The Angel search and rescue team is always happy to receive any help: from working on the Internet to posting directions and going to the site.

Six years ago, Minsk resident Sergei Kovgan, the future commander of the Angel rescue squad, saw on TV a woman who asked volunteers to help find her missing father. Without hesitation for a long time, Sergei took a friend and went to the Borisov region. I arrived, and there was no one there. It turned out that no one else responded to the call.

Together with professional rescue services, we spent the whole day looking for the missing person,” recalls Sergei. - Alas, to no avail. A week later the man was found dead. I thought: what if more people had come, perhaps he could have been saved. That’s when the idea came up to create “Angel” - a detachment that would unite dozens of volunteers.

To begin with, Sergei registered a group on social networks and added several acquaintances. And almost immediately the first request for help came - to find a girl who had gone missing in Minsk. The guy was confused, counting on a forest search; he had no information about working in urban conditions. And even then the detachment had neither experience nor equipment. Activists called for help on the Internet and posted advertisements. Unfortunately, the girl could not be saved - she was found dead a month later.

To gain experience, Sergei met Russian search groups, attended exercises, and received the basics of working in different areas. He shared the knowledge gained with volunteers from Belarus.

Inform in a matter of hours

Today “Angel” has its own office, high-quality equipment and a large volunteer staff. If previously a large number of people were required to comb the area, now the task can be solved with the help of modern technology.

In order to buy the necessary equipment, I look for sponsors every day, communicate with various commercial structures, which, seeing the significance of our work, provide assistance,” says Sergei. - If six years ago no one knew about “Angel,” now we have hundreds of thousands of subscribers on social networks. We can inform an audience of millions in a matter of hours. Productivity is also achieved through interaction with the media, taxi services, accident registration bureaus and law enforcement agencies. With the help of landmarks, the missing person is found in hot pursuit. For example, recently the location of an eight-year-old boy who left school after school in an unknown direction was established in 20 minutes. Agree, this is not bad.

Emotional burnout

Today “Angel” unites about 100 permanent volunteers. The team also includes a climber, dog handler, diver, psychologist, and signalman. Once a year, republican exercises are held for volunteers, where they learn how to use equipment, navigate the forest, talk with people and provide them with psychological assistance.

The activities of the detachment are based on a voluntary basis. To participate in a search and rescue operation, we do not call anyone, but announce a general gathering. I never know how many people will participate in the search. New volunteers are constantly joining the squad, but only a small part stays with us for a long time. I'm not mad at people who burn out quickly. They will not receive a salary, and they have no other motivation other than the desire to help,” says Sergei.

They can ask the squad for help at any time of the day. It happens that up to ten calls are received per day. We try to respond to all requests, but there are not always enough resources. At the same time, the detachment is developing, creating regional units and minimally providing them with the necessary equipment.

Any activity, including volunteer activity, depends on funding,” explains Sergei. - Purchasing equipment, repairing and maintaining equipment, renting an office and warehouse, parking for special vehicles require large monthly costs. We work together with my wife: I do search operations and organize collections, she communicates with the media. We do not pursue a commercial goal: assistance is provided free of charge.

In winter, “Angel” is involved in the search for missing fishermen. The bodies of those who have fallen through the ice have to be retrieved with the help of divers.

The initial information makes it clear who we are looking for: alive or dead. Depending on this, the operating algorithm changes. The deceased is more difficult to find. This is painstaking work, often without results. Relatives believe in the best to the last, but we, based on experience, roughly understand what the ending will be. Emotions are not the best helpers in our business. The main task of the squad is to find the person. Whether he turns out to be alive or not, unfortunately, is a matter beyond our control.

Why am I searching and not cross-stitching?

Forest search coordinator (one of the “Angel” teams) Kristina Kruk was brought to the group by her own misfortune - the disappearance of a loved one. Six years ago, the detachment searched for the man informationally, by identifying witnesses. The body of the missing man was found in the forest three months later. After the incident, Christina continued to follow “Angel”. Soon she decided to take part in the search and rescue operation herself and... stayed in the detachment.

Over time, I gained experience and now I draw up a plan for search activities on my own,” says the girl. - “Angel” works 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, so the burden on volunteers is serious. And this despite the fact that everyone has a family and a main job. Some people can’t stand it mentally and leave. Of those who started working with us, only a few remain. My family says to me: “Why do you need this?” And I don’t know myself, I probably just can’t do otherwise. When I run through the forest in the rain, I often think: why am I searching and not, for example, cross-stitching?

Christina says that, despite the squad’s preparedness, not all stories have a happy ending. The girl’s memory recalls fragments of the brutal murder of Tatyana Slonimskaya, the unsuccessful search for schoolgirl Nastya Kot, as well as the largest operation to search for the minor Maxim Markhaluk, which she led.

Tragic stories force us to constantly improve our work,” Christina emphasized. - Unfortunately, we are not omnipotent, but we always give our best. Our squad has saved hundreds of lives.

Additionally

You do not need to have search and rescue experience to become a volunteer. PSO is always happy to receive any help: from working on the Internet to posting orientations and going to the site.

Anna Khaldeeva

Photo: Search and Rescue Team “Angel”

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Ksenia Knorre-Dmitrieva

Helicopter squad “Angel”: None of us can say “no” anymore

If you are lost, help will come from heaven

“If the phone dies and you find out three days later that he died because we didn’t manage to find him on the phone in time, what will you do? When you fly back, it’s immediately clear what the result is: either everyone in the helicopter is buzzing, laughing, talking, or there’s silence...”

He talks about the helicopter search and rescue squad "Angel", the dreams and fears of the pilot

“When I saw my mother, I realized what I had done.”

One day in 2006, search and rescue squad No. 1 at the Ministry of Emergency Situations in Mozhaisk began searching in the forest for a grandmother with two children. And there is a forest to the west, wow - if you don’t cross the railway, then there are only wolves, wild boars and the Baltic Sea ahead. Imagine the state of your parents...

The grandmother was in touch, she had matches, she was told to make a fire and not go anywhere, and they decided to look for her from the air. The guys from the detachment found the telephone number of the Vatulino airfield and called the flight director. At that time I had just finished flying my small plane and came in to say goodbye. And the leader says to me: “Sasha, in the Mozhaisk region a family is lost in the forest, they are calling the Ministry of Emergency Situations and asking for help.”

I became interested and said: let's try it. It was an hour and a half before darkness, the airfield was not lit at that time - it was impossible to fly in the dark, in addition, the weather was deteriorating, a rain front was coming like a wall, it took about twenty minutes to fly there, and I don’t really know where, but I was flying.

Alexander "Boatman" Mikhailov.

I arrived at the place, I see - there is no fire, only in one place there is a black column of smoke, I think - this is definitely not my grandmother with the children, but since there are no others at all, I think I’ll fly and see what’s there. It turned out that the black smoke was ours: the grandmother could not find anything else to set on fire, and set the rear wheel of the tractor on fire - in our forest you can find everything, even a German tank.

I had no connection with her, because it is almost unrealistic to fly an airplane and communicate with someone, and there was no headset. The rescuers told her: “The plane will flap its wings and show you the direction to exit.” I saw that the nearest dirt road was two kilometers away. He turned around, walked onto their fire, descended and slowly, at the lowest speed, shaking his wings, pointed in the right direction.

I fly by, turn around, and they’re standing still. I descend for the second time, flap my wings - they stand. The third time he went down very low, made a scary face, shook his fist at them, made a full circle, and they slowly walked in that direction. I flew away and returned, showed them, looked at the cyclone, looked at the approaching night...

They came out of the forest onto a field that separated them from the road. Once again, I turned around, looked, a UAZ drove up, and guys in green paint got out of it - apparently, rangers, they also see me and understand that I am leading the lost onto the road, to this place.

And about fifteen minutes later, a figure eight drove up, and a woman got out of it, and I realized that it was my mother: I flew away towards the forest, and this woman immediately tried to run in the direction in which I flew. I directly saw how the men grabbed her: “Where? It wasn’t enough to look for you there yet.” The children and their grandmother have to walk another kilometer, and I can see both of them from above.

And then, at the edge of this wet, dirty, ordinary field of ours, the first to appear was a boy - he went a little ahead of his sister and grandmother.

And then this woman broke away from the hands of the men and ran across the field, and I see from the plane how she runs through the mud, splashes fly, she stumbles and falls, gets up and runs further. How she rushed towards him... no words are needed, I saw it all from the air.

I didn’t do a loop and shoot fireworks, but I did make a couple of turns with a descent - I also needed to somehow release my emotions...

It was only when I saw this meeting that I realized what I had done.

Little cows and the blessing of the airplane

– What happened then?

“Then there was a pause in the search, but they already knew about us, and small local requests came to us: for example, they asked for help when a car was stolen. And the next thing I completely unexpectedly had to look for was... a herd of cows.

In 2008, I received the L-42 seaplane in Togliatti - a completely new domestic development, and therefore we had many problems with it - in particular, we could not figure out why its landing gear was not retracted, and once when we were fiddling with it , the local collective farm chairman came to us. Do you remember there was such an artist - Yan Arlazorov?

- Certainly. “Listen, man!”

- Exactly. A police car pulls up, and in it sits “Arlazorov,” the chairman of the local only surviving and well-living collective farm. Seventy expensive breeding heifers were stolen from him.

He tells us: “Guys, help as much as you can. They’re my little darlings.”

So about the cows, as if the children had disappeared... He told me which “shoes” were “shod” in, which ones had which “colors”.

I ask him: “How do we recognize them?” - “You will recognize mine!”

Boatman

We fly with him, and from time to time I have to hand over the helm to the co-pilot to laugh it off. We fly over the herd, I ask him: “Yours?” He told me: “No, my beautiful ones.” And they are cows and cows. And he also said: “Boys, boys, you stop here, I’ll take a look.” And he wasn’t joking at all, he was almost hysterical because of these chicks. “Let's see there, let's see here” - I got tired of it, and I started working in an expanding spiral.

In general, we found them near the forest, they were not allowed to leave, they were held, there was a car parked there. I tried to see the license plates, but as soon as they noticed the plane, they drove the car under the trees so that it was not visible from above. I turned around, and they realized that they had to leave, and they left. As soon as they cleaned up, the cows immediately went to the water: they had not been watered for a day. The chairman was so happy!

He asked: “Is your plane blessed?” I say "No". - “Are you crazy? I have the most important priest in the entire Volga region, I have a holy spring here. In short, we will come to you tomorrow.” The next day they brought us all their meat delicacies and the priest. The priest blessed the plane. And over the next three days we solved all our problems with the electrical system, with radio communications, with the chassis - everything that we couldn’t figure out for a month. You can believe anything here! And this plane still has a sticker and is flying, the longest of all, God grant it to fly for a long time.

"You, like angels, descended from heaven"

– How did “Angel” come into being?

“For the first time, private owners of airplanes and helicopters were naturally attracted to volunteer searches: they were looking for someone somewhere and decided that they needed to see the forest from the air. The one who was assigned the task in “Lisa Alert” simply typed “small aviation” on the Internet and saw the word “AOPA” - this is an American abbreviation: a worldwide public organization of pilots and citizen aircraft owners, it has branches in many countries.

We called its chairman for the Moscow region - my companion at the airfield, Dmitry Shapovalov. And since by that time I was already doing this - collaborating with the Ministry of Emergency Situations, Dima gave me information about the call, and that’s how I met Lisa Alert, and they began to slowly call us.

I was flying airplanes back then, but in 2011 I received another search request: it was necessary to inspect a forest 100 meters from the Moscow Ring Road, somewhere in the area of ​​Losiny Ostrov. I can’t help you on a plane near the Moscow Ring Road: I will inevitably hit the restricted area when turning - the plane’s turning radius is quite high.

I turned to a pilot friend and owner of my own helicopter, Mikhail Farikh, and Misha agreed to help, and I flew with him as an observer. From that moment on I was hooked on helicopters. But I strongly resisted this for another year and a half, shouting: “You are all elevator operators, this is not aviation at all, no romance: press the button - you go up, press the button - you go down, if you want, you stand, if you want, you fly...”

After this incident, we helped Lisa Alert a couple more times, and then a tragedy happened: a helicopter disappeared in the Tver region. We started looking for him from the air. I worked on an airplane for one day - it was useless: the white helicopter was scattered among the white birches, and then it was all covered with snow, white on white. The debris lay on fallen birch trees; there are millions of them in the Tver swamps.

And there I realized that I was hooked on the helicopter, because it turned out to be very correct and generally the best means of supporting any operations in the world.

– When did the “Angel” squad officially appear?

– Why was the detachment called “Angel”?

– We spent a long time choosing the word. There was a proposal to name the detachment “Nord”, I asked: “Are you crazy? This is the German division that stormed Moscow.” I take the title very seriously.

And then, when they told us two times in a row: “Guys, you, like angels, descended from heaven,” we realized: we are an “Angel.”

– By the way, speaking of names: why are you “Boatman”?

– Because I was one of the first to fly on the wonderful domestic amphibious aircraft L-42 and wrote a lot on the Internet under the nickname “Boatman” about flying on this aircraft. Now this is forever my second surname.

– What do you do in your free time from searches and helicopters?

– I have my own business – auto parts, I am a co-owner of the company.

Seaplane L-42

Boatman

Expensive “pleasure” for the sick

– Does searching for missing people take up a lot of your time?

- Almost all. Previously, “Lisa Alert” called us, the aviation, when it was already too late: the foot soldiers had already worked, there was no contact with the lost for a long time, there was no strength, and then they remembered us: let’s take a look from the air. The effectiveness of such work was low, and the results, naturally, did not bring satisfaction.

In 2015, there was a breakthrough in the interaction of all services, and they began to give us those people who are in touch. This has dramatically increased our efficiency, because if a person is in touch, a helicopter arrives and quickly finds him by phone. Therefore, from 15 found per year, we jumped to 120.

Previously, we had 30 flight hours per person found, but last year we had about 200 flight hours per 120 found ones. Most were quickly found thanks to saved leftover phone battery or clever instructions received before the phone died and the aircraft began to operate.

When a person is in touch, we instruct him, we arrive - usually at night (while it is light, the person tries to cope on his own), and when we enter the search area, he dials us: I see you, you just flew over me. We turn around: “Now above you?” - "Yes". - “Okay, don’t go anywhere.” We transmit the coordinates to the walking group and fly back, it’s not even interesting.

– It turns out that in order to participate in aviation searches, you need to have a very lucrative job!

- Yes. Naturally, mostly business owners can afford this. There are guys who have a helicopter for three, and they save every penny, but still fly, there are those who, like me, spend almost everything with the hope that it will be better in the future.

– It turns out that this, to put it mildly, is not for poor people. If for searchers on foot everything is simple - put on waterproof boots, fill the tank with gas and drive off - or you can get there with someone else if you don’t have a car - then everything is much more expensive.

– Yes, but this is done mainly by people who are completely sick. And I am sure that, as a percentage of their income, people on foot often spend much more than we do and risk their health more than we do. Operations on the ground tend to be long and difficult, physically and mentally. We bow to these people, and no amount of our expenses can compare with what they have to do below.

At the presentation of the Ministry of Emergency Situations Constellation of Courage award. December 2016

– Are people sick with the sky or searching?

- The sky. But we are unlikely to be able to come up with a hobby related to the sky that would be so effective and fruitful and would bring benefits equal to ours. And I can’t even call it a hobby.

A hobby is when you like it, you do it, and we do it when we are needed, according to the formula “365 days / 24 hours.” In winter - rarely, and in summer often and howling from fatigue. But none of us can say “no” anymore. Up to 10% will die because of our “no, I can’t”, this is statistics. I believe that today participation in the search is simply the responsibility of any flying citizen.

– According to your description, searching from a helicopter is a bit boring. Is it so?

– These are, first of all, emotions that need to be driven into a corner. There are operations that are simple for us, but at any moment they can become difficult and tragic for others. We, like everyone else, really want to find and are very afraid not to find, we are very afraid to give a telephone to a lost or injured person asking for help, this is an eternal Russian roulette: we are connected only by a telephone, and kilometers of swamps separate us.

You have already talked to the person and promised to help him. If the phone dies and you find out three days later that he died because we didn’t manage to find him on the phone in time, what will you do? When you fly back, it’s immediately clear what the result is: either everyone in the helicopter is buzzing, laughing, talking, or there’s silence and only service commands can be heard...

Mikhail Farikh and the failed helicopter base

– Please tell us about Mikhail Farikh.

“He and I lived in parallel. He was a man of great charm. Once, when we were not yet so familiar with him, I—or rather, one of my friend’s grandmothers—had a problem. She is in her eighties, she goes fishing in the winter, and in the forest in the summer to pick mushrooms - with a tracker (a watch or bracelet that informs relatives about a person’s location - Ed.), in an orange vest and with matches, and teaches the population the same...

Like any woman who survived the war, she tried to plant potatoes all around her. She bought an additional plot near the river, planted it, then bought another one, and then a local oligarch appeared and said that he needed access to the water and that he wanted to buy one of her plots, and named the price: three hundred thousand. Grandma tells him: “It costs one and a half million.” And the oligarch told her: “I’ll give you four hundred, if not, see for yourself, you’ll regret it: we’ll take it for free.”

She calls me: “Sasha, what should I do?” And sometimes I flew there on a seaplane and sat down near her house - after that, all the local drunks spoke to her only on “you”. I said: “Okay, we will arrive in two or three days.” She says: “He probably won’t be there.” - “It doesn’t matter, he has people on the site. We’ll fly in, hang next to this area, if we can, we’ll sit there, then we’ll change seats, have lunch and fly away. And you say that the guys are looking for a place for a landing site, they want to buy land - there will be a helicopter base there.”

Imagine: you have a house built on the bank of a river, you are just a little away from the water, and suddenly there will be a helicopter base there. Under the window, instead of a bathhouse. I didn’t have a helicopter then - I had just relearned how to fly them, so Misha and I flew in, hovered there, sat down and waited. His local workers walked there. We waited until everyone took photos and videos of us, posed in front of us, made sure that everything turned out well for everyone, then we moved closer to home, ate village soup, took moonshine and smoked fish with us, and flew away. Literally a day later, the oligarch came up and said: “That’s it, we sign, one and a half million.”

– Mikhail Farikh – holder of the “Angel” helicopter squadron badge number one. What kind of sign is this, why is it given?

– When introducing the sign, we had one single task - so that no one could appropriate it, and no one could give it by decision. Therefore, the regulations state that the badge is awarded for a successfully completed rescue operation by a volunteer member of the crew. An operation is considered successfully completed when the aircraft has completed its task - found the lost person alive or dead. This is a first level sign.