Civil Air Search and Rescue Association - Manitoba

Welcome to Zone 1

CASARA Winnipeg Zone operates from St Andrews Airport, 10 miles north of Winnipeg. We have about 100 members, of whom about 40 are certified to participate in searches. We use the CASARA Provincial Training Centre as our base.

CASARA Winnipeg responds to requests from the Canadian Forces Joint Rescue Co-ordination Centre, and from provincial RCMP. We fly privately owned or rented airplanes, mostly Cessna 172s or 182s, on searches. We also sometimes place spotters on the CF CC-130 Hercules aircraft. On the Herc, we can deploy on searches anywhere in the Trenton Search and Rescue Region. Since April 2005, we have had spotters in the Hercs on searches in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario - Moosonee and Sault Ste Marie - the North West Territories, and Nunavut.

CASARA Winnipeg also carries out flying exercises about twice a month to practise search skills. We have regular exercises to find emergency locator transmitters (ELTs), missing people, and airplanes, as different skills are needed for each search object. We hold regular ground training sessions as well, on subjects like use of the E6B flight computer, spotting from the Hercules, and first aid.

Part of CASARA’s mandate is the promotion of aviation safety. We host an annual pilots’ refresher session that is open to the aviation community. We participate in open houses and fly-ins within our zone, where we demonstrate signalling methods and other survival techniques. We offer a winter survival course in co-operation with local aviation agencies.

For more information about CASARA Winnipeg, please contact the zone commander at casara@mts.net

Contact the webmaster: airsar@casaraman.org

Last modified: May 31, 2008