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portable ELT/EPIRB

flyeyes

flyeyes

Well Known Member
One of our local pilots crashed his Cessna 210 a few weeks ago, landing in woods at night.

I don't know him well, but we have many friends in common, and his wife has been a colleague of mine for many years. She called me a couple of days after the crash with questions, trying to understand what might have happened.

In his personal effect recovered from the crash was a green 406mHz satellite beacon/ELT, and he had registration paperwork for it in his office at home.

The airplane also had an installed 121.5 mHz ELT (typical 1978 Cessna).

Neither of these beacons activated in this serious but survivable accident. The pilot spent 11 hours unconscious, with life-threatening injuries, overnight in the wreckage.

I dont know the exact circumstances of the crash, but given the what we do know I think it is likely he was certain that he was going to crash for at least a couple of minutes. The area where the crash occurred is only a couple of minutes flying time south of the Memphis Class B, but is very sparsely populated and has poor radar and VHF coverage at low altitude.

My point with this story is that we need to remember to activate these beacons when things are going poorly. My guess is that he was stressed, busy, and it just never occurred to him. There was a search the night he crashed, but they were unable to find him until he was spotted from the air the following morning.

His condition was much, much worse after spending the night in the airplane.
 
Look up PLBs. Of the 406 MHz variety with integral GPS. They are reasonably affordable and at least one appears small enough to fit in a shirt pocket...at least pants.

Here is one review of one option:

http://www.equipped.org/blog/?p=284
 
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A very good point about activating the ELT before you hit, particularly if you have a 406 w/GPS built in, as you should get a signal out before impact. Hopefully.

While traditional 121.5 ELT's are no longer monitored by satellite, that doesn't mean that they aren't still "out there" and you will never hear them - particularly if you monitor 121.5 enroute.

If you do hear a beacon, besides reporting it to Centre, if you have the fuel and time available, you may want to consider trying to pinpoint it yourself. I've had to do this once before (on the ground) when some idiot quartermaster threw out a boxful of obsolete beacons late on a Friday arvo and set one off. First thing anyone on base knew about it was when the Queensland Rescue helicopter landed and said "Where's the crash?" :eek: Being low man on the totem pole I had to check our squadron aircraft to make sure the transmitting beacon wasn't in one of them and after that, on a hunch set off with an Icom hand-held trying to locate the errant beacon. Successfully in the end. :D

Annnyyyway; as we all know, VHF is essentially line of sight, so the lower you are, the closer to the beacon you are. You can then take this a step further and progressively de-tune your radio away from 121.5, to 121.475, then 121.45 and so on, until you get to apoint where you might be on 120.5 and you can still hear the beacon. By then you should also be able to see it.

Bear in mind this is a lot less accurate than the actual SAR teams that (hopefully) are searching for the wreckage so stay vigilant and monitor other traffic -AND YOUR FUEL STATE lest you get in the way of the professionals and/or become another casualty. That being said, in Australia at least, there are a lot of wide open spaces where you could well be the first to hear an ELT, so hopefully this might be useful to someone, sometime.
 
I had an engine failure in a Sequioa Falco over rugged terrain in Canada and in solid IMC back in 2008. Did not break out of the clouds until around 400 feet and was lucky to be able to ditch the plane in a river. A Falco has retractable gear, just like a C210. They ditch real easily without flipping over.

I had an EPIRB with me with GPS and thanks to that the rescued me within 2 hours which was a record for that area. Having an EPIRB was essential and most likely the best investment I ever made.

My EPIRB came from ACR, model ACR 2844 GLOBALFIX. I would recommend this to everybody, $ 600 well spent !
 
EPIRB's are for boats, ELT's are for airplanes. They have the same end result but are different types of units.

Unfortunately it is common for ELT's not to activate on impact and if it did and the plane flipped over on top of the antenna it would have a hard time sending out a signal. The panel mount switch is there to push if there is any distress and should be part of an emergency checklist. Better to trigger it just in case than not at all especially while still airborne if a 406mhz beacon. Don't forget that that the panel mount remote switch also has a small battery in it and must be replaced I believe every 8 years.
 
Read the following and ask yourself if you want SAR assets to know almost immediately who you are and where you are.

http://www.avweb.com/eletter/archives/avflash/2329-full.html#207384

The article you want to read is this one:

"Pilot, Passenger Survive Open Ocean Ditching

The pilot of a Beech Baron that successfully ditched in the Gulf of Mexico Thursday is praising the response of rescue personnel after he and his passenger spent more than three hours in the open ocean 28 miles south of the tip of Louisiana. Theodore Wright said if the crews hadn't persevered until just before dark to spot him and his passenger Raymond Fosdick bobbing in their life jackets they might have faced a different outcome. "I said we have about 25 more minutes of daylight. If they find us in 20 minutes, we're going home tonight. If not, we're staying the night our here," Wright told reporters in Houston. ........."
 
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I don't know, but when you know you are going down your mind is probably in a near panic, and thinking to activate the ELT switch - something most of us haven't practiced in a long time - and pulling out the PLB and remembering how to activate it as well, all while trying to fly the airplane and dial in 7700 and all that, would be difficult.

This sure got me thinking that next time I hop in my plane, I will practice with the ELT switch and make sure again I know how to activate my PLB without thinking about it.
 
Ron,

I don't see anything in that link about SAR beacons. I get AVWeb September 24 issue. Wondering if I missed something?

Greg
 
Greg, I added some of the article to read. From my reading, SAR did not know exactly where they were and the pilots were close to spending the night in the ocean.

If they had and activated a GPS enabled 406 MHz beacon, then their location would have been known and the rescue as close to immediate as possible.
 
PELTs are getting lighter

I keep my PELT in the plane, in reach, but the best possible solution is to have physically on you somewhere - like on a lanyard. In a crash survival seminar I took a while back the speaker said "take everything out of your pockets right now. That may be all you have with you after a crash."

My plan has always been to activate the PELT if I even remotely believe that I'm going down. I'd rather get yelled at for a good landing then not get rescued.

What I don't know is: does a PELT update the GPS location more than once as it broadcasts? Logically, I'd think yes. If any SARS folks are out there I'd love to know this for sure.

Neil
 
One thing I don't like about the ACK E04 406 Mhz ELT is that it does not immediately transmit on 406 Mhz when activated. First it broadcasts for 50 seconds on 121.5 Mhz and ONLY THEN does it broadcast on 406 Mhz. 50 seconds is a LONG time, and basically this means that you need to activate about a minute before a crash to ENSURE that your 406 Mhz signal with lat/lon encoded gets to SAR personnel. Who knows whether your ELT antenna will be ripped off on impact or you will end up upside down with the antenna in the water.

This 50 second delay may be a certification requirement from COSPAS/SARSAT to minimize the false alarm rate, but I'd be a lot happier with 5 or 10 seconds.
 
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