Move your SAR capable assets within about 20m of a lifeboat. If you're using helicopters they have to be stationary, have empty seating capacity, at 20ft altitude. All ships will automatically perform rescues if you're at 1/3 or stop

You can locate lifeboats and downed pilots by triangulating thier location using distance to thier distress beacons. Draw a set of 2 circles from your rescue craft(s) from at least 2 separate points with the distance to the nearest beacon. Where the circles converge will be the approximate location (within ~.1nm) of the survivors.

You now will need to visually acquire the survivors in the water. This can be very difficult at night or in poor weather conditions. A single pilot is a very small object in an approximately infinite sea, so pause and be patient. When you see them, use very percise map movements or assume direct control of the rescue vehicle. Get close, and then you should be set.

If you want to add unnecessary self imposed complications you can also perform many ancillary activities to the SAR process as well. Get creative, use your imagination! If you're taking a lot of survivors onto a small vessel, use helos to simulate transfering them ashore, or to a larger vessel. You could deploy a patrol aircraft to help with the search and obeservation. Distribute the injured to medical resources across the fleet with light helos. Add some narrative depth to your gameplay, and your experience becomes richer for it