In May, the Emilia-Romagna region of northeastern Italy suffered a series of devastating floods which inundated the area and the cities of Bologna, Cesena, Forlì, Faenza, Ravenna and Rimini, resulting in the death of 15 people and displacing a further 50,000.
Thankfully for the affected citizens, the SAR AW139s of the Aeronautica Militare (AM) were on hand to save the day, flying sorties around the clock to rescue as many as possible. Most of the rescues involved extracting people from the upper floors of flooded houses and other buildings, which underlined the importance of wireless communications between the aircraft and the AM’s rescue swimmers.
As one AM crew member explained, the Axnes PNG wireless intercom system played a vital role in the rescue operation: “Many people were stuck in their houses, which means that we had to hoist our rescue swimmers in through the window. Because of the power outages that followed after the flooding, it was pitch dark inside the houses, and the helicopter’s searchlights could only help us so much. This is where our wireless intercommunication system started playing a pivotal role in the operation. The rescue swimmer could immediately inform the rest of the crew on board the helicopter about the situation inside the house. Our AW139s have the BST50 Base Station and CP50 Control Panel installed, and our rescue swimmers use waterproof MP50 handheld Transceivers, which is important in this particular situation, as most of the houses were flooded. We had to hoist in and out through the windows of the flooded buildings. By having the possibility to talk directly on the aircraft intercom, we could coordinate our hoisting operations much more safely and effectively. In fact, we could not have carried out this type of hoisting if we didn’t have wireless communication in place, especially not in the dark. The PNG system is also connected to our moving map system, making it very easy to see where our rescue swimmer was in the dark. The Axnes PNG really gave us the means to safely carry out our hoisting operations in the heavily damaged area by the flooding.”
