Gallery: Italian coast guard training

With about 7,600km of sea borders, Italy must rely on a strong and capable coastguard (Guardia Costiera) for its national and international monitoring responsibilities and provide emergency help at sea. Although having a large fleet of vessels, the Guardia Costiera relies on a substantial force of aerial assets that fly out of four Italian bases to provide a national coverage. 
The Sicilian unit, based in Catania, operates two ATR-42 maritime patrol aircraft, six AW-139B helicopters for search and rescue (SAR) operations and a single Piaggio P-180 Avanti II for supporting and liaison duties. In addition to SAR, the unit's main tasks include environmental control, law enforcement (smuggling or fishery control) and border control missions (in cooperation with FRONTEX) through the Mediterranean seaways. The Guardia Costiera maintains a day and night alert state, to react immediately to any emergency situations at sea. The ATR-42 can conduct surveillance patrol flights for about five hours and can collect valuable data for a following AW-139 helicopter. The helicopter has a rescue swimmer onboard and, using a hoist, the helicopter can lift up to 13 additional people onboard. The AW-139 has a range of 130NM, a distance that can be reached in 1 hour of flying at approximately 130kt. With an overall normal flight endurance of 2.5 hours, the helicopter can spend half an hour at a distress site before having to return to base.
Continual training is essential and we joined rescue swimmers training, approximately 2NM out from the Catanian coast, in the vicinity of Mount Etna. To make conditions more demanding, the training was conducted around and after sunset, while the rescue swimmers performed jumps from 30ft out of the helicopter into the sea, to be picked up later by winch.