Defence Team News | Search and rescue without borders
Video / August 26, 2026
Transcript
Spokespeople
Major Matt Sinasac
Detachment Commander, 413 Squadron
ASAREX stands for the Advanced Search and Rescue Exercise. It's an exercise that's been running for 14 years now, run out of the Azores. It's got participants from Spain, Portugal, Canada, the US typically, and some other nations at times, and the point of this exercise is all these nations have Atlantic region search and rescue responsibility, and it's about interoperability and cooperation with those nations - sharing experience, sharing best practices, and learning how to work together.
So this year we're going to be doing a few different scenarios, all with a maritime nexus to them. We've got a vessel in distress or a stricken vessel scenario, which would just be a boat offshore taking on water and we have to intervene and help rescue it. We also have some cliff rescue scenarios simulating paragliders colliding with a cliff where we would deploy SAR (search and recue) techs to help them. We also are running some person in the water scenarios, you know, as though people had fallen off of boats or life rafts or things of that nature and looking for them and then rescuing them witha number of different assets.
So search and rescue by nature is international. Borders basically fade away when it comes to a rescue mission, and because the Atlantic is divided up into a number of different search and rescue regions, it's very important that we learn how to operate with other countries that cover these regions so when the time comes, we can work smoothly and effectively to execute a rescue.