The Air Centric Personnel Recovery Operatives Course or APROC, which concluded after two weeks on 6 June 2018 at Gilze-Rijen Air Base, home of the Defence Helicopter Command (DHC) of the Royal Netherlands Air Force witnessed over 500 troops, more than 18 fixed and rotary wing aircraft and 140 sorties with a total of over 300 flight hours.
EPRC
From 2002 to 2006, the European Air Group (EAG) conducted exercises named ‘Volcanex’ with a heavy focus on Combat Search and Rescue or CSAR. These exercises provided not only valuable training for the participating forces but also fresh insights. As no other training opportunity of this kind was available in Europe, the EAG developed the Combined Joint Combat Search and Rescue Standardisation Course (CJCSARSC) on the basis of the previous Volcanex exercises and their respective lessons learned. The main source of information for the CJCSARSC was NATO documents on Personnel Recovery (PR). Throughout the years these have changed regularly and that provided quite a challenge to the organisers. In summary, the CJCSARSC was a robust and comprehensive programme. Eventually, the need for this course had become more pronounced. What emerged is CSAR, which is a narrow subset of PR and many see it as a legacy capability from times passed. In 2013 it was decided by the EAG that a separate multinational hub of Personnel Recovery expertise was to be set up which is, since then, known as the European Personnel Recovery Centre or EPRC. On the 9 July 2015, the EPRC reached Initial Operational Capability, a day after the inauguration ceremony which was held at its location at the Poggio Renatico base in Italy.
Objectives
The course, the main European training event in the recovery of civilian and military personnel in a hostile or non-permissive environment, was conducted by five out of seven EPRC members: France, Italy, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and Spain. In addition, for this occasion, helicopters from Poland and Sweden, plus observers, totalled to 12 countries.
Crawl, Walk, Run
The course is set up in a way to give participants the possibility to adapt to everything they have learned on a certain day and take that into account all that the next day. The first two days were reserved for theory lessons followed by familiarisation flights on the third day over the Netherlands, including the seven landings zones (LZ) which were used for the actual missions. Then eight days followed, during which three missions a day were flown simultaneously. Each mission comprised of three daily changing selections of the total field of participants and grew in complexity. “During the first few missions all information available for the execution of the tasks is available” Major Kwiatkowski, DETCO of the Polish Mi-24 Hinds, explained. “But during the course, mission information becomes more scarce compelling participants to collect this information with all parties involved.” LTC Holewijn complemented his colleague: “The course adopts the crawl, walk and run approach with the idea that if a task force is trying to achieve something big, that sometimes you have to evolve your approach in stages rather than trying to make all the changes all at once.”
Diversity
As usual, APROC attracted a very diverse field of participants. Home team of the Netherlands supported the daily task forces by two Boeing AH-64D Apaches, one Boeing CH-47D Chinook and a single Eurocopter AS532 Cougar. Also, two Lockheed Martin F-16s from Volkel Air Base joined some of the missions during the course. Italy had a great input to the exercise as well by sending two Eurofighter F-2000s, in the Fixed Wing RESCORT role together with the aforementioned F-16s, and a Gulfstream E-550A which is a converted Gulfstream G550 Conformal Airborne Early Warning and Control System (CAEW) aircraft. It was delivered to the Italian Air Force in December 2016 and during APROC it operated in the Airborne Mission Coordinator (AMC) role. This turned out to be very beneficial as all scheduled NATO E-3A AWACS AMC missions in support of the course were cancelled for aircraft availability reasons. Two Merlins, one Air Force Augusta Westland HH-101A and a Navy UH-101A complemented the Italian input. Merlins were well represented as the Royal Navy sent two examples of 845 NAS as well. Other aircraft of interest among others were two Polish Mi-24s Hinds and a rarely seen Swedish Hkp.16a or Blackhawk.
Bright future
Being the single entity in Europe the EPRC provides a course that aims to educate and train Aircrews and Extraction Forces in the implementation of internationally agreed techniques and procedures for Personnel Recovery operations as a member of a combined and joint force contingent. The result of this kind of training will be an interoperable force that will be able to provide a viable PR capability for future contingencies. “For the Polish detachment we had the aim to train a new Rescue Mission Commander and to further educate more experienced guys of our squadron” Major Kwiatkowski explained. “We succeeded in our goals and became better trained people making friend on the side.” The course aims were achieved by executing all scheduled missions except for one day when flight operations were cancelled due to thunderstorms passing over the Netherlands. This course enabled the participants to train the Personnel Recovery mission profile in a realistic and international environment that uses the processes and structures found in international operations. But there is always room for improvement stated Holewijn, “For the flying phase of the course, the central European location of the host base restricted the freedom of movement of the course participants due the layout and density of local airspace. These challenges were tackled and, in most cases, resolved. However, the integration of Fixed Wing and Rotary Wing assets in a PR scenario like it is planned in the APROC remains an organisational challenge to be considered in the future. The frame of the exercise is very good but next year in Zaragoza (Spain) we will try to improve on this point.” Although the United States have a similar course called Angel Thunder the APROC course seems a good and cheaper alternative for European forces and has a permanent place on the European exercise calendar.
Patrick Smitshoek, Stephan van Geem and Remco Stalenhoef
A Swedish Hkp.16A or Blackhawk followed by a French AS.555 Fennec vacate the FARP at Gilze-Rijen
Back end view of Polish Mi-24
French Navy Eurocopter NH-90 returns after picking up a down pilot during Aproc 2018
With the doorgunner ready this Spanish Air Force Puma hovers to the runway for the first Aproc mission
Italian Navy taxies back to its parking
The French Air
Force participated with two AS.555 Fennec home based at Orange Air Base
Swedish Hkp.16A
The Italian E-550 provided the ground picture for the task forces. In the background two other participants of Aproc being refuelled at the FARP