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Exercise Northumberland 2: Research Report

Nine crews flew route and open-moorland searches using visible and thermal targets. Recorded detection was 84% on the route and 86% in the area search, under the exercise conditions.

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Published on IPP

  • Publication date: July 2026

  • Country: United Kingdom

Why it matters in operational practice: It offers useful field data on how flight profile, camera angle, observer tasking and environmental limits affect actual detections—not just platform capability.

Operational transferability: Relevant to UAS-enabled land SAR with environmental and regulatory adaptation. It supports systematic tasking, not fixed altitude or camera-angle rules.

Important methodological limitations: A single exercise with 12 prepared, thermally enhanced targets; small sample; open moorland; and no live-subject, woodland or adverse-weather validation.

Training influence: Use practical UAS scenarios requiring crews to justify flight profile, log conditions and detections, manage aborted sorties, and state how a negative result changes ground-tasking.

SAR training sections: UAV operations; visual search; resource selection and tasking; POA/POD/cumulative probability; Search Operations and progress monitoring; reassessment and replanning.

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