Even a fire usually left no burn mark.īy the time Saunders arrived, scores of servicemen had been lost.

When an airplane hit the jungle canopy, the trees opened up, the machine dropped in and the trees closed back over with nary a dent in the foliage. Saunders knew from his WWII experience in Burma that finding downed aircraft in jungles could be difficult. Saunders arrived at Tan Son Nhut Air Base near Saigon in June 1963 to work at Detachment 3, Pacific Air Rescue Center. Even if the Air Force had been willing to send SAR aircraft to Vietnam, Air Rescue Service equipment was woefully inadequate, suited mostly for firefighting support and rescues near a base.Īir Force Major Alan W. Instead, a handful of assigned rescue coordinators relied on Army helicopters and the CIA’s Air America, neither of which had crews trained for combat SAR. The Air Force was initially reluctant to station dedicated SAR aircraft in Vietnam since their presence would indicate U.S. crews were soon flying combat missions against the Viet Cong. Despite the stated goal of training, U.S. In November 1961, USAF crews began training South Vietnamese pilots in counterinsurgency operations using older aircraft such as North American T-28 trainers and Douglas B-26 bombers. Here, airmen in Korea transfer a patient from an Albatross to a Sikorsky H-5G helicopter. Grumman’s amphibious SA-16B Albatross, developed specifically for SAR missions, began service in the Korean War. Air Rescue Service crews no longer trained for combat conditions and mostly flew support missions following peacetime accidents.

After the war, however, military strategies centered on nuclear weapons, and SAR during a nuclear war seemed ludicrous: There would be no one left to rescue.

Air Force’s Air Rescue Service extracted nearly 1,000 personnel from hostile territory. Search and rescue came of age during the Korean War with the advent of more-capable helicopters and an amphibious aircraft designed specifically for the SAR mission, the Grumman SA-16 Albatross. In the last months of the war, tiny helicopters introduced in the China-Burma-India Theater proved their worth for picking up airmen downed on land. Amphibious aircraft, originally designed for maritime patrol, were repurposed for search and rescue, augmented with pursuit and small liaison airplanes for searching and bombers retrofitted for dropping life rafts and other supplies. military developed rudimentary capabilities to rescue downed aircrew members who ditched in the sea-a scenario that until then had usually amounted to a death sentence. Hampered by inadequate equipment and training, resourceful American aircrews improvised combat search-and-rescue techniques early in the Vietnam War.ĭuring World War II the U.S.

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