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February Deadline For Emergency Beacons Approaches
An anonymous reader writes "In two weeks, older emergency locator beacons will no longer be monitored by satellites. USA Today noticed that 85% of private aircraft in the US have not switched to the 406 MHz beacons. I thought I'd send up a flare about this. And this should not be relevant to the airplane which landed in the Hudson River today, as that was a commercial plane and its location was known by a number of bystanders, one of whom helped crash TwitPic."
It isn't like the old ones will not useful. The CAP and the FAA will still listen for the 121.5 beacons. Just the satellites.
If you are flying over really remote areas (northern Montana, etc), then you are silly not to have one of the new beacons. If you are flying within 100 miles of a major city, on nice days on the weekend, it is silly to buy the new ones, if your old one works.
The new ones are about $1200 installed.
I know, "airplanes are rich mans toys", but that isn't true. You can buy a taylorcraft for $15000, and ercoupes for under $20000. Most planes out there can be bought for under $50000.
ok.. so, there's my confusion. article linked to a coast guard site on EPIRBs, but we're really talking about ELTs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPIRB
Yes, the existing ELT (Emergency Location Transmitter) beacons are no longer monitored by satellite. That does not mean they become useless. They broacast an audio tone on a radio frequency all civil and military aircraft can tune to.
Many pilots fly with their second radio continually tuned to this frequency, and I have been on flights in a general aviation flight where we have picked up beacons and reported them to ATC. More often than not, it's a hard landing that trips the beacon and the aircraft is parked on the ramp.
Finally, when your aircraft does go missing, these beacons are deliberately tuned by authorities doing search and rescue work, such as the Civil Air Patrol. Aircraft listen for and locate the general location of the beacon, and ground personnel locate the beacon with good directional antennas.
The (relatively) recent Fossett crash is a prime example of this -- His aircraft was not equipped with a ELT beacon at all (in violation of law) and had he been ELT equipped, he would have been found within a day.
The big thing that changes here is that, with the sattelites no longer monitoring, ATC will not get an automatic alert when a beacon turns on. This tech is spotty at best, however, and of course, 90% of ELT activations are false alarms anyways.
The new 406 Mhz beacons include a GPS reciever and actively transmit their location, such that rescue units simply get a waypoint on their GPS where the transmitter is downed. They are a far better technology, but the existing system does work well.
Overall, more hype than needed.
First, it is important to remember, only satellite monitoring for 121.5 ELT is stopping. Ground and air based monitoring is still ongoing. Secondly, CAP (Civil Air Patrol; Axillary Air Force) does not have equipment to track 406. Keep in mind, CAP performs the bulk of the required search and rescue operations in the US. All 406s I'm aware of have a dual mode of 121.5/406. This means it's more likely you'll actually be located by rescue crews using 121.5.
The problem is, because of the FAA, there is no competition. This means purchase plus install for a really nice 406 unit can cost in excess of $5000 for a $200-$400 ELT. Now that lower priced units, and units which are compatible with existing installs are finally starting to come onto the market you'll start to see increase in the number of installations. Yet the bulk of these installs will likely occur either during an aircraft's annual or when the existing ELT's battery requires replacement. The combination of the two means installs should start to increase sometime over the next 24-months.
In the meantime, many have elected to go with much cheaper solutions. Personal Locater Beacons (PLBs) and SPOT are very popular with pilots because they can be had at a fraction of the cost despite their reduced sized and increased capabilities.
The big advantage of the 406 ELT is the specification allows for a data component. Specifically, it allows an aircraft's GPS to continuously update the ELT with its current location. In the event of an emergency, the ELT can be manually armed or be set off from excessive G's (impact). Once set off, the ELT immediately transmits the last known location received from the GPS. This allows for very high accuracy position reporting. Of course the problem is, pilots want this capability and most existing manufacturers are attempting to rape owners.
Right now, Artex's ME406 is about the only reasonably priced unit available and it hasn't been on the market all that long.
Lastly, let's not forget satellite monitoring of 121.5 is really pretty crappy. Your typical detection window requires three satellites to pass overhead, ignoring the fact it can technically be done in two. The detection capabilities of the existing satellites are pretty crappy. And if one of the Russian satellites are in the mix, you may even require four satellite passes overhead before anyone is dispatched. This means you're looking at anywhere from 10-36 hours before someone picks up the phone to get people looking for you - unless you filed an optional flight plan. In the end, loss of satellite detection for 121.5, while certainly not good, is not really a nightmare scenario.
In the end, the best thing to do is to simply let someone know when you're flying, where you're going, the route you're taking, and the time you expect to arrive. Ideally, this is someone at your destination. And should you not show or be heard from, teach them to call the FAA or an official briefing station. At that time, they can immediately dispatch a search effort. Meaning, for many pilots, this is actually a better plan than filing a flight plan with the FAA. Routes which are not direct or too complicated to convey to laymen should be filed via flight plan.
And for those interested, here is a comparison of existing, alternative tracking solutions.
A bit of an odd aside, but the first thing that struck me there was how much those GPS units cost. What makes them so different to normal consumer ones?
The FAA will not permit "consumer" gps units to be installed into any certified aircraft. Not even into a Piper Cub. Only FAA certified GPS units are legal to install in a regular small aircraft, plus the FAA will only permit a "Certificated Repair Station" type of avionics shop to install the units too. So what this means is that in order to stay legal with my 45 year old antique Piper Cherokee (which is still a perfectly airworthy, and viable IFR-equipped aircraft that gets flown a couple hundred hours a year all over the central and southern USA), if I want a Garmin 430 installed, I can pick up a used unit for about $6500 (new ones cost $8995.00), pay a certified avionics shop to bench test it and "re-certify" it for operation to make it an FAA-legal piece of used equipment, for about $250, and then pay them an additional $2500-3500 labor to install it into my airplane, and then they have to "certify" the actual installation itself.
When you consider that my airplane only has a market value of about $30K, investing a third of its market value just to install a certified GPS unit does not make any financial sense at all. Therefore I use a portable handheld GPS, which is just as accurate as the $10K unit, but I cannot legally use it as primary navigation on an IFR flight plan, because it's not "certified" (or even certifiable) by the FAA.
I am not installing a 406MHz ELT beacon in my plane yet either. They should only cost maybe $300 tops and be legal for any licensed A&P to install, but because of artificially imposed bureaucratic bullshit the avionics makers and installers are forced to go thru, these new ELT's instead cost thousands of dollars to purchase and have installed.