Hello, everyone.
My name is Dale Kirsch. I'm the president of the Civil Air Search and Rescue Association, CASARA, in Canada. CASARA is a Canada-wide, 1,700-member, aviation-based volunteer association. We're dedicated to providing air search support services 24 hours a day, 365 days of the year, primarily to the Royal Canadian Air Force. This includes searches for downed aircraft. Recently, we've been doing more humanitarian efforts, and we help promote Canada’s search and rescue program across Canada.
Our volunteer makeup includes search-and-rescue-trained pilots of civilian aircraft and remotely piloted drones—RPAS units. We also provide navigators, spotters and other various key roles in our organization.
Since 1986, our challenge is to provide search support services for Canadians that cover the entire approximately 9.985 million square kilometres of our nation. However, our operations provide a large economic benefit for Canada through our lower-cost, quick-response, aviation-based organization.
For example, one of the RCAF’s CC-130H Hercules can cost approximately $13,000 per hour to operate versus our cost of around $250 per hour to operate a small aircraft that can have a full search crew up in the air in a fraction of the time that it can take the military.
Our membership is spread out into each member organization, which we call MOs, of our association. We have one MO per province and territory across Canada to run our search operations. This allows us to be prevalent in each section of Canada, including the large and vast northern areas like the Yukon, Northwest Territories and Nunavut.
For example, this past summer we had various member trainings in the north conducted by our MOs and the RCAF for upkeep and readiness, which included Gjoa Haven, located far north in Nunavut above the Arctic Circle on King William Island.
In 1986, CASARA was incorporated and formed as a national association. The directors of the provincial and territorial associations met in Ottawa with representatives of the two federal departments that were sponsoring CASARA: the Department of National Defence and the Department of Transport. All parties signed the agreement that listed the support that the federal government would provide to the association and what the association would provide in return.
From there, we have continuously provided search support and have explored innovative ways to be more effective, expanding our capabilities and looking at different ways that we can be of service to the RCAF and the rest of Canada.
For example, our most recent activities include being at the forefront of implementing remotely piloted aircraft systems, RPAS—or drones—in search and rescue. Paired with Loc8 imaging/video software and other third party applications, we now have another method for us to be effective at meeting the needs of various search conditions: by embracing and adapting new technologies into the world of search and rescue.
That being said as an overview of who we are and what we do, a more detailed showcase of our organization and other related information about us can be found on our website at www.casara.ca.
Thank you.