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Tragic crash not reported for 21 hours-Poll


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ELT monitoring and 121.5 vs 406.  

112 members have voted

  1. 1. Do you monitor 121.5 when you fly?

    • Never
      31
    • Occasionally
      55
    • Always
      26
  2. 2. Are you equipped with a 406 MHz ELT?

    • Yes
      51
    • No
      61


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I've done this before....get my hopes up that my incredible vision and best spotter in the group finds the aberrant ,not quite right to base scenery ,I find that  patch of white against the granite that is a airplane wing and search over! (yeah right,)Today it was just grey and white...no definition at all.Years ago ,The Steve Fossett search financed by his friend Sir Richard Branson in early sept 2007 out of Minden airport,would Have blown you guys away!If you were a pilot than and were approached by a suit with cash in a briefcase asking...do you have an aircraft here?Commercial rated?No commercial rating?Ok...can we share expenses?A quiet conversation ensued all while the Nevada National Guard set up camp with their humvees and every Ground based SAR group from three states with their horse trailers,atv s,keeps etc launched on a fruitless search.We never found Steve Fossett..All the cash in my pocket made no difference,cause my search area over the pine nuts toward Hiltons ranch where he took off with the  decathlon he borrowed that day was easily 120 nm south of my search area.A hiker found a wallet 3/4 years later with his pilots license east of mammoth ...than they found his plane.It hit so hard ,cylinders separated from the case and individual instrument cases were scattered on the hill side.Im going up again tommorrow afternoon...right after work and we think the Truckee aircraft went down in the blue canyon area...but who knows...Squaw valley is talking about skiing all year long due to unprecedented snow levels!Im doing my best..but it still is all grey and white!Fly Safe !

 

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Back in 2000 a friend went missing on the ferry flight home from BC to Ontario in his newly acquired airplane.  He disappeared without a trace and only a brief 121.5 signal from his ELT was ever heard.  Twelve years later the wreckage was located with only his wallet and pilot's license remained.

Buy a good ELT and file a flight plane.

Clarence

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We had a well respected CFI that was flying from the lower peninsula of Michigan to the U.P., going over Lake Michigan near the Mackinaw bridge, disappear.  It was in the late fall, snowing, and at night.  He was in an older fabric airplane (like a Pacer).  They searched for him for a while and finally gave up thinking he ended up in the bottom of Lake Michigan.  His wife couldn't get the life insurance to pay because they could never find the body (this was 30+ years ago).  Later in life she ended up the airport manager of KESC (Escanaba).  Anyway, it was like 8-12 years later some hunters found the plane and skeleton, still sitting behind the controls, in a nasty swamp where you couldn't see 25' in front of you.

Tom

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The poll above shows roughly one quarter of us consistently monitor guard while flying. If this number holds throughout the entire GA community, 1 out of 4 aircraft are monitoring all the time. Not to mention almost half of us monitor 121.5 at least occasionally. Considering the amount of traffic in the sky (especially in the southeast) there is a high chance that if a beacon goes off someone will report it. That being said, what will transpire from the reporting seems to be a crap shoot. Just like the car alarm in a crowded parking lot draws almost no attention, the 121.5 ELT might or might not get a second glance.

 

 

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Cap uses combination of any radar pings along with cell phone pings to narrow down crash location...In this case ,they think it went down 20 miles nw of takeoff point and not in a direct line to their destination.This suggests scudrunning to avoid a cell...the area is totally snowed in .Ground crews are having trouble getting their snowmobiles in...We had another little system come thru last night that dumped even more snow...weather is clearing and should be much better for the weekend...

 

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Always sad to hear about any loss. Rest assured Civil Air Patrol (CAP) still does these searches, I was on one that turned out to be an inadvertent triggering of a PLB  last Thursday. Air Force Search and Rescue gave us initial GPS search coordinates of a 406 Mhz beacon that turned out to be about 1.9 miles to the southwest of the actual find location. Our CAP aircraft found the 121.5 companion signal's general location very quickly and passed those coordinates on to the ground team I was on, once on scene we were able to isolate the signal to inside a home in about twenty minutes. Reports of 121.5 ELT signals are very useful in these searches especially from lower flying aircraft.
Civil Air Patrol is all the volunteer auxiliary of the US Air Force and performs many different missions as well as ELT searches. If any of you may be interested copy the link. gocivilairpatrol.com
Below is a forum response I gave last year on different search we did.
Posted September 12, 2016 · Report post
  I see browsing the site that in the past there has been some confusion about the usefulness of 121.5 MHz ELT emergency beacon freq. A few months ago I went on a ground search for a 406 MHz emergency beacon. It turned out to be inadvertent triggering and all was well in this case. But I can tell you from this and other experience that if we did not have the homing ability of the 121.5 MHz companion signal from the 406 MHz equipment the ELT battery may have run dead on the unit before we ever found it. We were given Lat, Lon coordinates by SAR derived from a 406 MHz ELT beacon transmission to start the search. But we actually found it 3 miles away (typical).
As a side note, CAP aircraft are equipped for 121.5 MHz homing but were not used in this search. PLB's and EPIRB's I believe transmit on both 406 and the 121.5 MHz frequency when triggered also.
My observations from this type search
1) The 121.5 MHz is monitored by many commercial and some of us GA types while flying. We often still get reports of 121.5 triggering from these sources and was verified by commercial aircraft on this occasion also.
2) We get a very small search area IF your 406 MHz ELT has the ability to output a GPS signal to SARSAT. Typically within a few hundred meters, but not all 406 MHz ELT's have this ability!    406 MHz ELT's without the GPS output ability have a much larger search area. Our target in this case did not have GPS output thus a longer search time to find it.
3) In heavy ground or wooded cover the 121.5 may be the only reason SAR will find you. Especially for PLB's.
4) Our search area had mostly cell coverage but in many areas there was none especially in the low areas of the hilly terrain. Cell phone may or may not be a good backup but there are lots of recreational places in our state where coverage is nil.
5) If you have one of these devices, a 406 ELT or PLB or EPIRB, registration rules for the device's need to be followed to protect us all. I like many don't like a bunch of additional rules but to protect us and our passengers it can be very useful in this case.
 
My observations on 121.5 homing, I hope this helps.
 

The ELT in my aircraft has GPS position and it broadcasts both on 406MHZ and 121.5. I am assuming most do the dual broadcasting. The GPS position was a little more money, but worth it in my option, the cost was a couple hours of labor to have the ELT fed GPS data from my GTN750.
 
 


I just had my 406 ELT hooked up to the GPS. One thing I would like to understand is how frequently is the information provided to the ELT? A typical crash situation would have the plane destroyed enough that the panel mounted GPS is inop. Unless you push the panel mounted ELT button, when and how often is the ELT updated with the GPS provided location?


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1 hour ago, Yetti said:

At least the top is blue... if it were white like most planes it would crazy hard to think about seeing it

Except it's got 6 in of fresh snow that fell on it since Monday afternoon...forest service roads thru the area won't be passable for months!

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5 hours ago, Jerry 5TJ said:

MH370 has been missing over 3 years.  One data burst from a 406 ELT might have saved a lot of searching.  

At least oceanographers got a lot of new seabed mapping done in the remote waters of the South Indian Ocean.  

image.png.936ff275363c7eab028193928765962c.png

I am stunned that on a $250M aircraft, that the black box does not come with batteries enough to power the black box for more than  month, say a year.

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I'm not a fan of that news article - the implication is that pilots were just indifferent, as if they saw the airplane but were too busy to help or point it out.  As if it were one of those cases you hear about in a big city where bystanders see a person being assaulted and are too busy to help, or even call for help.

I can't believe for a second that this is anywhere near the truth. If it took 21 hours to call in the crash, then it took that long for any one to see it.  For whatever reason.  But I know that on climb out I am both focused on what is in front of the windshield (at climb angle) like flying airplanes, and flying, and the engine and airplane parameters, and not so much looking out the window at the ground below me - even if I could see down where my feet are in my not glass bottomed airplane.

I am certain that if any one of those pilots departing in the previous 21 hours, any one of them, had seen the wreckage then they would have called it in immediately.

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3 hours ago, aviatoreb said:

I'm not a fan of that news article - the implication is that pilots were just indifferent, as if they saw the airplane but were too busy to help or point it out.  As if it were one of those cases you hear about in a big city where bystanders see a person being assaulted and are too busy to help, or even call for help.

I can't believe for a second that this is anywhere near the truth. If it took 21 hours to call in the crash, then it took that long for any one to see it.  For whatever reason.  But I know that on climb out I am both focused on what is in front of the windshield (at climb angle) like flying airplanes, and flying, and the engine and airplane parameters, and not so much looking out the window at the ground below me - even if I could see down where my feet are in my not glass bottomed airplane.

I am certain that if any one of those pilots departing in the previous 21 hours, any one of them, had seen the wreckage then they would have called it in immediately.

Of course they would have ,pilots are reporting old "x"wrecks,forest fire smokes,abandoned river hulks..you name it...it's what we all do

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So, I have reported ELTs on multiple occasions in South Florida.  Probably 6 to 7 times.  I would say that I got the impression that ATC took the report seriously on about 3 occasions, with them asking other aircraft to see if they were picking it up in order to better locate the source.  On the other occasions, I got no more than an acknowledgement from ATC.  Perhaps they already had the report, so no need to investigate further. 

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On 4/18/2017 at 5:09 PM, kortopates said:

Pretty unbelievable story that so many pilots didn't notice or report it. I am trying to imagine how visible this was to airport people and departing traffic. I assume it was pretty obvious and therefore assume most people thought someone else had already reported it. I certainly understand that but so sad.

But there are at least a couple ways pilot could have avoided this outcome despite nobody noticing or calling it in. The 406 ELT is obvious. Another is activating a VFR nextgen flight plan through LH on the runway with their smart phone or device before they were airborne. (I thinkI have heard that functionality has been integrated into FF). VFR flight plans after all are for this very purpose and the latest capabilities allow you to activate on the ground with out using the radio. Its possible one or more occupants didn't perish right away either that could still be alive. But if not this accident, certainly others.  

I've flown to Williston on a number of occasions, although I was not there for the fly-in. The part of the field where the plane crashed is not visible from the ramp area at all so it wouldn't surprise me that people on the ground wouldn't see it. Some in the pattern may have spotted it depending upon how they entered the pattern. If you entered the pattern from a crosswind entry, you would have a better chance of spotting it than if you entered downwind on the 45. Once you were on base leg or final, you typically wouldn't be focused on the very far end of the field. You would be concentrating on your landing, particularly since it was reportedly a gusty day. Someone departing might have spotted it if they looked down while on climbout but I'm not sure that most of us would have a reason to be looking there at that time.

I'm not trying to make excuses for what happened but like most of you, I'm just trying to understand what happened. One possible scenario is that he lost power during his climbout, turned left to attempt to return to the field, raised the nose attempting to stretch his glide over the trees to reach the runway and stalled it. But that is all conjecture. I wasn't there and we may never know the truth. It's just another very sad event.

Edited by BKlott
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On April 18, 2017 at 2:39 PM, MyNameIsNobody said:

I am monitoring tunes on my I-Pad outside of controlled airspace.  Freedom, a wonderful thing.

Selfishness and selfcenteredness, such sad things.  You can listen to both music and 121.5 and keep an ear out for your fellow man.  Looking out for you fellow man, the wonderful thing that brought you freedom!

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I was enroute from Wilm De to Detroit, Pitt atc requested me to listen to 121.5 and report if I seen anything, a couple minutes later they had a report of a downed plane and asked if  I could  search an area there was no other planes yet around, I circled and listened for 20 minutes or so, descended from 12000'to 2000 I never saw a downed aircraft. It left me somber for a few day of my vacation. I contacted them via phone the next day and they did find the craft and thanked us for the help. They would not give me anymore info.  Private pilots can be of great assistance when needed.

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1 hour ago, Ftlausa said:

Selfishness and selfcenteredness, such sad things.  You can listen to both music and 121.5 and keep an ear out for your fellow man.  Looking out for you fellow man, the wonderful thing that brought you freedom!

NOPE.  Make up your mind dude.  First I am told to get the more expensive monitoring system because 121.5 is "dead" and no one monitors it anymore.  Now I am "Selfish" for not monitoring it and looking out for my fellow man.

That is an overt direct personal attack that would get me banned...and it is political.  But you know what, I am going to just laugh at you instead of being triggered by your ridiculous comment on what brought "me" freedom.  Wouldn't that be "us"?  Talk to the hand Ftlausa.  

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So the people using 12.5 to chat with each other.  The ones that clog the frequency making noises and goofing around.  The ones that cause those that monitor the frequency to SHUT IT OFF....They are not called out for being selfish and I am.

Face palm...

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Search ends for a Socata that went missing a week ago from Truckee airport headed for Petaluma. Very mountainous snow covered terrain. Not sure what the weather was like the day of the flight but with the winter we have been having would not be surprised if was unfavorable.

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