McMurdo Establishes Americas Headquarters
McMurdo Group, a company in end-to-end search and rescue (SAR) and maritime domain awareness (MDA) solutions, announced that it has formally established its Americas Headquarters in Beltsville, Maryland located within the Baltimore (Maryland)/Washington D.C. metropolitan area. The new headquarters, a result of McMurdo’s recent acquisition of Techno-Sciences, Inc., will also be home to the group’s Search and Rescue Center of Excellence which will include a distribution warehouse and an advanced research and development team. A first-of-its-kind search and rescue demonstration center is expected to open before the end of the year.
The distribution warehouse will stock a variety of search and rescue products including distress beacons for maritime, aviation and outdoor personal use. The first products are expected to ship from the facility on September 2, 2014, expediting the delivery of McMurdo's SAR solutions to large-scale customers and the retail channel. Local assembly, manufacturing and repair services are expected to begin in 2015.
The advanced research team will focus on defining and developing emerging search and rescue technologies including next-generation distress beacons and Medium Earth Orbit Search and Rescue (MEOSAR) satellite-based systems. These solutions are expected to bring a number of improvements to the search and rescue process including near-instantaneous detection, identification and location of distress beacons.
The demonstration center will provide a showcase of McMurdo’s end-to-end search and rescue ecosystem – from beacon distress signal to MEOSAR satellite-based search and rescue infrastructure to Mission Control Center software to Rescue Coordination Center systems. McMurdo has installed the only two operationally-ready MEOSAR systems in the Americas (Florida and Hawaii) and recently announced that it was chosen to install the first MEOSAR system for Asia Pacific (Australia and New Zealand).
“Our new Americas Headquarters expands our solid presence and strong reputation in the Americas, fortifying our commitment to this key search and rescue region of the world,” said Jean-Yves Courtois, CEO, McMurdo Group. “As we further build out our Americas strategy, our partners and customers will continue to be at the forefront of our efforts. Our distribution center will provide access to our industry-leading products; our advanced research team will ensure McMurdo products are future-proofed for tomorrow; and our SAR demonstration facility will interactively exhibit a search and rescue ecosystem that has helped to save over 37,000 lives since 1982.”
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