For most of us, an aircraft like the ATR 42 makes pleasant work of short-hop holiday or business trips. Such turboprops fly lower than jets, so the view reminds us that flying can still be a joy.
But imagine spending seven or eight hours airborne at 1,000ft (300m) or so, sharing the cabin not with 50 passengers, flight attendants and a drinks service, but with five crewmates and a battery of radar, optical and infrared sensors. Spend the flight scanning the sea for small boats while the pilot banks hard to keep a target in sight, maybe breaking off to find another, perhaps circling for a better look. Such is working life for the airmen of Italy's customs police, the Guardia di Finanza.
For them, ATR 42MP maritime patrol aircraft are just the latest weapon against crime in a region that's always been rife with smugglers and invaders. Consider Italy's southernmost island of Lampedusa, closer to Tunisia than to Sicily and at various times a base for the Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans and Arabs. Once abandoned owing to pirate attacks, Lampedusa today is home to a few thousand people and a small airport - and the goal of thousands of refugees, often in rickety, overcrowded boats, fleeing North Africa's revolutions.
Underscoring the power of airborne surveillance to help us tease humanitarian need from the messy confluence of upheaval and crime, patrols monitoring this exodus have located and rescued 20,000 people while arresting at least 42 human traffickers.
Or, as Ernest Hemingway might have put it, don't let anybody tell you there isn't plenty of water between Tunis and Lampedusa.
Source: Flight International
