Smith Myers and Leonardo Helicopters win RAeS Team Silver Medal

Courtesy Smith Myers

A joint Smith Myers and Leonardo Helicopter team brought diverse skills from different domains to engineer an innovative and effective SAR capability.

Previous Silver Team Medallist include The Beagle 2 Mars Mission Engineering Team.

The team’s vision was to enable a SAR helicopter to have the capability to locate and communicate with a person in distress possessing a standard mobile phone. This system had to work in areas of no cellular network coverage and effectively configure the mobile phone as a rescue beacon.

Leonardo Helicopters experience in airborne system design, development and evaluation together with Smith Myers’ expertise of advanced telecommunications design, produced Redstreak.

Redstreak demonstrated detection ranges of 32km with accuracies of better than 100m. Whilst locating the individual, Redstreak provides both voice and text communications.

Redstreak can locate individuals not detectable by other sensors and large search areas can be covered rapidly. The search is quicker, safer and more effective.

The Redstreak system is used on the AW101 Norwegian All Weather Search and Rescue Helicopter.

The systems avionics certification covers both rotary and fixed wing aircraft.

Peter Myers managing director of Smith Myers said: “Despite the distance between the two sites, the team quickly gelled and rapidly produced flying prototypes. The professionalism and expertise of both companies ensured a well‐designed and thoroughly tested system. Redstreak/Artemis gives
SAR crews an effective alternative where previously looking out the window was the only option.”