HAMNET, the Ama­teur Radio Emer­gency Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Organ­i­sa­tion for South Africa has con­clud­ed its involve­ment in a cross-bor­der Search & Res­cue oper­a­tion for a miss­ing aircraft.
A South African light air­craft, on a flight from Malawi on 28th Octo­ber to Lanse­ria air­port in South Africa, failed to make reg­u­lar radio con­tact over Mozam­bique. The South African Air Res­cue Con­trol Cen­tre (ARCC) was advised and request­ed to assist. HAMNET received a call on Mon­day 29th Octo­ber from the ARCC ask­ing for com­mu­ni­ca­tions sup­port between Tam­bo Air­port in Johan­nes­burg and Beira in Mozam­bique to assist with the co-ordi­na­tion of the search efforts and the request went out to HAMNET mem­bers to form a team to trav­el to Beira and pro­vide a HF com­mu­ni­ca­tions link between the two coun­tries using fre­quen­cies in the 30m and 20m bands.
After get­ting all the equip­ment togeth­er, the team left for Beira on Tues­day morn­ing and with­in an hour of their arrival and excel­lent com­mu­ni­ca­tions link was set up between the search base in Mozam­bique and the author­i­ties O R Tam­bo air­port. Aside from mes­sage traf­fic, the link was kept active every 15 min­utes between 08:00 and 18:30 with few QRM dif­fi­cul­ties on the inter­na­tion­al­ly agreed Emer­gency Cen­tre of Activ­i­ty fre­quen­cies. This was a relief giv­en the oper­a­tions in Region 2 sup­port­ing the response to Hur­ri­cane Sandy in the USA.
Sad­ly the search for the miss­ing plane and its occu­pants was unsuc­cess­ful and was scaled back on Sat­ur­day 3rd Novem­ber. The ARCC team met with the fam­i­ly on Sun­day and there is a pos­si­bil­i­ty that through Diplo­mat­ic chan­nels, the fam­i­ly will con­tin­ue the search on a pri­vate basis.
The HAMNET team has now returned home and a full debrief will take place short­ly. While the out­come of the search was not what any­one would like, the abil­i­ty of ama­teur radio to deliv­er crit­i­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tions to where it is need­ed was proven again and the ARCC were very hap­py with the ser­vices provided.
— Greg Mossop, G0DUB IARU Region 1 Emer­gency Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Co-Ordinator.