Aircraft-Deployed Aerial Rescue System for Maritime Survivor Recovery Within the Six-Hour Golden Window Following Major Tsunami Events

The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami killed approximately 228,000 people across 14 countries. A defining characteristic of that disaster was the complete failure of international rescue assets to reach maritime survivors within the critical 6-hour golden window — naval vessels arrived 48–96 hours post-event, by which time survival probability had fallen below 1%. This paper presents a mathematically grounded feasibility analysis of an aircraft-deployed aerial rescue system capable of reaching tsunami-affected coastlines within 2.30 hours of seismic trigger using existing military heavy-lift transport aircraft (C-17, C-130, IL-76) with no new procurement. The system deploys passive net-shell rescue hubs and operator-crewed inflatable rafts into debris fields inaccessible to conventional rescue assets. Survival probability is modelled as an exponential decay function calibrated against the 2004 event. Under the pre-authorisation protocol — the paper's central contribution — a C-130 based 650 km from the epicentre delivers first craft to the water at T = 2.30 hours, yielding an expected 1,133–1,480 lives saved per sortie. The paper provides full response time mathematical framework, per-platform capacity analysis, warning-to-deployment timeline, multi-nation combined capacity analysis, and structured comparison against helicopter HEMS, naval response, and amphibious aircraft. This is a theoretical design and mathematical feasibility analysis; prototype development and operational trials are future work.