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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."
I've re-checked and it's all there.
Right between the emergency eggs and the emergency beer.
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.
It makes absolutely no sense why they would discontinue monitoring this important safety device
The page linked in the article quotes a 99.8% false positive rate for satellite detections of these beacons. I.e. they run around trying to find the crashed plane, and 499 times out of 500 it's a faulty electrical appliance or something that is giving off interference (or someone activated the beacon by mistake - unfortunately they don't break down the figures further). 1 time out of 500 it's a real rescue situation.
That seems like a valid reason to say "please upgrade to new beacons that don't suffer from this interference, and which identify you so we can give you a quick phone call to see if you accidentally activated the beacon".
I can see why you're upset though - it's never nice to be told you have to spend that much cash.
Actually, I'm one of those volunteers who look for the emergency beacons when they go off(Civil Air Patrol) right now 100% of my 40 or so finds are false positives. Of those, 1 was a boat EPIRB in a storage warehouse, 1 was a broken FAA transmitter and all the rest were actual aircraft ELTs. Of those, probably 30 were on airports in aircraft which had not crashed. Some were hard landings, some were a mechanic accidentally hitting the switch, some were just going off because the contacts shorted out due to moisture. A couple others people had taken home or were in salvage yards. In most cases a 406 would have let someone call the owner directly and tell them to drive to the airport and turn off their beacon. For the remaining 121.5MHz beacons my life will be much more difficult, right now satellites get us usually within 10 miles or so. Without that, an airliner at 10-30k feet reporting an ELT will give us a HUGE area to search, and if we can't launch planes due to weather it's going to take us a very long time to find the source. In addition, if multiples are going off in an area, we may locate the one at the airport and not know until it's turned off that there was a second real crash somewhere else when we get another report of an ELT still going off. So, please upgrade if you can, and especially if you're going to be away from civilization.