The Air Rescue Service (ARS) is a disestablished organization in the United States Air Force. Previously a subcommand of the Military Air Transport Service (MATS), a USAF major command (MAJCOM). ARS was redesignated as the Aerospace Rescue and Recovery Service (ARRS) on 1 Jan 1966 when MATS was redesignated as the Military Airlift Command (MAC). As ARRS, it retained the same subcommand status with MAC.
The Air Rescue Service was initially established in 1946 under the Air Transport Command, just prior to the U.S. Air Force's designation as a separate service in 1947, and it continued to serve the U.S. Air Force proudly as both ARS and ARRS during the Korean War and Vietnam War, as well as during the Cold War. Rescue's worth was proven time and again: 996 combat saves in Korea and 2,780 in Southeast Asia. The crews, both fixed-wing and helicopter, had but one motto: "These things we do that others may live."
ARRS returned to its former name of ARS in 1989 and was disestablished in 1993, following the disestablishment of Military Airlift Command and the dispersal of legacy USAF search and rescue (SAR) forces among the Air Combat Command (ACC), the Air Force Special Operations Command (AFSOC), United States Air Forces in Europe (USAFE) and Pacific Air Forces (PACAF), to include those Air Force Reserve Command (AFRC) and Air National Guard (ANG) rescue units operationally-gained by these MAJCOMs. The current structure and strength of search and rescue in today's U.S. Air Force is focused primarily on combat search and rescue (CSAR) and Personnel Recovery (PR) and is greatly reduced from the air rescue force structure that served from 1946 through the end of the Vietnam Era.
Read more about Air Rescue Service: Origins, Korea, Vietnam War, Post-Vietnam, Cold War, Operation Eagle Claw and Operation Desert Storm, Current Rescue & Guardian Angel Unit Designations
Famous quotes containing the words air, rescue and/or service:
“The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools, but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure with a liberal allowance of time.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The individual woman is required ... a thousand times a day to choose either to accept her appointed role and thereby rescue her good disposition out of the wreckage of her self-respect, or else follow an independent line of behavior and rescue her self-respect out of the wreckage of her good disposition.”
—Jeannette Rankin (1880–1973)
“Whatever events in progress shall disgust men with cities, and infuse into them the passion for country life, and country pleasures, will render a service to the whole face of this continent, and will further the most poetic of all the occupations of real life, the bringing out by art the native but hidden graces of the landscape.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)