South Dakota Civil Air Patrol to hold State-Wide Training Exercise Saturday

South Dakota Wing, Civil Air Patrol, will hold a state-wide training exercise Saturday, March 12. It will be a distributed Search and Rescue Exercise (SAREX) with operating bases with local ground and air sorties coordinated from an Incident Command Post in Sioux Falls.

“South Dakota Wing continually trains for the kinds of missions we perform for the Air Force and other federal, state, tribal and local agencies,” said Col. Michael Marek, CAP’s incident commander for the exercise. “The lessons we have learned from the COVID era about long-distance collaboration have enhanced our ability to launch mission sorties from multiple locations and integrate incident staff who are not all in a central location.”

The aims of this SAREX are two-fold: to hone the skills of aircraft search crews and ground search teams in advanced search and rescue techniques and procedures; and, to exercise command post personnel in operating in a virtual environment. Several exercise scenarios will be played, such as locating a simulated aircraft crash and rescue those onboard, photograph simulated flooding along the Vermillion River and simulated blizzard damage to local and state infrastructure.