Slashdot Mirror
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."
Well I'd classify anybody with 2nd vacation home as rich, but yeah, $15,000 on an airplane doesn't make you rich.
Particularly as due to the way the financing works on many of these things, people never really pay that much for them. A lot of the loans for aircraft are structured oddly. They'll set them up for 7 years. Over those 7 years you have a fairly low monthly payment. Mostly just interest with a little principle thrown in. Once the 7 years are up, you get hit with a huge bill for the remaining balance.
Now, the thing to keep in mind is that many used airplanes are 20, 30, or even 60 or 70 years old. They've already depreciated about all they're going to - as long as they're maintained in good condition then they maintain a roughly equivalent value. So, people will buy that $15k or $20k airplane, essentially pay the monthly interest on the loan for 5 or 6 years, and then sell it again just in time to recoup their cost needed to pay off the loan at the end.
When broken into monthly payments like that, it's really not a lot.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
$15K, over what time period?
I will spend somewhere in that range building my Dyke Delta over a 7 year period. That comes out to just under $6/day. I know "poor" people that spend more than that in cigarettes. I know high-schoolers that spend MORE than that going to movies. There are a LOT of people reading this forum that could point out $15K of audio-visual and computer equipment that they've bought over just the last few years.
$15K to spend on a permanent hobby in America is middle-class. Granted, by world standards that is still rich, but even the poor in America are rich to most of the world.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Jeppesen is one of the primary providers of aviation databases and is used in pretty much all Garmin handheld and panel mount GPS units.
Jeppesen is paid to maintain the data and certifies it is IFR quality.
The data is/was publicly available at one point. Some of the map makers bitched and moaned about how unfair it was public data was available to the public. There was intent to charge a fee for the data but I'm not sure what happened. Regardless, the data is publicly held.
If you are out in the wilderness a lot or driving lonely stretches of road without cellular signals you can also get a hand-held beacon that can be handy.
I have this one: http://acrelectronics.com/product2.aspx?sku=2898
Here in Arizona (as I'm sure many other places with extensive wilderness) people get lost and in distress a lot. With no cell phone service and no one knowing of their plans (so that they can be reported as "missing" by someone) their first instinct is to set a "signal fire." In somewhere as dry as Arizona that's a very bad idea. A couple years ago someone set a signal fire that ended up destroying 250,000 acres. I realize that when someone's lost they panic but if people just used a little forethought when they go out to the wilderness (like taking a PLB) then things would turn out better for everyone.