ENG-1982 — Page 269

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THE ARMED SERVICES AND AUXILIARY SERVICES

attended Territorial Army courses at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, and the School of Infantry, Warminster, while another 11 were attached to the Queen's Own Yeomanry for an exercise in West Germany.

The regiment was re-equipped in 1982 with a new Clansman communication system which, being fully compatible with the equipment used by the regular army in Hong Kong, enhances the regiment's capability in its reconnaissance role.

Royal Hong Kong Auxiliary Air Force

The Royal Hong Kong Auxiliary Air Force provides a wide variety of flying services, including internal security, for the government. Based at Hong Kong International Airport, it operates seven aircraft: a twin-engined Cessna Titan, a twin-engined Britten- Norman Islander, two Scottish Aviation Bulldog trainers and three Aerospatiale Dauphin twin-engined helicopters. It has an establishment of 83 permanent staff and 116 volunteers. The blend of permanent and volunteer staff and of fixed-wing and rotary aircraft, supported by a totally self-sufficient engineering squadron, enables the Auxiliary Air Force to operate seven days a week and round-the-clock during an emergency.

Helicopter crews on night standby duty, shared on a monthly rotational basis with the Royal Air Force, responded to over 200 requests for emergency medical evacuations. During the unusually dry weather in the early part of the year, helicopters assisted with fire fighting in the rural and afforested areas, transporting men and equipment and dropping over 1 000 tonnes of water on inaccessible areas. As part of the Clean Hong Kong campaign, regular morning helicopter patrols flew over the harbour to enable the Marine Department to identify particularly polluted areas. Helicopters also assisted in the completion of a number of civil engineering projects, as well as being used to transport official visitors to

remote areas.

The Cessna Titan and Britten-Norman Islander maintained off-shore patrols in support of anti-illegal immigration activities and gave continued assistance to the Lands Department for aerial survey, photography and map-making purposes, as well as maintaining long- range off-shore search and rescue patrols. The two Bulldogs were used for regular meteorological evaluation flights for the Royal Observatory, and for training the squadron's volunteer students and the Civil Aviation Department's student air traffic controllers.

Civil Aid Services

The principal role of the Civil Aid Services, a uniformed and disciplined volunteer force with over 3 000 men and women, is to support the regular emergency services in times of natural and man-made disasters and other emergencies. To carry out this role, its members are trained to handle emergencies including typhoons, landslips, building collapses, sea and land search and rescue, mountain rescue, forest fires, flooding, marine oil-pollution, refugee feeding and camp management, crowd control, life saving and rabies control.

During 1982, which marked the services' 30th year of operation, the adult service was re-organised into two wings covering operations, and administration and development. This centralises the regional heavy rescue resources into one unit which can be fully operational and ready for deployment at short notice. Most members serve in the Operations Wing which consists of three regional commands and a centrally-controlled Task Force. The rapidly-mobilised Task Force has three separate units covering mountain rescue, emergency, and liaison.

The service was heavily committed during the year in delivering food to Vietnamese refugees on arrival, in the management of refugee camps, and in the rescue of victims from