CSAR Trains With 5th‑Gen Fighters
- A USAF Combat Rescue Officer described CSAR training at Nellis that integrates F-35s, F-22s and other assets for dynamic rescues. - The training spans basic courses to daily operations and stresses multi‑platform coordination under pressure. - Those integration practices offer CRM and coordination lessons that are directly applicable to naval aircrew rescue and escort planning (x.com).
Combat search and rescue is the mission to find and recover a downed aircrew while the fight is still going on, and Nellis is where the Air Force is rehearsing it with F-35s, F-22s, rescue helicopters and tankers in the same scenario. (af.mil) At Red Flag-Nellis 22-3 in July 2022, the Air Force said the exercise included “enhanced combat search and rescue scenarios” inside a much larger battlespace than earlier iterations. The aircraft list for that event included F-35A/Cs, F-22s, HC-130J Combat King II rescue tankers and HH-60G Pave Hawk helicopters. (af.mil) That rescue training is still active at Nellis. DVIDS footage from Jan. 30, 2025 showed Airmen from the 38th and 41st Rescue Squadrons conducting a combat search and rescue drill at the Nevada Test and Training Range during Red Flag-Nellis 25-1. (dvidshub.net) A Combat Rescue Officer is the Air Force officer who plans and directs these recoveries. The service says those officers are its joint personnel-recovery planners and integrators, responsible for coordinating pararescuemen, Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape specialists, aircraft and command-and-control cells. (af.mil) The hard part is not the pickup itself. It is stitching together stealth fighters, rescue helicopters, tankers, radios, escorts and survivor location data fast enough to reach an isolated pilot before enemy forces do. (acc.af.mil) Nellis has become a hub for working out that problem in both live flying and simulation. The Air Force’s Joint Simulation Environment there is built to connect F-35 and F-22 training in a digital range, and the Navy said in May 2024 that Navy and Air Force fighter pilots would begin training together in that system in summer 2024. (navair.navy.mil) The rescue fleet is changing at the same time. The first two HH-60W Jolly Green II combat rescue helicopters arrived at Nellis in April 2022 for operational test work, replacing an aging HH-60G fleet and forcing the Air Force to rewrite parts of its rescue playbook. (twz.com) The Air Force has been pairing rescue units with stealth fighters for years. A 2017 drill later detailed by The War Zone put F-22s together with HC-130Js and HH-60Gs, with the rescue tanker also setting up a forward arming and refueling point for the fighters. (twz.com) That mix is useful for naval aviation, too, because a downed pilot recovery at sea or near a defended coastline still depends on the same basics: who finds the survivor, who protects the rescue package, who passes fuel, and who owns the radio plan. Nellis is where the Air Force is practicing those answers under pressure. (af.mil)
