Search and rescue operation involving marine beacon still a mystery

An emergency marine call that sent two Hercules aircraft from CFB Greenwood to the mid-Atlantic on Friday continues to be a mystery.

On Friday afternoon, the Joint Rescue Co-ordination Centre in Halifax responded after an emergency beacon carried by vessels was activated 1,670 kilometres east of St. John's, N.L., and 780 kilometres from the coast of the Azores.

Search crews didn't find any signs of a ship in distress and officials called off the search Saturday afternoon after about 24 hours. 

On Sunday, the centre's Maj. Martell Thompson said they located the beacon but didn't recover it.

• Joint Rescue Coordination Centre fails to find any distressed vessel
• False emergency beacon leads to search and rescue response in Newfoundland
• Search and rescue for false alarms costs millions
• How does an emergency beacon work?

"Until that is completed, we won't be able to definitively say which vessel corresponds to that beacon. We've searched  an extensive area and we see no signs of distress."

Though the signal came from quite a distance, it was still within the Halifax search and rescue region, said Maj. Rhonda Stevens of the Joint Rescue and Co-ordination Centre.

'We were holding our breath'

"We didn't find anything, no debris and we turned it over to the security team so they can investigate, figure out how this beacon ended up in the middle of the Atlantic.

"The weather in the area wasn't great, there were some pretty high seas. It turned out it was just the beacon."

Emergency beacons can be installed in a variety of places aboard vessels, from life rafts to wheelhouses.

How the one that activated Friday's extensive search operation ended up overboard remains unclear.

"We don't have the answers for that right now. So that's for the beacon registry folks along with the security folks and intelligence folks as to how the beacon ended up in the mid-Atlantic, and becoming activated," Stevens said.

The Halifax Search and Rescue Region covers all four Atlantic provinces, eastern half of Quebec, southern half of Baffin Island and the northwestern quadrant of the Atlantic Ocean — about 4.7 million square kilometres.

Stevens said the section of ocean crews scanned borders with Portugal's search area. Waves in that area can be between seven and eight metres this time of year. 

Search crews were relieved there was no emergency, she said. 

"We were holding our breath until the aircraft got on scene to see what we were actually going to find, especially that distance out. Some of the challenging sea states that are out there this time of year... so it was quite challenging."

Ships in area joined search

The search operation that pulled in vessels sailing in the area as well as two Portugese aircraft continued Friday night and into Saturday. Two Hercules aircraft from Greenwod were joined by a Casa 295 and a P3 Orion aircraft from Portugal.

"[The ships] responded to the broadcast and conducted a search as well for us," Stevens said. 

"We ran a number of models we have at the joint rescue co-ordination centre that detects drift of objects in the water based on the temperatures, winds and we conducted daylight search as well today and we didn't find anything," Stevens said.

National Defence is responsible for dispatching aircraft and co-ordinating aerial searches at the federal level. There are three search and rescue centres — that work with provincial and municipal governments and volunteers — that handle more than 15,000 calls each year, including hundreds of false alerts.

In 2013, the auditor general published a review of Canada's search and rescue operations.

"We found that the Canadian Forces now analyzes the causes of false alerts," the report observed.

"The Canadian Forces informed us that the number of air and marine false alerts from 2009 to 2012 was about 2,800 out of a total of 3,000 alerts, taking time and resources to resolve."