The Colorado map arrived in 10 minutes. The West Virginia pilot arrived closer to 20 hours. Both are now lives. The doctrine is speed; the unit of account is flexible.
Since 2009 the team has participated in nearly 1,100 missing aircraft missions. Over 650 of the aircraft have been found. Only 114 saved lives have been recorded. The bulk of the work, in other words, has been the careful location of airframes that were not going to start again.
The 10 members have Air Force and Federal Aviation Administration backgrounds and provide the forensic service at no cost, which is the Civil Air Patrol phrase for doing it unpaid, with radar, ADS-B, uAvionix ADS-B, real-time weather, and a save column that must, on the rare days it moves, be made to move by five.