ANCHORAGE, Alaska – Alaska Shield’s mission of teamwork among federal agencies reached out to nearly every emergency responder in the 49th state … even a volunteer group of citizen pilots.
The Alaska Wing of Civil Air Patrol flew a reconnaisance mission over the Alaska Pipeline Tuesday, mapping it with its ARCHER system.
CAP is the U.S. Air Force auxiliary, a nonprofit volunteer organization with more than 59,000 members. They are pilots and observers performing 95 percent of search and rescue missions in the U.S.
“Alaska’s state emergency control center requested we fly the pipeline and use ARCHER to detect any threats or anomalies,” said Jim McCarthy, an official with the Alaska Wing.
The system, Airborne Real-time Cueing Hyperspectral Enhanced Reconnaisance, uses a camera on the bottom fuselage of the CAP airplane to record constant images of the terrain. The camera is able to detect objects that are significantly different from the background, such as an airplane or lost hiker.
“This imaging allows us to detect objects as small as a meter from a half a mile up in the air,” said Lt. Col. Stuart Goering of Alaska Wing. “We get the imaging in real time in low resolution color or high res black and white.”
Goering was preparing to format a portable 500 gigabyte hard drive for the pipeline mission at Anchorage’s Merrill Field. The CAP mission crew included Goering and Maj. John Wahl as the observers with pilots Col. Skip Widtfeldt and 1st Lt. Don Stendingh.
“We prefer to fly ARCHER missions with two pilots and two observers,” Widtfeldt said. “There’s a lot of chatter between us to keep the aircraft stable and on path to record what we’re flying over.”
ARCHER has many applications to keep CAP aircraft in the air: search and rescue, drug interdiction, border patrol and remote area mapping, Goering said.
Cooperative efforts like this mission is part of Alaska Shield/Northern Edge, the state’s portion of Ardent Sentry/Northern Edge, a national level training exercise designed for multiple government and private agencies to work together in response to an emergency.